The Inductive Method of Teaching Visual Art Criticism

Abstract

It seems that the method has been applied to all manner of nonscientific, affective concerns such as social intercourse, religion, and value acquisition. Thus it is not surprising, though it may seem repugnant to many, that an attempt should be made to apply the method to art criticism, an area many hoped would remain a sanctuary, safe from systematizing classification laws. Applying the method to art is an old idea and has been discussed at length by Munro, Valentine, and others.' In this paper, however, method is related not to inquiry into the nature of the beautiful or into the nature of appreciation, but rather to teaching the process of art criticism. Although art criticism seems so unlike science, the methods of both have much in common. But before adjusting the procedures of the one field to the other, caution demands pointing out the obvious dangers to which some scientific systems of art criticism have succumbed. Hecksher describes how a misunderstanding of true method is often at fault: curriculum of the liberal arts has often been in danger of being taken over by the technological society; too often it has been infected by the very spirit which it should have combatted. Thinking they were imitating science, the high priests of supposedly classical learning created rigid categories and became subject to a narrowing spirit of analysis. Two forces have tended to rescue the liberal arts from this deformation. The first, paradoxically, is science itself. For while the liberal arts thought that in counting every comma they were imitating science, the true geniuses were making us aware that science does not operate this way at all.2

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