Child Art After Modernism: Visual Culture and New Narratives

Abstract

This chapter is built on an ironic assumption that child art, which is generally assumed to be a natural artifact of childhood which is essentially unaffected by culture, is itself a cultural construction. For more than a century, the practices of art education have been based on the notion that child art is something that childrenmake by themselves and that children are creative in ways different from those of adults. Like the French philosopher Lyotard’s (1984) claims about modernism, this belief was the “grand narrative” of art education. It unified our values and guided our practices. Now, in the postmodern era, that unifying narrative has fragmented into a surprisingly varied surfeit of little stories. I wish to examine the evolution of our grand narrative and to employ the very evidence that the proponents of child art have used to make the case for its naturalness and its creativeness to argue that child art is not natural, that its special character is the result of adult intervention, and that children are no more, and perhaps less, likely to be creative than are adults. Then I will have the task of characterizing some of the new stories that are beginning to be told about children’s visual cultural activities-and, of course, I will need to point to the ideologies and theories underlying then.

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