Clearing the Decks for Dominant Culture: Some First Principles for a Contemporary Art Education

Abstract

The promotion by art education of high culture is based upon the high-culture critique of society which condemns the dominant, popular culture with which students are largely engaged. The assumptions on which this critique is based do not resist analysis and need to be displaced if art education is to become a serious critic of students' cultural preferences. Pejorative stratifications of culture need to be reformulated as categories of cultural pluralism, and an insider's perspective on dominant culture adopted. Instead of a romantic, individualistic model of cultural production, a collaborative and institutional model of production must be employed. Disdain for the users of dominant culture1 must be replaced by regard for the way students handle the conditions of their existence. A regressive view of cultural history should be exposed as a myth, and pessimism about the future displaced by a willingness to engage in social struggle. A creator orientation toward culture must be superseded by a user orientation. Finally, the assertion of common-sense, self-evident, ideal standards must give way to an acknowledgment that standards are historically conditioned, ideological, and subject to argument. Outside the art room students watch television, read comics, go to the movies, play videos; inside the art room they draw, paint and sculpt, and learn about what they are told is great art. One culture is dominant; it is highly popular and closely linked to the major economic arrangements of society. The other is high culture. For many art educators, the division between the two cultures is maintained by deeply held assumptions about their respective natures. For art educators to engage seriously with the cultural forms with which most of their