I don’t expect to visit a museum anytime soon with Covid-Omicron raging, but that shouldn’t prevent me from putting into practice some lessons from How to Enjoy Art by Ben Street. I consider myself non-artistic and generally ignorant about art. It’s not something to proud of; if anything, I should educate myself a bit more. How do I do so? By reading. It’s what I do, out of habit, but also because that’s what I like doing – reading. This might not be the best approach, and I’m ironically learning this by reading a book.
Fittingly, Street’s book is rather short and very different from the art history books I’ve perused with little memory or learning. That’s possibly because I wasn’t all that interested – I felt it was good for me to learn to appreciate art, but I wasn’t particularly motivated. Instead of history, Street exhorts the budding art appreciator to take time observing. In five brief chapters, he highlights five things to consider when looking at art: colour, scale, process, placement, and content. Note that content is last on the list. I would have gone for content first. Perhaps that’s my default scientist-training kicking in. Or maybe it’s my inner teacher-learner mindset. I’m here to learn. Teach me some content.
Street’s advice: look and see. Participate in the creative act of observation! Huh? I don’t know how to do that. Art speaks in a humanistic voice aimed at the person, unlike much of science education which seems aimed at a disembodied mind. Street has anticipated this, and I will quote (in italics below) three brief passages from his book, all on page 123. This analysis comes after he has spent some time asking the reader to take some time in observing the first four: colour, scale, process, and placement.
Treating history as a creative act is likely to prove a fairly unsettling experience. Turning away from a work of art with more questions than answers might frustrate some viewers, but it is the case that any deeply held piece of knowledge about a work of art can be teased at until its ambiguities become plain.
As an instructor of chemistry, I resonate with this. Learning to appreciating chemistry in a little more depth is, or should be, an unsettling experience. The invisible world of atoms and molecules coordinating a strange dance that give rise to a variety of substances with diverse properties is awesome but hard to grasp. It might frustrate some learners. Actually, from experience I know it frustrates many learners – myself included. But there’s a pleasure in delving into the details, and I personally find joy in uncovering the ambiguities. But it takes time and patience.
Students want their answers quickly in chemistry class. For things to made plain and simple, hopefully without too much hard work. Perhaps, I’ve been doing the same thing in my few museum visits. Before I do anything else, I first read the label. Habit, I suppose. Also, because I now have some appreciation of how much work goes into labels and other textual information in an art museum by listening to a friend while she was working on such projects. There’s a lot of thought that goes into the text you read in a museum, as minimalistic as it seems. Reading art history can be a stumbling block, or maybe a narrowing blinker. Here’s what Street has to say.
There is always wiggle room for creative interpretation, even when faced with a seemingly impenetrable wall of veneration around a work of art. A certain kind of inflated language creates a blockade that can seem to leave little room for the imaginative viewer seeking their own point of entry into the work. It can take some tenacity to find it, but without it works of art can only be famous objects, rather than springboards for imaginative possibility.
That’s not to say one shouldn’t read art history and that it should always be approached from a blank slate of ignorance. As an expert in my own area, I know that it can very much help me appreciate things related to my field in ways a non-expert has no access to, and won’t have access to even with deep contemplation. But I appreciate the interpretive wiggle room. In my introductory chemistry classes, the most interesting questions often come from the intellectually curious students with the least background. Their broad, seemingly simplistic questions, turn out to be very interesting – from my point of view as an expert. Over the years, my reading interests in chemistry have broadened considerably. I used to only read specific articles in my niche area, but now I roam more broadly and I can see the glimmers of creative interpretation that fleetingly spark my mind.
The most important thing about art appreciation that I learned from Street is to take the time to look and see. Focus on the art, and allow your senses some creative play. It’s not just about intellectual understanding. Street has something to say about history and authority about art, that to some extent has parallels in science.
The fact is that there is no right or wrong way to engage with a work of art, but it’s possible to not engage at all, and one way of doing that is to treat art-historical information as unshakeable fact. A work of art can become an illustration of art-historical work, even an illustration of the label’s text, rather than its own physical life and complex possibilities. This is not unusual – in fact, it’s very commonplace – but it is unfortunate, since it leaves viewers as nothing more than passive subjects, worshippers at the altar of data rather than creatively active participants in the making of meaning.
I don’t want my students to just be passive subjects. I want them to engage! It’s easy in science to worship the altar of data. And I haven’t quite grasped how a non-expert can participate in the making of meaning in chemistry research, but it’s something I should continue to ponder. Perhaps I can do that by spending some time engaging in observing and appreciating art. I don’t have to wait until going to a museum. Art is all around us in human structures and designs. I’ve started to notice colours more vividly since reading Street’s book, and as a chemist, I do think about scale. As an educator, I should be thinking more about process and placement. Teaching is an art, although it’s also a science. Sometimes, I concentrate too much on the latter. Seeing the artistic in art can help remind me what it means to learn and appreciate anything.
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