Dear Mr. James Elkins,

Last night my fiance and I walked into a local gallery to look around. It was open extended hours because of Jubilee, a street-fair type shindig in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania (where we went because we wanted funnel cake after our strawberry-picking expedition. You should try both sometime. It might make you more optimistic).

We're both artists, both trained at the same liberal arts college. His interests lean more towards graphic design and illustration, commercial and "low-brow" art. My interests are definitely more oriented towards high art, although not in the "ideal media" as you describe them in your book, "Why Art Cannot be Taught." (Those two elements of the art world which you talk about as if they are completely separate and irreconcilable.)

We walked through the gallery and frankly were not impressed by anything there (especially not the naked ladies badly photoshopped into exotic locations).

Then one print caught our joint attention -- sharply angled animals and people described by sweeping ink strokes. The dynamism of the lines, the quirkiness of the way they created figures and animals with expressive control and a minimum presence on the page -- everything about it was GOOD, head and shoulders on a mountain above everything else in the gallery. The skill of the hand that made it was undeniable and overwhelming, the subject and style both engaging.

Can you tell what I'm going to say next? Among the Yosts, Yoders, and hosts of possible high school students (I hope for their sakes, anyway, that they are continuing their education), here, claimed the small paper placard tacked to the top of the free-standing wall, was a Picasso.

I loved this experience, because the quality of the piece appeared undeniable to us, although it didn't strike us as particularly Picasso-like, and we thought it had been made by a local central Pennsylvanian. (you might argue that our education conditioned us to respond a particular way to a member of the canon -- but I would refute the accusation on the grounds that it was not the typical Picasso, and so not the kind of Picasso we were educated to appreciate).

This experience and others like it lead me to the conclusion that there is such a thing as a fact of quality in the world of art. It is nebulous, it differs from style to style, but it exists on a more than purely subjective level. It can be recognized by large groups of people over varying periods in time.

This leads me to my primary criticism of your book.

It seems to me that the elephant in the room of your argument is a question of quality. You say that art cannot be taught. That is an OK generalization, but you make it implicitly clear throughout your book that what you think cannot be taught is good-quality art. Mediocre art is made all the time, you say; it is the staple of art academies. It's only good art that you do not see being taught in art academies.

And while you take care to define teaching carefully (a definition which I do not completely agree with, but that's another argument), you do not take the time to define "art" ("I don't think we need [a] definition of art," you say, "since 'art' is whatever we end up talking about in art school. Its definition is fluid, and it changes along with our interests") or "quality." And how can you say it can't be taught if you aren't sure what you're not seeing?

Let's talk about the Picasso again. Its great qualities were its control, the obvious mastery the author showed of his medium, the perceptiveness toward form and spirit that allowed the author to choose so few lines to describe his subject so vividly, and the expressiveness of the lines (both of the author's state of mind and the spirit of the subject).

Can those things be taught? By your own arguments throughout the book, mastery of a medium's technique can absolutely be taught in an art academy or college. Control can be taught and perceptiveness can be taught ala the Bauhaus's methods (which you, oddly enough, seem ambivalent about). Expressiveness is a little bit trickier -- you can teach someone what marks express certain things, you can teach them to recognize certain forms of expressiveness in various media, and you can foster expressive mark-making and expressive work when you see it, but perhaps you cannot teach expressiveness entirely. The responsibility for that may lie primarily with the student and not with the teacher.

So why can't art be taught? You can't teach depth of thought? Witness liberal arts colleges. They do their darndest to teach depth and creativity of thought in every discipline (and in large part succeed). Do we lack engagement with the world beyond our ivory academic towers (which you claim is one thing holding us back from making quality art, i.e. art which expresses some part of our larger contemporary culture)? That's something that can be modeled by teachers and so taught to those that are willing to learn. Look at families raising children who are social activists, or the ways in which children are strangely aware of the unwritten rules of their community through observation and modeled behaviour. If students are taught to pay attention, then they are being taught to engage with a world that doesn't revolve around art history or self-reference.

The other thing you have not addressed in your book is the partnership between student and teacher that must be formed in order for effective teaching and learning to take place. You describe teaching as if it only happens in one direction, although you do make a nod to the fact that some students are unreceptive, and others more teachable, indicating that they must have some place in the process of teaching other than as a passive vessel.

So all the elements of good-quality art can, in fact, be taught. Why do I not go on to simply say "students can be taught to make good art"? As it is, I sound like I fall neatly into one of your categories.

Well, here it is: teachers and students can teach one another how to make good art, but it will inevitably be a strange hybrid between the teacher's style and the students's attempts to internalize that style in a way that makes sense to them. It is in a post-academic atmosphere in which the student seeks to harness all those elements of good art in service to their own voice, that indefinable element of good art as we understand it in the modern & postmodern age, and which is not really effectively taught.

And if that's all you're worried about teaching to students, take some lessons from Peter Elbow and Paulo Freire, who have pioneered pedagogy aiming to give students their own voice and hence empower them. . . .

Does that make sense?

Sincerely,
Mackenzie Martin