I participated yesterday in a workshop filled with extremely smart and exceptional people. In general the entire experience was wonderful and inspiring, and I learned a lot from everyone. But there was one odd moment.
One the talks, you see, involved a bit of back and forth. From time to time the speaker would show something on the screen and solicit a response from the room. At one point showed an image of the Mona Lisa sporting a mustache. Next to this he showed a photograph of a man’s face. He then asked “Who is the man in the photograph?”
I shouted out the obvious answer, expecting that a chorus of us would give the same answer: “Marcel Duchamp!” Yet in that entire room, only one other person spoke up. I realized then that nobody else knew about Duchamp’s iconic work L.H.O.O.Q.. Either that, or they had suddenly all become strangely shy.
I’m certainly no art historian, and my knowledge of 20th Century art has huge gaps. But it seems to me that some things, like iconic works by pioneering artists, should be part of the general knowledge base of our populace. Yet clearly it is not, which tells me that something is screwy with the way education works in this country.
OK, maybe this isn’t the most important problem with our education system. After all, our high schools also manage to carefully avoid teaching mathematics, or even letting kids know how amazingly creative and fun math is. Instead they mostly teach a sequence of rote exercises and formulae that they mislabel as “mathematics”. Believe it or not, in most parts of this country you can get all the way through high school without ever learning the beauty of Euclid’s proof of the infinity of prime numbers.
So maybe in a way our education system is indeed teaching absurdism to our children. Except instead of painting a silly mustache on Leonardo da Vinci paintings, they are painting a silly mustache on rational thought itself. I wonder if many kids get the joke.
A not-entirely-coincidental sequel: together with one of the other workshop participants, I spent Sunday afternoon at MoMA, much of it sitting inside the Dadaist room on the 5th floor, looking at Duchamp.
(At the workshop I said “Dali”, erroneously.)
As to your point, a brief personal anecdote. As a child, I adopted an identity which didn’t include art, the making of music, dance, or theatre. This may in part have been personality. But I suspect it was largely due to adults around me saying “Michael isn’t into art”. Hear that enough, and you begin to integrate it into your identity. Instead, I was a math-and-science-and-sports kid.
For me, as an adult, there was a moment at which I realized Rembrandt’s self-portraits moved me enormously, for reasons I could not explain, sometimes to the edge of tears. And shortly after that I really saw into Picasso’s early cubist work, and was stunned. They were my artistic equivalent of understanding Euclid’s proof.
These events were fortuitous accidents, aided by generous friends. But they led to a personal restructuring and expansion of identity, around the exploration of art as this extraordinary universe. I realized I wasn’t “not into art”, I simply had never seen art, and once one saw into it, how could one resist going deeper?
These remarks hold also, mutatis mutandis, for theater, for dance, film, etc.