Landscape with the Fall

The California Art Council posted a link to this thought-provoking piece on "The importance of teaching the arts," outlining the plethora of reasons for arts education — creativity, self-expression, social-well-being, better test scores. Wendy Earle offers her thoughts on the challenges and purposes of an arts program that purports to be accessible to all learners.

Democratisation of the arts – making them accessible to everyone, engendering real public engagement – requires an arts education that properly introduces young people to a range of art forms (and gives them a sense that there are others to explore).
Most students who study the arts will not become artists; those who do will specialise in one artform. So the purpose of a good arts education must primarily be to develop the ability to judge, ideally within a range of forms. Art, once it leaves the studio or the rehearsal room, no longer belongs to the artist and becomes subject to the judgement of others. If we really want to democratise the arts, we need to give young people enough knowledge to enter into an intelligent debate about what is good and what is not.

I wonder:  How do we begin to define what is "good."?  Who gets to decide what is "good"? Can we agree that there are multiple kinds of "good"? Does the idea of "good" always need to be attached to arts education, in order to justify the engagement?

Must it all be either less or more,
Either plain or grand?
Is it always "or"?
Is it never "and"?

Sometimes, it's helpful to take some time to look at the frame, rather than to look directly at the thing being framed.  The article references "the opening of a window" in a poem by W.H. Auden.

"Musée des Beaux Arts" (French for "Museum of Fine Arts") was written in December 1938 while Auden was staying in Brussels, Belgium. The poem's title comes from the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, famous for its collection of Early Netherlandish painting, including the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder whose painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, hangs in the museum. 

Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (circa 1558)

The painter Brueghel sets this Greek myth in his own time and place. Icarus the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, who constructs wings made of feathers and wax.  Daedalus has already tried out his construction, when his son asks to take his turn. Father warns son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but thrilled by the sensation of flight, the son completely ignores his father's instructions.  Brueghel depicts Icarus splashing down amidst ordinary people, going about their daily business.

Icarus, plate VIII from the illustrated book, Jazz (1947)
Matisse, Henri | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Splash! (2007)
Yoo, Geun Taek | Korean Art Museum Association

The myth of Icarus will always have a special appeal to artists.  

Looking forward to the day when the chance to fly is reason enough to make some art.