I read this book after attending the Monday lecture, but I needed to revisit the lecture a second time to fully understand and accept the reality discussed in it. I grew up in a city with only one museum, which housed taxidermied animals. My art classes had no paints or anything beyond simple pencils and colored pencils. However, I attended art school from the age of 8, and even though the program lasted only four years, I continued attending until I was 16, up until I graduated from school. Those were the best years of my life—magical, one could say. The future of the country seemed bleak, with no prospects, and everything around me was depressing and frightening. But the art school was like a portal to a magical world, where discussions about Homer intertwined with endless creativity.
An interesting point from the book: “Howard Gardner’s idea is that art education should be pursued in four directions: creator, performer, viewer, and critic. All four roles are crucial for developing skills in the modern world.”
“Creating simply a mess with art materials is still a good or even important thing. Thinking through making, investigating, and discovering in our material world—this is how we learn.”
“Testing how materials behave is an interesting and strange process, and productivity happens along the way.”
“Questions are necessary, and the more you ask, the better.”
“Linguistic, literary, and educational experts Shelby Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath, with whom I worked at Tate, suggested additional elements like developing interpretive abilities, forming observational skills, creating symbolic meaning, and navigating contingency. Making art requires us to work out and make decisions about ideas, time, color, shape, form, spatial relationships, detail versus the bigger picture, and the development of a wealth of associative features around how we speak while we make, how we develop language and visual focus, how we categorize, synthesize, and analyze.”
“I’ve described art-making as an abstract idea (something imagined), which is made manifest. It actively stimulates feelings (even if those feelings are cold or deliberately disrupted), and it exists in the social realm, to be understood in context.”
“In these terms, can art improve lives? Yes. Does it generate critical thinking? Yes. Analysis and synthesis? Yes. Does it help make meaning? Yes. Does it build creativity? Yes. Does it develop independent thinking? Yes. Can it shape emotional intelligence and literacy? Yes. Does it give insight into materiality? Yes. Is it straightforward? Yes. Is it complex? Yes. Does it stretch your thinking? Yes. Does it develop skills required to address today’s problems? Definitely. Does it include other subjects? Yes. Can you use it to understand history? Yes. Math? If you want! Can it develop physical skills? Yes. Can it create wellbeing? Yes. Does it spark joy? It can. Will it improve confidence? It does. Might it generate empathy? Often. Does it have social benefits? Yep. Can everyone do it? They can.”
“They said: Art is what makes us human. Art is a language everyone speaks. Art is power. Art is life. Art holds our lives together and helps us live. Art is an act of expressing feelings, thoughts, and observations. Art needs us. Art makes us think. Art is the way to move. Art allows you to discover who you are. Every child has the right to a good education.”
“Empathy requires that we see from others’ perspectives, and looking at art, making art, and talking about art exercise our empathetic capacity and engage the emotionally reasoning mind.”
This book stirred many emotions within me. I felt deeply inspired by it—full of questions, heartfelt stories, and personal reflections that explore moments of true learning, both with and through art.
