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Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students

by James Elkins.
University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, U.S.A., 2001.
ISBN: 0-252-06950-1.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart, IA 52224-9767, U.S.A.
E-mail: ballast@netins.net


It is very difficult to know what to make of this book. It is both annoying and exhilarating, and it may be, as the cover claims, "the only book of its kind." At the very least, one has to admire an author who ask questions that others are afraid to voice, or may not even think to ask. By some accounts (which this book may not agree with), the stable in which art is housed is greatly in need of a cleansing, as much or even more so than in the 19th century. What emerged as avant garde back then, as anomalous protest, is now the entrenched paradigm. Today's academic art, which is daily fed and fostered by university art departments and art schools (in cahoots with commercialism), is as restrictive, inbred and conservative as it was 200 years ago, although it loudly claims to be avant garde. True, art students no longer render drapery or make history murals; instead, they make performance art, vapid installations, or tired and tiresome Duchampian jokes ("the old tampon-in-a-teacup trick," Daniel Clowes calls them, in a series of trenchant cartoons in this book), no less run-of-the-mill than anything produced in the European art academies. In our own time, "virtually all our instruction," writes James Elkins, a smart and prolific art historian who teaches in Chicago (at what is parallel today to the Royal Academy or the Ecole des Beaux-Arts), "goes into fostering individuality." The virtue of his latest book is the daring with which it addresses (but does not answer in the end) the doubts that gnaw at anyone, teacher or student, who participates in an art critique. The book's distressing omission (which may open the door to a sequel) is the failure to examine its own assumptions, while all the time warning that one should beware of "unexamined assumptions." Let's pray this is the opening shot in a long, honest dialogue, a self-examination. Given its thought-provoking title, there is some hope that it might be read by art students and, more importantly, by art professors (to whom it really is addressed).

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 16, No. 4, Summer 2001.)

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Updated 7 August 2001.




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