A Response to Ted Bracey

Abstract

Ted Bracey's criticism of my book Mind in Art: Cognitive Foundations in Art Education finds fault with my views on artists, art, philosophy, psychology, mind-body relationships and with my failure to elucidate a theory of Art Education. The list suggests that my biggest failure may have been not writing the book he wanted to write. One might find this lengthy effort to find fault with an introduction to art education flattering, in that it aroused so much ire in the mind of the reviewer. Some of his criticisms are, of course, quite valid and speak to issues that professionals may respectfully disagree on. But his efforts to find so many things to disagree with resulted in his making a number of serious misattributions and misinterpretations. It may be useful to discuss some of our major disagreements and to expose some of his misunderstandings and misattributions. Bracey's biggest disappointment with my book was that I did not propose a new theory of art education. He is correct in claiming that I did not do this, since my intentions, as noted in the preface, were to examine and make explicit those cognitive behaviors normally associated with most higher order and problem solving activity and how they function in the act of creative forming (p.14). Further, I stated in the preface that my purpose was to inform the reader how we can go about understanding the role of cognition in art learning and to suggest some strategies teachers can use in schools to demonstrate the feasibility of that approach. I long ago disabused myself of the dream of constructing a theory that would answer all the questions one could raise about the role of art in education. I have always thought that there is more than one suitable rationale for teaching art-a view I made clear in 1997 (NASA 1997) and in my offering of three competing paradigms, reflecting the Rationalists, Idealist, and Empirical philosophies (Dorn 1994). I have never had any desire to develop a Dorn Theory or to present a single theory of art education as being more adequate than any other. My experience in teaching college students tells me that most art majors are not all that hot to read theory. I believe, perhaps falsely, that Art Education students are more interested in learning how, rather than why, we do what we do. For this reason I did not want to write a textbook on psychology and art in such a way that I might give any students that eyes-rolled-over look. More importantly, perhaps, Bracey aims a good deal of his criticism at my claim that art making is an intelligent activity. He argues that I have advanced unquestioned assumptions about the nature of art and mind, and he asserts that making art is mindless rather than intelligent, that artworks can be made stupidly and that individual artworks reveal only the thinking [that] led them from one work to another. He also believes that the tradition of Modernism has long been discredited, is hierarchical and wildly elitist. One might conclude that Bracey has a negative view of both artists and art. We can only guess why Bracey challenges the claim that making art is intelligent activity. My attempts to provide a view of both top down and bottom up theories of cognitive psychology and aesthetics were apparently insufficient to sway his on this matter. So too was my review of the art education research yielding data supporting a positive relationship between art and intelligence. One can guess about what assumptions he used to criticize the book by noting his use of the ideas of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Lanier, and Institutional Theory. Bracey was correct that I avoided George Dickey's institutional theory of art as a basis for my thinking. Dickey's theory argues that the artist must accept that his or her artwork is first and foremost a commodity for sale on the art world market and that its aesthetic value is decided by the number of works sold and the prices they bring in the marketplace. …