Art is a Fine Large Word

Throughout this collection of essays, John Dana references the art museum as the example of everything he thinks a museum shouldn’t be. I have found this to be both entertaining and frustrating. Entertaining because of the snarky and often off-handed manner in which he makes these comments, and frustrated because he seems to regard the art museum as so beneath him that he does not propose any set of solutions for its improvement. Dana seems to have a certain fondness for detailing hypothetical museums, but he does not give the art museum this treatment. He spends a great deal of time and energy criticizing art and art museums and then gives no time to the solution.

In the final section of this collection of essays, Museums and Art,  Dana discusses art in America in two essays, one focusing on the significance of art in America and the other focusing on the art of America. In the first, Dana describes art as a way to “...conceal thought, and to conceal the want of thought (Dana, 1906, 201)” He goes on to tell us to define and limit the use of the word, and not to fool your pupils with it. In the end, Dana concludes that art is not a teachable endeavor, and that the time spent teaching a student to draw when that student is not artistic is time wasted (Dana, 1906).

I am an art teacher, and I most emphatically disagree with Dana on this point. It is my most sincere belief that all of us have a need to express ourselves, and that art is a way in which we can do that. Not everyone uses art making as a mode of expression, but that is not because they can’t.  I have been teaching art for a year now, and that is a remarkably short period of time. In that year, however, I have seen dozens of students who were told that they were not artists create some of the most creative and poignant works I have ever seen.  My job is less teaching technique and basic principles and more encouraging my students despite their inhibitions about art. It is very disheartening to face a classroom of twelve year olds who have already been convinced that they cannot create art.

I wonder now if Dana was as ahead of his time in this mode of thought as he was with most everything else he discussed in his essays, or if this denouncement of art and art making is a deep-rooted myth we have been perpetuating for a century or more.