Today I went downtown and saw Picasso. What a horrendous scene that was! We all jiggled and jostled around like salmons. I love seeing the masterworks when they come through town, but you can hardly get to them. I think there were way too many people let in with each wave. I know, I know, cha-ching.
The worst is the people with the audio guides. They stand in one spot, head tilted, slackjawed. Always at the same distance. Far enough away so they are not hogging it, but close enough so you feel like you are cutting them if you get in front to see the brushstrokes. I don’t get them. I don’t think I could cram an education into hour like that. Is it better than nothing? I just go to look, but I know Picasso already.
There were a lot of children under 10 as well. I have mixed feelings about them. I heard a lot of teachers or docents asking them what they thought the art meant and what they thought Picasso was doing. I know it’s very postmodern to assign personal meaning to objects or art, and I think that’s okay on an individual level. It cannot be helped.
I feel something different when I look at an artwork than when someone else looks at it. I just don’t know how helpful it is to ask children how they feel about a bunch of confusing bloogs and horrible monster women when there is actual historical context for Picasso’s work, as well as his own words and the words of experts about what he was doing. Can children really take anything from an hour’s visit to the art museum if all they are encouraged to do is impose their own limited experiences and knowledge over it?
Then I looked at Hockney titties and got a boner over the Rothko. It was a good day.
Can children really take anything from an hour’s visit to the art museum if all they are encouraged to do is impose their own limited experiences and knowledge over it?
Actually, I’d say that’s exactly what is needed for kids that young. They need a hook to first develop some interest, even if that hook is making bogus connections to their own lives and thoughts. If/when the interest has built up and solidified, then the bogus stuff can be stripped like scaffolding. Hell, I still come at a lot of new material this way and I’m oooold.
Heh, you’re not THAT ooooold. I see your point, though. Thanks.
I think it is only okay for the chilluns to place art in their own limited context, but *only* if it doesn’t end there. Let them know at the time, at least, that there are historical/contextual elements to what he painted and why, and maybe save getting into those things at a later date when the kids are either older or are just more generally receptive.
As a kid, I was *always* down for trips to science and natural history museums, but art museums weren’t very interesting to me, and the long school group lectures about each painting on our little tours just made me associate art with unfunness for several years. Fortunately, I got over that because of an interest in photography, but I still shudder at the sight of a curator.
I think the time for art education (about, not creating) is when kids get much older and can start to understand themes like death, war, love, and sex. I agree about being more interested in the natural world as a kid. Of course, this is me talking out of my butt, as usual.
Well, if you count Star Wars as being about death and war, and Disney Princesses as being (at least partly) about love and sex (though they’re also about power and femininity), kids are obsessed with those topics pretty early. I’m okay with them looking at and thinking about Real Art on the subject, too. Or instead. And having a way to connect it to their lives.
But yeah, it shouldn’t stop there.
Mmm, I like this too.
I am so glad I brain dumped. Thanks everyone. Um, don’t stop here if you don’t want to.
I went to the art museum every Sunday with my father from ages 10-17. It started out as something all three of us kids did with him, but I was the only one who maintained interest in a weekly trip to the same galleries without even checking out the Hall of Dinosaurs first. We never did the docents’ tours because both he and I hated being shuffled around in crowds of strangers, but he did ask me a lot of “what do you think about that?” sorts of questions. On a one-on-one level, those were great jumping off points for some cool conversations – he would add whatever historical context he knew that was relatively age-appropriate, and we would talk about whether we liked or didn’t like a particular piece, and why. I ended up doing a lot of independent research on artists we’d see during our trips, and gained an appreciation for some artists (like James Ensor) whose pieces initially confused me, because of our conversations.
YMMV, though — I was interested in art enough that I eventually went to art school, so I may be something of a statistical outlier. But I agree that a “what do you think?” followed by a bit of contextual info can often hook a kid into learning more about art. I just think a crowded class full of kids of various attention spans is a tough place to have that sort of discussion.
I took my nine year old. He was bored and thinks that Picasso was a bad dad. He liked some of the paintings though, and said he thought some of them were from an extreme close up POV, which is totally accurate. We did not bother with most of the audio tour, and after the first room I looked at the map and cut across to the last room and we worked backwards. My favorite pieces were Woman with Cataract (because I really actually like that one) and that fucked up sculpture in bronze painted black that was obviously crap leftover from a cabinet shop haphazardly nailed together by undernourished street urchins or perhaps drunk transients. I think it was titled “The Beach”?