Reading Response 4B – RR

I think the authors believed that the art-proletariat, lulled into a dream of genius and enmeshed in artistic conceit, was being prepared for the ‘profession’ of architecture, painting, sculpture, or graphic art, without being given the equipment of a real education. That its abilities, finally, were confined to a sort of drawing-painting that had no relation to the realities of materials, techniques or economics. Lack of all vital connections with the life of the community led inevitably to barren esthetic speculation. The fundamental pedagogic mistake of the academy arose from its preoccupation with the idea of the individual genius and it’s discounting the value of commendable achievement on a less exalted level. Since the academy trained a myriad of minor talents in drawing and painting, of whom scarcely one in a thousand became a genuine architect or painter, the great mass of these individuals, fed upon false hopes and trained as one-sided academicians, was condemned to a life of fruitless artistic activity. Unequipped to function successfully in the struggle for existence, they found themselves numbered among the social drones, useless because of their schooling. With the development of the academies, genuine folk art died away. The authors believed that every factor that must be considered in an educational system which is to produce actively creative human beings is implicit in such an analysis of the creative process. That human achievement depends on the proper coordination of all the creative faculties. It is not enough to school one or another of them separately: someone must thoroughly train them at the same time. Its chief function is to liberate the individual by breaking down conventional patterns of thought in order to make way for personal experiences and discoveries which will enable him to see his own potentialities and limitations.

The role of typography and photography has the flexibility and elasticity to bring with them a new reciprocity between economy and beauty. That typography materials themselves contain strongly optical tangibility through which they can render the content of the communication in a directly visible—not only indirectly intellectually. Photography is highly effective when used as typographical material. It may appear as illustration beside the words, or as “photo text” in place of words, as a precise form of representation so aim as to permit of no individual interpretation. The typographic revolution was not an isolated event but went hand in hand with a new social, political consciousness and with the building of new cultural foundations. The artist’s acceptance of the machine as a tool for mass production has had its impression on aesthetic concepts. Since then, an age of science has come upon us, and it has motivated the artist more than ever to open his mind to the unknown forces that shape our lives.