We’re constantly surrounded by images everywhere we go.
Social media showcases this better than anything – memes, our friends’ profile pictures, pictures of cats, and comical factoids plastered on black backgrounds account for most of our attention.
But even in other quotidian aspects of our lives – on our way to work, whilst we’re standing in line, grocery shopping, and etc, we see that images highly influence our environment.
And yet, why is it that we spend so little of our time in school examining the visual medium?
Keep in mind that throughout this post, I’m going to take the visual arts to roughly signify a general history of art course rather than a practice of art course (though there is also a great argument made for the latter here).
Almost all students throughout high school are forced to analyze and interact with the literary classics of our time – novels such as To Kill a Mockingbird & 1984 have been read countless number of times by your average 18 year old (well, they have been assigned to be read that many times ;))
But how many of those 18 or 17 year olds have been asked to think about Rembrandt’s The Night Watch or Picasso’s Les Demoiselles? How many of them have attempted to describe what they see in such paintings?
If you were to respond along the lines of “Why is that important?” then I’d conversely retort by questioning the importance of literature, and especially essay writing – unless you want to go into academia, essays will actually train your writing to be much worse when applied to the real world, and you’ll ironically have to “unlearn” many of your bad writing habits.
Note: I’m not trying to bash the study of English – I’m trying to frame the relative importance of studying English in regards to studying the visual arts.
Now, if you question the importance of the arts in general (including both the literary and the visual) then that’s a whole other question for a whole other debate. But for now, let’s simply look at what an education with more emphasis on the visual would mean.
Building skill-set within the visual lexicon isn’t so much about terminology or semantics as it is about training your mind to think in a new way. It’s similar to coding – sure, you generally start off by learning one language and its specifics, but most importantly, you learn how a computer carries out its processes. You draw environment diagrams, figure out what different statements print, and are encouraged to “be the interpreter” when solving problems.
Similarly, when we start to describe paintings, we must learn such a new language as well. The “computer” in this case isn’t as binary in identification; rather, it’s a combination of the artist, the environment, and the strokes you see on the canvas.
Take 30 seconds to describe the painting below. Comment on the size of the lady at the center in relation to her foreground, the colors you see, what she’s wearing, what the others are wearing, and anything else of relevance.
Van Eyck’s The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele, c. 1434-36
I don’t know about you but I found that much harder than expected the first time I had to do it. You have to be precise, clinical, and have a particular command over the language to effectively communicate your ideas that is only possible after hours and hours of practice.
How will this help you land a job? How will this translate to practical, actionable insights you can immediately utilize?
You definitely won’t come out with the ability to understand mergers and acquisitions better than anyone else or be able to pick up R at a faster rate than your roommate who studied Economics. But that’s not the point of this post.
The point of this post is to surface and question the omittance of studying the visual in favor of studying the literary.
Millions of kids complain about having to read “old” books and write 2000 word essays. Why not make them complain instead about analyzing “old” paintings?
When did reading Hamlet become more important than studying anything by Van Gogh?
Ultimately, most highschool focused curricula look like this:
But, really, if we’re trying to see how literature stands in comparison to the visual arts, it should look like this:
I don’t know enough about music to comment, but I am convinced that if taught the right way, both literature and the visual arts should be offered with equal importance on this spectrum.