A Preface for Inquiries into Art Education

Abstract

Obviously the term 'art education' consists of two complex concepts, namely, the concept of art and the concept of education. Let us begin with the concept of art by considering Mary the artist. Mary is an artist by virtue of the fact that she is engaged in the artistic activity of producing works of Within the preceding sentence, we have made three conceptual distinctions which relate to the concept of art: that is, the artist, Mary; the artistic activity of making works of art; and the works of art themselves which are the products of the activity. Both the activity of making works of art and the products of that activity are central to the concept of It is important to distinguish between our use of the term art in the activity sense and art in the product sense. Art, as they say, has a process/product ambiguity. One usually refers to the process sense when one says I was never good at (making) art in school and to the product sense when one says I like Mary's art (product). We thus have a beginning conceptual map with three components: Mary, the artist; the artistic activity; and the art product; where the last two components are central with respect to art. As long as the artist as an agent is in our picture, there is the related notion of the artist's motivation. Any agent has a motivational nature that provides the impetus for the agent's actions and activities. And since one can discourse about the motiva-