Why Johnny Can't Paint like Giotto

Author(s): Anita Silvers

Source: The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 20, No. 4, 20th Anniversary Issue
(Winter, 1986), pp. 128-132
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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128 Journal of Aesthetic Education
As for the term "aesthetic," I trust that the transactional context and the defi-
nition of the two stances counteract its diverse usages.
7. What the student brings to the transaction is as important, educationally, as the
character of the artifacts studied. The assumption is not that any evocation
"goes," but that if there is to be growth, it must build on, expand, and if neces-
sary modify, the perceptual habits, the sensitivities, the assumptions, that are the
residue of past transactions in life and in art.
8. The text, as a set of signs that are part of a semantic system, can be more easily
dissociated as an artifact from the aesthetic evocation than can a painted canvas
or a bronze statue, which seem so much more the work. The semeiological situ-
ation is similar, however, as the many studies in perception demonstrate. See
"Coda: Literature as a Performing Art," in Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration;
Rosenblatt, "Act I, Sc. 1: Enter the Reader," Literature in Performance 1, no. 2
(1981).
9. This brief exposition could not deal with the transaction between author and
text, or artist and artifact. We can at least recall that the author is the first reader
of the text.
The potential role of the production of such artifacts in the education of the
student of literature or art is another of the many implications of the transac-
tional theory to be explored.

Why Johnny Can't Paint Like Giotto

Anita Silvers

How would you resolve the following case?

You've made your seventh-grade class a model of excellent art edu-

cation. Your students have admired reproductions and slides of
famous works, visited collections and exhibitions, and been encour-
aged to express themselves artistically in media from pastels to
printmaking. For his final art project, Johnny requests permission
to replaster the classroom walls and use them as the site of his work.
(He has been much impressed with Richard Serra's site-dependent
art.) But the fresco Johnny paints is stylistically indiscernible from
Giotto's painting.
Vou try to be tactful in criticizing Johnny. You explain that not
everything is possible in every period and that, while Giotto's style
was appropriate for his own art world, it cannot be inserted into the
art world today.
Johnny is indignant, of course. He reminds you of how your art
history lessons have focussed on exemplary work like Giotto's and
of how you've urged him to study Giotto's paintings. "If Giotto is
good enough to be hung in museums and included in books, he's
good enough for me," Johnny says. "Why can't I paint like Giotto?"
The answer to this question is not as easily formulated as you might think.
Johnny is asking you to explain something more than why his painting in
Giotto's style in the postmodern era is not art. He wants to know why, if
this is so, you have insisted that he familiarize himself with the art world's
history and with its famous historical objects.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 1986

01986 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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 Silvers: Why Johnny Can't Paint 129

As is typical in art-historical pedagogy, you've treated the works you've

selected for study as exemplary. But if they are exemplary, then what
example do they set? In pressing his question, Johnny discloses a puzzle
about our pedagogical practice.
In our art world, although not necessarily in art worlds of more tradi-
tional cultures, objects that are exemplary or canonical exert their influ-
ence in some way short of being reproduced. There is such widespread
agreement on this point that you are justified in insisting Johnny learn this
lesson well. However, if replication of past art is an inappropriate response
to historical study, does any aesthetic advantage accrue from learning the
lessons of art history? And who should teach these lessons in the schools,
those trained in history or those trained in art?
Do not misapprehend my intention in raising these questions. My pur-
pose is neither to approve of anachronistic painting nor to doubt the value
of learning the history of art. I do not even think this puzzle case proves
the inconsistency or irreconcilability of conceptions central to our art-
historical and art-educational practices. What questions like Johnny's force
us to rethink is how the elements of these practices interact and what
benefits each element bestows. Of course, no virtue resides in formulating
an account of art-historical methodology in brevity and haste. So the most
I can do here is raise some considerations that may help teachers to help
students comprehend the uses of art history.
Not all approaches to art-historical study illuminate aesthetic education.
An approach I believe to be peripheral uses artworks as evidence from
which to reconstruct the cultures in which they were made. While such
historical treatment enlightens us about the history of civilization, it also
inevitably reduces aesthetic objects to being mere samples of the artifacts
made in a cultural or historical period. Doing art history this way inclines
art historians to expand their interests to include the products of craft:
furniture making, silversmithing, and tailoring are examples. All these are
theoretically as informative about social and cultural structure as is the
great art of a period; indeed, it can be argued that any period's bad art tells
us as much about the period as its good art does. Were we serious about
art-historical study's functioning predominantly as a source of social his'
tory, we would revise our art-historical teaching to emphasize ordinary
rather than great art. Then Johnny would no longer be perplexed, since
the historical works he studied were not selected because they are exem-
plary. But Johnny's aesthetic education would be seriously impoverished
and diminished because his art-historical education would be divorced
from his learning to appreciate art.
Victorians committed to academic painting took an alternative approach
to art-historical study, one which delimits rather than eliminates the
exemplary force of the works that are studied. They disparaged Giotto's
art because it seemed so primitive as to be hardly art at all. They feared
that English painters might take Giotto as canonical and, in doing so, cause
English art to retrogress. We might expect them to answer Johnny as they
responded to their pre-Raphaelite contemporaries: by condemning Giotto's
style as too primitive a model for contemporary art.
Although believing Giotto to be an inappropriate model, they never-
theless accorded him an influential art-historical role. Giotto's work was
worth preserving to illuminate his successors' attainment of aesthetic
worth, for Giotto's painting contributed to the much more successful

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130 Journal of Aesthetic Education

work of Raphael. On this view, art objects can be studied from an anti-
quarian historical perspective and apprehended not as exemplars of aes-
thetic value, but as at least having exercised exemplary influence upon
more recent art.

Art history can thus be thought to present its subjects not

of aesthetic value but as causes of later works which have aesthetic value.
On this view, a condition of appreciating artworks is understanding them,
and understanding their causes is essential to understanding them. At least
from the time of Aristotle, who thought it important in the Poetics to
base his characterization of tragedy on the historical development of the
dramatic form, it has seemed unexceptionable to enrich our understand-
ing of works of art by considering them as resulting from the influence of
(some of) their predecessor works.
Some such accounts invoke causal connections too crude to be believ-
able or too vacuous to be verifiable. But there are other proposals, such
as the recent one made by Arthur Danto in The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981) and
"The End of Art" (in The Death ofArt, edited by Berel Lang. New York:
Haven Publications, 1984), which deserve serious notice. Although this
is not the place to engage in a thorough analysis and assessment of Danto's
views, his institutional theory of art gives art's history a central role in
explaining how aesthetic appreciation occurs. Thus, it is informative to
consider the implications of his theory for teaching the history of art.
Danto takes art to evolve as new works exemplifying newly relevant
predicates are created. New kinds of objects are accorded the status of art
in a historically continuous art world because they are able to redefine
earlier works. That is, as new styles occur, earlier works are reconstrued
either as precursors which have exercised exemplary influence over the
new work, or else as hopeless evolutionary dead ends. For instance, Giotto
acquires even more significance when he is construed as a precursor of
Cezanne as well as of Raphael, while by the same token of Cezanne's cen-
trality to the evolution of art, academic Victorian painting appears to have
hardly any historical consequence at all. Another example of this approach
to the history of art is the contemporary painter Frank Stella's proposal
that Caravaggio's aesthetic importance lies in his functioning as a precursor
of Stella in the painterly exploration of space.
This approach gives an account of why we should learn the history of
art and why we should do so even though art history offers no guidelines
for creating contemporary art. If predecessor works are valuable because
they are precursors, they cannot also be valuable in virtue of being succes-
sors to their own successors. Johnny cannot help but be a successor of
Giotto; consequently, Johnny not only shouldn't but can't paint like
Giotto. This is because Johnny's painting defines Giotto's work as its evo-
lutionary predecessor, and in this respect it necessarily is unlike Giotto's
own painting. But Johnny's painting affords Giotto's work the status of
historically important predecessor, and in doing so Johnny's painting
secures its own status as art. Notice that this could be so only in an art
world which is infused by awareness of its own art history in general, and
in particular by its acknowledgment that Giotto's work exists. In the art
world according to Danto, art-historical study does not create contem-
porary art. It creates the possibility of contemporary art.
Nonetheless, Johnny's disquiet about the value of his art-historical

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 Silvers: Why Johnny Can't Paint 131

study may be unabated by Danto's view, for on it the history of art di-
verges abruptly from the other historical studies he pursues. Usually, when
Johnny learns history, he is told that he is learning lessons which are from
the past but which are for the present or future. Even those who have
abandoned believing that history teaches us to avoid the mistakes of the
past admit by virtue of the same reasoning that studying history at least
offers protection against foolish hopes.
To the extent that historical methodology aspires to the standards and
results of science, historical teaching presumes that historical explana-
tion, although formulated and supported by reference to events in the
past, achieves significance because the present reiterates the past and
because history thus reveals forces that apply equally in the present. To
the extent that historical teaching assumes a moral rather than a scien-
tific role, historical agents are portrayed as responsible for desirable, or
else regrettable, change and consequently are studied as models to be
emulated or abhorred. But within an art-historical framework which limits
historical art objects to a harbinger's role, the contemporary usefulness of
studying such works seems severely reduced, for the heuristic effect of the
great predecessors of contemporary art is limited because they cannot be
repeated and consequently apparently should not be taken as models to be
reiterated by contemporary work.
In the art world according to Danto, given Johnny's knowledge of what
subsequently created objects any particular historical art object precedes,
Johnny cannot understand the earlier object aesthetically without regard
for its successors and so cannot understand it purely in terms of its own
historical period. He must always see it as characterized by the presence or
absence of properties which gained their aesthetic relevance at a later time.
Therefore, although other historical studies purport to provide understand-
ing of what happened in the past, the nature of the objects of art-historical
study prohibits similar comprehension because we cannot help but see
these objects as defined in contemporary terms.
Indeed, our very identification of objects as art and thus as proper
subjects for art-historical research is determined by our current definition
of what art is. This suggests that causal explanation in the art world is
tested by its retrodictive rather than its predictive adequacy and that, for
the events which constitute Giotto's painting to have causal efficacy in
respect to their successors, future art-world generations must at a mini-
mum maintain knowledge that Giotto's work exists. Hence, art-historical
causation differs from historical causation, for the study of art history is
more than the study of causes. The study of art history not only takes art-
historical causation as its subject, but it itself operates as a force in art-
historical causation.
Moreover, unlike what we would expect if art-historical development
were evolutionary as Danto believes, the development of art is not progres-
sively linear. The following excerpt (from a review by Michael Brenson in
the New York Times, 18 May 1986) is one of very many instances avail-
able to support this point:

Who would have expected an exhibition of new sculptures by

Anthony Caro modeled from the human figure? When Caro began
making abstract, welded steel sculpture in 1960, it seemed that
he had discarded forever traditional ways of thinking about sculp-

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132 Journal of Aestbetic Education

ture. .. . Caro's abstract work may not allow [him] ... to express
all he knows . . .Modeling the human figure helps .... While in art
school Caro copied ancient and medieval sculpture. The sculptures
in this show seem to reach back to the reclining figures of Michel-
angelo .... They pause for a long time at the Elgin Marbles .... Just
what Caro will do with the dialogue he has set up here is hard to
tell.

Our problem then is to formulate an art-historical model on which

predecessor works function as examples, but not as examples forceful
enough to promote slavish reproduction. Danto's evolutionary model is
suggestive but inadequate because, while evolutionary predecessors possess
causal efficacy, they exert no exemplary force. On an evolutionary model,
predecessors function as benchmarks which are exceeded rather than as
standards which are repeated. But it is as misleading to think that Cizanne
surpasses Giotto and Raphael as it is to think that he imitates them.
We now should see that competence in ordinary historical learning and
teaching will not suffice for either Johnny or his teacher in studying the
history of art. Art historians themselves have paid relatively little attention
to clarifying their methodology, even though they often appear to assume
an explanatory account characterized by unusual causal relations such as
the simultaneous influence of predecessors and successors on each other.
In addition, art-historical causation appears to be informed and enforced
by the power of example, in the sense that predecessor works serve as
exemplars for their successors, and successor works illuminate the exem-
plary aesthetic virtues of their important predecessors and enhance our
appreciation of them. What observations we've made in considering how to
answer Johnny's question suggest that the causal account appropriate to
the history of art may be unique, as are artworks themselves. Should this
be the case, teaching Johnny to understand the art world's history is as
demanding of specialized aesthetic knowledge and taste, and as unlike
teaching other history, as teaching Johnny to paint.

Feeling and Knowing, and Wisdom: Louis Arnaud Reid,

1895-1986

Alan Simpson

Our apprehensions of anything at all are only possible through the mea
made available to us by what we are as persons: those avenues of hum
sense, perception, feeling, thought, intuition, aided and abetted by exp
nations both analytic and synthetic and mediated through social more
values, and forms of inquiry. Those avenues or categories are epistemol
cal categories; they are fundamental to the possibility of experience,
things-"the world"-can only be as we perceive and know them as p
nomena: appearances, or our representations, our "pictures." The k
feature of our representations is not that they have meaning in relation
their logical correspondence with an independently existing, fixed, emp

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 1986

1986 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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