Can art be taught?

[Andrew Bryant]

In the modern era, art is about particularity, about individuation, finding out what kind of artist you are in relation to all the others, so teaching it is bound to be tricky, because how can one being teach another being how to be? Maybe it is similar to psychoanalysis, with the teacher/analyst helping you to find your particularity within the general. In psychoanalysis there is desire and there is your desire, there is narcissism and there is your narcissism. In art there is painting and your painting, process and your process. It is the role of both professionals to guide you to yourself, to help you to bring yourself into conscious view, so that instead of being a slave to your neuroses or your bad habits and misconceptions you can live alongside them and work with them. Of course there will always be an unconscious element to oneself and to one's work, and this is no bad thing, after all in making art, as in being human, we are always ahead of ourselves.

[Andrew Bryant]

Art cannot be taught and any teacher who thinks they can teach it is going to be a bad teacher. A good teacher is one who thinks of themselves not as a teacher at all but simply as an artist. Likewise a good student is one who doesn't see themselves as a student but again as an artist. All there is and all there can ever be between art teacher and art student is a conversation - an informal and spontaneous exchange of ideas, knowledge and experience - and this is quite enough.

[winnicott]

I agree that in my experience of becoming and developing work as an artist, perhaps the one most crucial thing is the importance of a dialogue with experienced artists. My experience is of finding this more successfully in a university than before, or elsewhere. It is because I think this is possible within an academic institution that I think the drawbacks could also be addressed better there. Again from my own experience, I think too little attention is paid to the relating context of learning ie to how long a student might stay with the same tutor, whether once having started a dialogue with a particular tutor, whether it is possible to return or pick up this thread again later, or whether time-tabled reallocation of tutors instead take precedence. Academically there may be an assumption that any suitably gifted and qualified artist can substitute for a previous tutor, as a paper exercise, without paying due attention to the experience of the student. There is an important balance to be struck between i) the opportunity for a particular ongoing engagement, and ii) exposure to or experience of a wide enough range of critical engagement of different kinds. Although this may be of particular relevance and use in art education, I would say there is not enough attention is paid to this in adult education generally. There is a lot of understanding out there, which does not somehow filter in to the timetabling of courses at planning time.