The Case for Artistic Literacy

Why understanding what we see is more important than ever

Ever since I began teaching art in the classroom, I’ve taught my students to do something called formal analysis. Rather like how we dissect literary works in English classes in order to see the underpinnings and mechanisms by which the author weaves their words, formal analysis in art similarly examines the details and context of artworks.

How do you look at art? How do we begin to make sense of what we see? (Photo by Marwan Ahmed on Unsplash)

I teach it very simply: we set up a four-square grid, with each square devoted to a concept — description, analysis, interpretation, and judgement. In teacher-lingo, this is designed to tap into students’ higher order thinking skills (critical thinking, analysis, application of knowledge, etc) through a framework that can easily be applied to many different types and styles of art.

As you may guess, I usually get one or two petulant questions along the lines of “why do we need to learn this?”

And my answer is, “Because it is important.”

My reasoning is thus: we live in a very visually-oriented world. Every moment of every day, we are bombarded with visual stimuli: advertisements, video, photos on social media, murals on street corners, business signs, screen printed T-shirts at the store, illustrations in books, and, of course, the requisite artwork found in waiting rooms and office foyers and homes and museums. We cannot escape it. No matter where we go, there is some form of art to be found.

Scumble abstract art by yours truly. I am still contemplating a title.

And yet, despite being inundated with art in some form or another, we are lacking in the ability to discern.

After over a century of our educational focus being somewhere other than the arts¹, and the rapid disintegration of concepts of beauty and order², we have lost our ability to make sense of visual art. We look at works in a museum and know we feel something in our soul, but we generally lack the facility of knowledge to truly make sense of it. We are on the outside, looking in, and for many, that encourages them to turn away from a deeper understanding, or even from art itself.

The importance of developing artistic literacy through formal analysis comes in as we encounter situations like we did this summer during the Olympics, although this was hardly the first time an agenda was presented craftily through creative means in the hopes of winning bodies to the cause. The point is this: there exist groups in our (collective) culture with very specific agendas, and many of them count on us not being able to understand enough of our artistic history, themes, and structure to call them out. They count on our lack of knowledge about the particulars of artistic literacy, because it is easier to pull the veil over the eyes of those who already cannot truly see.

One of these things is not like the other... no matter how some groups may attest to it. Da Vinci had very different motivations with his "Last Supper" (L) than Van Bijlert did in creating "Feast of the Gods" (R). As you dive into the historical context around each of these, you can begin to see they stand for drastically different things, and have wildly different purposes.

This is why developing (and encouraging) artistic literacy is important, and why it is especially important to us here and now.

So that said: How does one begin developing their artistic literacy and discernment?

1. Slow down and really study the visuals in front of you. Just like you spend significant time poking and prodding at a poem in literature class to get it to give up its’ secrets, get in the habit of taking time to truly see a work of art. Look at it closely, look at it from a distance, look at it in different lights. Study the textures, patterns, and colors. Really absorb what your eyes are telling you.

2. Avoid the tendency to make generalizations. Ralph Ammer did a wonderful TED talk on how drawing helps you think³, and in it he discusses how the human brain tends to make generalizations. We get so used to doing this, we often forget we are doing it. We walk down the street, and rather than seeing specific and unique trees and cars and dogs, our brains resort to labels. I have found in my work with students, that this tendency carries over into looking at art. Be aware of this, and avoid just labeling “blue,” “bridge,” “man,” etc. Ask instead: What shade of blue is it? Does the color get lighter or darker? How is the bridge built? Are there textures? What is the man wearing? Is he happy or sad? Get specific.

3. Familiarize yourself with the Elements and Principles of Art and Design. The Elements and Principles have a pretty straightforward access point and can help you understand art in greater detail. Elements are the building blocks of art (line, value, color, shape, etc), and the Principles are the way in which the artist organizes them in the artwork (pattern, unity, balance, movement, etc.). Knowing the Elements and how they work inside a piece of art is like looking under the hood of a car to see the engine. As you identify specific features, you get a glimpse of how and why the artist constructed the work, and you can begin to extrapolate what they are trying to say.

4. Make connections with things you know. The arts as a whole often develop in tandem throughout history and mirror major world events. For example, baroque music like Bach is really ornate and complex, similarly, baroque art is heavily ornate and complex. Another example: art that is of the brutalist movement has ties to and mirrors the austere and imposing aspects of Communism. Everything is connected, and these connections give us insight and context into the artist’s motivations.

5. Lastly, make note of how you feel. Art only becomes complete when it is viewed, it is this engagement with the viewer that becomes a conversation across time and space with the artist themselves. Is the work uplifting? Depressing? Anxious? Intimidating? All of our emotional responses to an artwork can give us clues as to the artist’s potential intent. Once we know what we feel, we can look closer and determine what about the work inspires that inside us. And once we know these details, we are better prepared to make any judgements we might come to.

1. The Committee of Ten convened in 1892 to determine the course of education in the United States, and the blow they dealt to the arts has yet to be truly rectified. Where previously, the arts were included and deemed to be a necessary part of education, once the Committee of Ten moved to standardize schools in the United States, the arts were seen as unnecessary to the goals of public education and conveniently set aside. To understand how far-reaching their rulings were, this Committee even determined students would undergo eight years of elementary education and four years of high school before moving on to college, a model we continue to follow (blindly?) today.

See https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/timeline_event/committee-ten-develops-first-national-standards/ and this video on American Education Reform History

2. Compare and contrast early historical eras of art (Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque) with modern eras (Impressionism on forward to the present). We have easily had double the artistic movements in the modern era, all of them short-lived by comparison to their historical counterparts, and each with an increasing aesthetic of disorder. The mindset around beauty went from where it was seen as a gift created by God, to the modern ideas that beauty is wholly determined by the viewer, or, that beauty doesn’t/shouldn’t exist in art (whose sole purpose is now for social activism).

3. “How Drawing Helps You Think” by Ralph Ammer for TEDxAmsterdam, 2019