Questions/Prompts
- According to these authors, what is missing from the art of the past?
- What role should typography, photography, and other media play in shaping a new kind of art?Â
- What role should language play in art and design?
- What sort of new strategies or ideas will be necessary for future art forms?
- What should education or “the academy” teach artists about their field?
Response
Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, and Bayer have some similar values in terms of education in design. They believe that artists should interact more with their surroundings instead of being cut off from society (unlike the previous ways of thinking about art). They believed in balance, such as artists needing to use technology/machines as a tool, as a means to an end but not an end in itself. True art/artistic expression can not be artificially created by machines, it has to come from the human spirit and how we use the skills we’ve learned.
Schools in the past didn’t teach what was important/necessary for artists to grow and did not let them from hands-on field experience as well as be connected with society and the world around them. Since art and design have to communicate with a viewer it is a social study of visual communication. As people, artists are also influenced by what they see and experience, and that can be valuable when coming up with new ideas and designs.
About half of what Gropius goes over and of what artists should learn in schools can (I believe) be summed up in – teaching artists/designers to be self and socially aware (such as what are they influenced by, who/what are they designed for, how will their design influence themselves and the world around them, new ways of thinking, etc). The other half I believe is more about the technical skills, such as colors, shapes, compositions, etc, and getting familiar with the tools that artists and designers will be using as well as some hands-on experience (such as internships). Also teaching variety is important as well so (as Gropius mentions) students/designers don’t get put in a box/stuck with one particular style as that would stop the design field from growing and progressing and stop designers from learning new skills and restrict their creative freedom. One example of this can be a curriculum within an art school that allows for students to build their own degree by taking classes from different majors (such as an illustration student taking fashion classes to improve their character designs or a graphic design student taking sculpture classes to make 3D graphics) – this will help bring about new ideas and art forms and help these fields develop more. From the readings, it is also inferred that designers should have a unique sense of individuality in design and that schools should teach the language used in the design field (such as hierarchy, alignment, etc)
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