I've been reading this thread with interest and I find what's missing very telling.  What happens if the viewer and the piece have different presumptions about art and aesthetics?  Art can only be self-explanatory if both sides have a basic agreement on what what it is and what it does.

I was the Curator of the Chinese Cultural Centre Museum & Archives in Vancouver, Canada, and in addition to historic exhibits, we also had an active program of contemporary art exhibits.  I will admit I am not an 'art' person by training and left most of the decisions regarding this aspect of the museum to the Cultural Director.  The attitude to art labeling was minimal to say the least: artist name, title, medium, year was about it.

Even though I did not curate these exhibits, I was in charge of education for the museum and had to take schools and public tours around the building.  When the tours were for Chinese people, they wanted to spend a great deal of time with the art, when the tours were for 'Westerners' they tended to stay less than 5 minutes in the gallery - just enough for a walk around.  I came to the conclusion that the lack of interest in the art on display was tied into a lack of understanding.  So, I created a general tour where I talked about the history of Chinese art, how it was produced and the philosophy behind it.

The next time I had a group of students, I asked them to walk around the gallery and gather when they were ready.  Sure enough, less than 5 minutes later they were ready to go.  I then gave my 10 minute art talk and offered them another opportunity to view the gallery.  They took me up on the offer and spent another 15 minutes looking at the art, and most importantly, discussing what they were seeing.  What made the difference is that they now had the knowledge to understand and appreciate what they were seeing.  We got past the stage where they just thought that the art was 'weird and different' and they could begin to understand that differences were grounded in values and beliefs rather than just being arbitrary.  I extended this program to my general tours with similar results.

What did I learn from this experience?  Art is not universal - more often than not it requires a meeting of the minds on a cultural and historic level for it to be appreciated.

--
K. Linda Tzang
BA, MA, MA
Phd. candidate City University

email: [log in to unmask]


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