Why is Art Important in our Schools, our lives and our Societies?

 

 

View from Dali Museum of Tampa Bay

Salvador Dali is not the easiest artist to understand with his melting clocks, hidden symbols, and sexual imagery, yet he is recognized as a master artist and people flock to the new Dali Museum in the Tampa Bay Area.  Why?  Why did David and Harriet Dyer spend a life time and a fortune collecting Dali's work?  Why did the city of St. Petersburg commit huge amounts of funding to build a museum of the Dyer collection? Why is this museum so crowded with people on the day after Christmas you can't even get close to the pictures?  Why is the new museum breaking records for attendance? What is the fuss all about?  It is only paint on canvas, and weird strange images at that, why? 
 I think you must go even further and ask yourself what is the importance of art in our lives...all art, all artists.  Being a teacher of the arts in public schools was a humbling process as an artist and teacher.  My role was not only as teacher of the basics of art to children, but as much to the adults I worked with in the schools.  Much of the time I found myself being an art advocate and resource counselor for those with little education or understanding of the arts. In my career as an art educator I was more likely than not to be evaluated in my teaching by non artists and those who had little understanding or education in the arts.  There is a culture in schools that is pervasive, it is those who are have an education believe what ever area their education is in is the most dominant and important.   It takes a rare leader to have a wider more expansive view of what learning is about.  I did work with a few of those rare leaders who helped me bring art alive to children and community and who began to see that arts are an intellectual process and activity.  I think the hardest thing for administrators in public education to understand is the intellectual nature of art. I cannot speak of all school systems around the world, only in the United States public schools.  Hopefully in your area, in your country it is different.  But to me art is many things, but it is primarily a process of thinking, adaptation of skills and expression.  It can be beautiful, it can be ugly, it can be difficult, but one way or another its role is to make us think. Art is higher order thinking, so when an artist goes beyond copying, to interpreting, to altering, to experimenting, to envisioning it is a process not unlike the scientific process...it is Einstein, it is Hawkins, it is Bach, it is Gaudi, it is Bell, it is Steinbeck, it is Faulkner, it is Leonardo da Vinci, it is Dali.....
The human need to do art has been around since the beginning of man, from the prehistoric caves in France to the present time.  Perhaps the reasons we do art changes subtly, but not implicitly.  With the invention of new materials, and innovations like the camera or computer our needs change and our method of expression may be different, but not the need to think, interpret and express.  Our society, our civilizations leave a record of expression, an interpretation of who they were, what they were thinking, and visually we go on that journey with them...like a time machine.  
I will always think of the artist as the modern shaman, the cultural absorbers of our time, who then interprets it and presents it back to us...Dali makes us think, he presents challenges, he does not make it easy for us, he ask a good bit of us, otherwise we could walk away and say what a pretty picture!  But we can't and look how many of us want to think in depth and how many of us want a challenge. 
Now what I present to you is to ask more of your schools not less. Ask your schools for more art, insist on art being an ever present part of you child's education, and be determined to educate others about the intellectual nature of art! Your child may not become an artist, but they will learn how to think like an artist. It is those thinking skills we need in this fast pace out of the box thinking world we live in.  We need flexible thinkers, innovators, and visionaries. 
Museums open your doors to all, make art affordable to everyone in our society not a select few.  Bring the community in make it a part of your museum and more importantly go out to the community in every way possible.
Artists, if you want people to buy your art, view your art, then you must help also... Your future audience is the children of today...if you help them love and appreciate art, they will buy your art and go to museums and symphonies and plays...sign up for an arts council, participate in community events that support the arts...it will only enrich you and others.
You are welcome to add to this discussion.  I welcome your views. We can start with why was Duchamps' re Mutt and important piece of work in the art world.
Betsy