Commentary: On Arguing from Authority

Abstract

The National Art Education Association has been involved in a major research effort for about 4 years (NAEA, 1996). Concerted and systematically structured research is a necessity for the future health and development of art education and art educators must hope that the efforts of the various research teams will be fruitful, as fruitful, for example, as Harvard's Project Zero, but more focused on the needs of education in the visual arts, rather than on the collection of psychological data (Lanier, 1987). While I am optimistic about the NAEA research teams' efforts, I wonder if there might be greater rewards if they were accompanied by an equally major push for philosophical investigation. I say this not because I have any delusions about own philosophical abilities-far, far from it!-but because I have noticed a strand in art education literature that I regard as a weakness and that I think might be overcome or at least lessened by a greater attention to philosophical grounding within the field. That is, a more thought-out philosophy of art education-distinct from philosophy of art or philosophy of education-is needed. Is this a rather pompous and perhaps vague quasi-proclamation? Maybe ego has fogged reason, but let me try to explain concerns further. I will start by issuing a challenge to readers of art education literature to estimate how many articles they have read in which the validity of the argument depended on acceptance of the notions of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, or various neo-Marxist theorists? Or perhaps on the writings of currently popular anthropologists, such as Dissanayake or Levi-Strauss? Or psychologists, including Gardner of Project Zero? I further challenge readers to analyze the contents of these articles. How many of them marshal a tremendous amount of theory from outside the field of art education to explain or scrutinize a small scale or even trivial event within art education? I call this using a Sherman Tank for a short ride around the block. The small scale is seldom well-explained by huge and dense theory. Unfortunately, one important area of art education research, participant-observer studies, is prone to this malaise. I say unfortunately because qualitative research seems to promise so much for art education and I often read articles based on this methodology. Participant-observer articles frequently make pleasant reading of a rather anecdotal sort, but the connection to prestigious, usually anthropological theory can seem tenuous if not strained. Perhaps well-reported anecdotes need to be collected and published without so much theory so that solid art educational theory can be developed from that data. Perhaps the grandiose borrowed theories need to be downplayed by art education researchers, editors, and reviewers. However, I am not arguing for know-nothingness but rather, a more lean and tight use of citations of theoretical sources, a little less saying my reasoning is justified by theoretician-flavor-of-the-decade. The most recent champion example of citation after citation of authorities as judgments was not a participant-observer study but an article analyzing an advertisement for the Getty Center of Education in the Art, (jagodzinski, 1997). In one way the analysis was fun. If one enjoys the intellectual equivalent of a Fantasia hippo ballet, then the trouncing of the advertisement's imagery through heavy, very heavyweight theory was amusing. If, however, the theory-ridden exercise is read from the Sherman Tank, or perhaps from the beating-a-butterfly-with-a-baseball-bat perspective, amusement may wear thin. Given the tendency to hyperfootnoteism and dense theorizing of such deconstructive enterprises, it is difficult to gauge whether this was a critique or a parody of a deconstructive analysis. Frankly, since I like jokes, I enjoyed it as a satire of this sort of jargon-loaded field of analysis. In another recent case, Duncum (1997), cited several authorities to the effect that there is no valid difference between the aesthetic experience one can gain from art and that from mass media products. …