JANKA VD MERWE

What claims are made for the study of Visual Arts?

      1. Our visual language may have socio-political, ritual, spiritual, decorative and functional value and impact. They can be persuasive, subversive, enlightening and uplifting in some instances too.

      2. The students challenge their own creative and cultural expectations and boundaries.

      3. Students develop analytical skills in problem solving and divergent thinking.

      4. The exploration in general knowledge and knowledge of different art forms can combine to help us understand ourselves, our patterns of behaviour, and our relationship to each other.

      5. Studying the arts requires students to reflect on and question their own bases of knowledge.

What is 'What Good are the Arts?' by John Carey?

      In 'What Good are the Arts?' british literary critic John Carey explains that the case for Artistic benefit has been made on economic grounds; because more people are going to the theatre than to a football match, they provide jobs and thereby contribute to the wealth of the nation.

      Hitler thought that art made people more open minded and mature by making them realise that their 'petty woes' were not of particular importance. Carey says that this idea that Hitler had where in he was always right; he bombed German cities because he saw it as an architectural opportunity, and justified levelling Moscow and St. Petersburg with equanity because he thought Russia was not a 'cultured' country, had in fact helped to shape his inhumanity.

      Hitler: "Really outstanding geniuses permit themselves no concern for normal human beings"

      Kant believed that art accessed a a 'supersensible' realm of beauty and aesthetics, which could only be create and appreciated by those who are unusually gifted and aristocrats. "To expect the blind, striving creatures who composed the mass of humanity to appreciate art was clearly futile."

      Henry Treece: "To be an artist is to have your blood running a different way to other men's blood"

      Many people believed and still believe the same things, including art critics and artists themselves. However, Carey's own definition of art is defiantly inclusive and realistic:

"A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person."

      Otherwise, many people think that art could grant us a trance like vision of the spiritual truth, but Carey argues that if this were true, art could be boiled down to an ecstasy pill or alcohol.

      Carey sites a literally life-saving example of the positive effects art can do us when the novelist DBC Pierre deciding not to kill himself after hearing a symphony on the radio, as well as being able to treat depression in prison. Health creation rather than Wealth creation he believes is something that should be paid more attention to.

      It is then introduced that Carey is a bibliotherapist; which is someone who believes in the use of books as therapy. He states that books are the superior form of art, because it is the only art capable of self-criticism, reasoning, moralising and the fact that books can be ambiguous allows for reader-creativity.

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Are these consistent with the content of the texts?

      Being that the IB Subject Guide has a sense of definite-ness and sureness that the students will be whatever I said it claims (above) I think that the second text 'Why Art Cannot be Taught' disagrees with it somewhat. You cannot be assured that you will become an artist during this course. It is totally up to your determination, and your luck that you will become an artist. Sure, technical skills like how to hold a pencil, how to shape clay and everything in between can be taught and learnt, but saying that you can communicate in the visual language can only be something that you discover by yourself. In the IB Subject Guide, it is mentioned that this course can teach us about ourselves, i think what should mean to say is we learn by ourselves (which should i think inevitably also teach us about ourselves) which could with good luck and strong determination could manifest the label 'artist' in each of us. And with that, I say that the IB intentions for Visual Art acknowledge that there is something personal we may learn during the course.

Summarise your thinking about the ideas in the texts and how they relate to what you will be doing in your art course.

      My intentions for the Visual Art course at the beginning was to enhance my technical skill. I wanted to explore different mediums, see what I like, rule out things that I don't like, figure out if this field is something I want to pursue after I graduate, etc. More 'solid' things to learn was my intention. I didn't understand what it means to communicate through Visual Language, and i still think it is quite nebulous, but nonetheless I can only hope for a deep understanding of this in the next course given the right environment for it to manifest itself. I'm not distinctly sure how I am going to do this, but I believe that I will learn it along the way.