I just finished writing an essay about
the day Picasso made me fall down. I'm sending it off to my favorite editor, and if it's accepted, I'll post a link here.
The event I wrote about took place over two decades ago, when Picasso's
Guernica was still housed in the Casón del Buen Retiro at the Prado Museum in Madrid. (It is now in the Reina Sofia
, in a larger but - in my opinion - far inferior room. You can learn a bit about that
here.)
 |
| New Acropolis Museum, Athens |
Meanwhile, here's the upshot of my essay: education that's prepackaged and canned is not enough.
Education is not the same as transferring information.
It involves informing students, to be sure, but what we tell students
should not satisfy them; it should provoke them to want more.
Professors are not conduits of data; at our best we are like guides and gardeners.
As guides we point students in new directions and help them to see what
we see. Just as gardeners cannot make seeds grow but can prepare the
soil, so our teaching should be about increasing the fertility of minds
and then stepping back to watch what grows. Also, there is occasional
weeding involved.
As an undergraduate I knew very
little about art. Part of this was my disposition: I liked
representational art that was easy to look at quickly. Part of it was a
matter of my worldview, and the suspicion that some modern artists who
eschewed representational art were trying to undermine something good,
obscurantists clouding clear vision.
Time spent in museums has changed me a good deal, as has making the acquaintance of
Scott Parsons and
Daniel Siedell,
who have helped me quite a lot through their patient conversation and
what they have written. (Scott and I wrote a chapter on teaching
students about visual culture and the sacred in Ronald Bernier's short
but illuminating book
Beyond Belief, in which Dan also has a chapter.) Some of
Makoto Fujimura's short writings, James Elkins's book
On the Strange Place of Religion in Modern Art, and Gregory Wolfe's work at
Image have also provided me with clear and helpful education about art that I resisted when I was younger.
Museums are certainly controversial.
Curators make decisions that both expand and limit what we see, and
this can be exploited to achieve sordid political ends. Some ideas and
cultures are given preferential treatment while others are made less
known by their omission. They tend to be located in large, wealthy
cities, which means that poor people, rural people, and foreigners have
limited or no access to them.
But if the alternative is no museums,
or all of the world's artifacts in private collections, I will take the
museums we have, coupled with ever striving to make them better.
Because
museums are a tangible way we can commit to remembering our history
together. Museums are not safe deposit boxes where we lock away our
treasures; they are
Wunderkammers and classrooms where we may think and learn together.
I have come to love museums, especially the British Museum and the beautiful
New Acropolis Museum
in Athens (and I'm aware of the irony of that pairing) but I also love
the little museums I find in small towns the world over.
