Confined Arts

It’s no coincidence that the Harvard Art Museums are located steps away from the Carpenter Center, which houses undergraduate studio art classes. Solid brick walls separate works that have been deemed worthy of exhibition from those which have not—or, at least, not yet. The work of students at the Carpenter Center is years of practice and thought away from being considered alongside the works of a museum, assuming the students have the potential to be great artists in the first place. How can students become capable of producing artwork at such a high level? Can an unskilled beginner, after taking the right mix of classes, start in one building and end up showing work in its more prestigious neighbor? Many students stake their education on the assumption that creativity can be taught, but the potential of arts education to form talented artists remains open for debate.

NOVICES AND NATURALS

Arts instructors disagree as to whether talent or training contributes more to one’s creative success. According to Zachary C. Sifuentes ’99, a visiting lecturer on Visual & Environmental Studies and expository writing preceptor, artistic ability can be fostered in the classroom. “I’ve learned the past few years that Harvard students don’t really need to be taught. They need to be given the opportunity to learn something new, something complicated, something fascinating,” he wrote in an email.

Sifuentes leads a freshman seminar, “Pressing the Page: Making Art with Letters, Paper & Ink,” this term on the letterpress and typographical art. “Students can absolutely learn to make art, and I think this is especially true of students who don’t think of themselves as artists…. It’s showing students what’s possible and giving them the opportunity to test out those possibilities. And when they do, they do incredible work,” he wrote.

Sifuentes’ opinions on the potential of arts education are distinctly optimistic: given encouragement and guidance, students and their artistic output will flourish. Not all instructors share this view. Visiting Professor of English Henri Cole, who teaches a poetry workshop, draws a line between talent and accomplishment. “I don’t think you can teach talent. I think you can nurture and guide and coax it….The goal isn’t necessarily making a fantastic poem.”

If you cannot teach talent, then what can be taught? Technical artistic skills can be improved by adequate training. But given the explosion in non-traditional art forms over the last half-century, there remains the question of whether manual skills like sighting angles, mixing paint, and stretching canvas are relevant in today’s art world.  VES concentrator, Clarissa M. Hart ’14 believes these skills still have a place. “The thing about classical training is that to really be a good artist you have to get experience in as many fields as possible, so if people cut out classical training…then I think they’re missing out on a new perspective,” says Hart.

“There’s no need to re-invent the wheel if someone has already figured an easy method,” says Robert D. Dolori ’15, a guitarist who composes music. “I think if you teach yourself an instrument or an art or a skill, you’re really going to see that differently than someone who has taken more classes and is classically trained, which could be an advantage…but, at the same time [you] might miss out on more traditional techniques that might have improved [your] art.”

Another downside to the do-it-yourself approach is a lack of guidance.  Hal Glicksman,  former associate director of the Center for the Educational Applications of Brain Hemisphere Research at California State University, Long Beach, would agree: “I believe that [creativity] can be taught in the classroom…creative assignments—go out and find 50 different red things and see how they relate and put them together in a design—the crazy things that you throw out in design classes really do work,” he said.

Assignments require students to constantly create; the practice in itself contributes to their development. “In a sense my goal is to push people to make as much work as they can,” says Matthew Saunders, a visiting lecturer on VES.

What happens to the work of those artists who try to break into the art world without classical training? A lucky up-and-comer might find success in the Chicago-based exhibition space Intuit, the only non profit organization in the U.S. that is dedicated solely to presenting self-taught and outsider art. Cleo Wilson, executive director of the museum, said that it continues to be difficult for untrained artists to compete in the art world. “Galleries, that is commercial galleries, have their own niches. They don’t show outsider art. There are [only] a few outsider artists that have been accepted by museums into the mainstream.” Artists who do not go through formal training produce noticeably different end products from those who do, which may account for the disparity in success. “They use non-traditional materials, there’s a different passion, and they’re not looking to academia or the traditional world for what their art should look like, so it’s not reflective of [artists like] Michelangelo.” Despite the flourishing of non-conventional art forms, the route to success in the artistic community is less laissez-faire than one might expect. A lack of artistic education does not necessarily undermine potential, but according to Wilson,  it makes eminence significantly harder to attain.

ARTISTES VERSUS ELEPHANTS

After shopping Saunder’s “Postcards from Volcanoes” painting class, I take a moment to unwind in the silence of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. The first floor features a collection of well-known abstract and modern art; there’s a 1950 splattered canvas by Jackson Pollock hanging near a familiar 1922 geometric painting by Piet Mondrian. The skeptical response to such works, from those suspicious of or uninitiated into Modernist painting, is a surefire whine: “I could have made that!” Science, however, says otherwise.

A 2011 study co-led by Boston College’s Professor of Psychology Ellen Winner and PhD candidate Angelina Hawley-Dolan, investigated whether people could distinguish between abstract paintings created by professional artists with formal training and those created by children, monkeys, chimps, and elephants. The study found that people favored the professional works, even when they were falsely labeled as amateur pieces. “People untrained in visual art see more than they realize when looking at abstract expressionist paintings,” said Winner in the study’s conclusion. “People may say that a child could have made a work by a recognized abstract expressionist, but when forced to choose between a work by a child and one by a master such as Rothko, they are drawn to the Rothko…. People see the mind behind the art.”

The study argues that a qualitative difference exists between the work of formally taught artists and animal amateurs, even in the less restrictive medium of abstract art. If classical training makes a substantial difference even to the unexperienced eye, then the impact of arts education is significant.  Yet Winner has her doubts about the potential of education to create artists.“I think that training cannot make someone picked at random into a prodigy or a great creator,” Winner wrote in an email.  Winner is a former member of Project Zero, an educational research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Project Zero’s mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts as well as the humanities and sciences. In her 2008 paper “Toward Broadening the Definition of Giftedness,” Winner concluded, “Environmental stimulation, personality, and temperament variables can promote or strangle giftedness but cannot created giftedness out of normality.”  If genius artists are that way as a function of their genes and environments, then the implications are dire for aspiring artists lacking raw talent.

DRIVE AND CRAFT

Other researchers have approached the question of whether art can be taught from a scientific perspective; Glicksman is more optimistic than Winner. “Talent is strange because there [are] definitely people who are smarter than other people and more talented…but everybody can learn a high degree of skill,” says  Glicksman.

At the Center for Educational Applications of Brain Hemisphere Research, Glicksman was involved in continuing the work of Dr. Betty Edwards, an art professor whose 1979 book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” changed the standards of visual art instruction. The book, grounded in brain hemisphere research, emphasized focusing on the relationships between different components of an image rather than trying to draw what the artist thought something should look like.

“All these people who say ‘I can’t draw’ because they don’t have some innate ability really can learn to draw with complete realism and skill, up to a certain level,” Glicksman says. He distinguishes between the ability to paint or draw realistically and the ability to be creative; drawing is a learnable technique, a tool that can get you closer to artistic accomplishment.  However, a piece of visual art needs innate intent and vision to be successful.

Glicksman’s discrimination between the ability to become technically proficient and create visionary new work is a subtle but significant distinction.  Perhaps the disparity lies in the individual’s intrinsic motivation and inspiration.  “It’s good to have training, but first you have to have determination. You have to have something to say,” says Memory P. Risinger, who teaches the Freshman Fiction Writing Workshop. According to Risinger, successful writers are those who keep writing because of an internal desire to create, not because they are compelled by external rewards. If it is true that intrinsic desire must precede training, then the question of teaching art becomes more complicated; the most effective teaching techniques may fall flat if a student does not feel internally motivated to make art.

CYBORG COMPOSERS

Perhaps the best way to determine whether art is teachable is to delineate creativity into divisible components and try teaching it to a machine. Harvard professor Krzysztof Gajos defines creativity in the same formulaic fashion he might create an algorithm. “Creativity is novelty plus quality plus surprise,” he says.   Another researcher attempted to teach creativity to a machine and succeeded, but not without creating controversy.

University of Santa Cruz researcher David Cope created a computer program in the 1990s called Experiments in Musical Intelligence, nicknamed Emmy. Emmy’s more efficacious successor, Emily Howell, is a daughter program that successfully composes original, modern music. Emily Howell produced full musical scores modeled off the work of classical composers and eventually published an album. The end products were so convincingly made that music scholars were unable to tell they were artificially generated, raising questions about the importance of human creativity.

Nevertheless, Emily Howell still needed a human to sort through the computer-produced sequences. According to Gajos, a creative work has two distinguishing characteristics. First, it combines things that we have never seen before. Second, it breaks an implicit constraint. Salted caramel, Gajos gives as an example, was a creative dessert invention because it broke the implicit boundary between sweets and savory flavorings. “It takes enormous insight to figure out what these implicit constraints are,” says Gajos. It is a formidable challenge for a machine.

I listened to the computer-generated album “Emily Howell: From Darkness, Light” and though the chords formally sounded fine, the music struck me as strangely hollow and lacking singularity. People find themselves drawn to certain art works not simply because they are beautiful, but because they communicate something about the human mind on the production side; this emotional understanding cannot be taught to a machine.

SKILL SPILLS OVER

Although opinions differ on the degree to which artistic ability can be taught, most agree that the rewards of art instruction extend beyond the final product. The educated can become more intellectually courageous, more critically aware, more confident.

Sheema Golbaba ’14, a documentary filmmaker, knows firsthand that VES classes can have significant spillover effects. Golbaba’s VES professor transformed her initial idea for her final project, but the interaction changed more than what she turned in that semester. “Learning to be a little more open-minded [in my VES class] and to think about things in [different ways] helped me a lot, not only in my development as a person…but also [in] my other classes….I said, ‘I need to do something I’m a little uncomfortable with.’ And I don’t think I would have done that had I not been challenged previously.”

Firsthand accounts like Golbaba’s of students learning broadly applicable lessons through the study of art abound, but scientific research lags behind on substantiating these claims with evidence. In 2006, Winner and other researchers at the School of Education combed through ten studies dating back to 1950 on the effects of arts education in primary and secondary schools. In the majority of cases, there was no relationship between arts instruction and a boost in students’ academic accomplishments, but Winner and her fellow researchers did identify several other “studio habits of mind” that correlate with art instruction: persistence and engagement, express abstract concepts, creative risk-taking, observation, reflection, and knowledge of the art world.

Shari Tishman, director of Project Zero at the School of Education, says the question we really should be asking is not whether we can teach art but what the goals of this instruction are. “Developing technical expertise is only one of many [goals]…. Other goals might include teaching students how to think creatively, how to observe closely, how to pose interesting problems, how to look beyond the obvious, how to engage in productive critique, and how to look for balance and rightness of fit.  If these sorts of things are goals, it doesn’t make sense to design [a] curriculum or evaluations that focus predominantly on the somewhat esoteric goal of high-level technical expertise.” To Tishman, if expertise is not the goal of art instruction, then the answer to the question of whether art can be taught is changed dramatically, and perhaps the methodology of art education should change as well.

It’s a valid point, especially in a community that expects a high level of success in every endeavor. Not all works that start at the Carpenter Center will end up on display in one of the  galleries next door, but what students learn in the process of creation, from prose to painting, is inherently valuable. “The function of a writing class is similar to the function of reading. It helps young people to become themselves,” says Cole. “That’s the goal of the university at large....The end result is sometimes terrific poems and sometimes it is less terrific poems, but that is less important than becoming yourself.”

­—Staff writer Ola Topczewska can be reached at atopczewska@college.harvard.edu.