Why Art Matters: A College Course and its Consequences
Up until a few weeks ago, I had never staged an on-ground version of my recently published role-playing game, Monumental Consequence (2022).
While I did deploy the first iterations of the game at some game development conferences and workshops for educators and students years ago, I had had progressively fewer chances to do this as the game underwent its minor refinements and final play tests during the last months of 2021. Most recently, I was teaching college level art history courses online as well as on the ground in Rome, Italy, and the scheduling for the Roman art and architecture course was so constrained by location demands that a play test was simply impossible. Fortunately, however, a great number of play testers - mostly in the form of higher education professionals - stepped up to the plate. Even with pandemic constraints in place, play testing occurred on the ground and online.
Even since its first incarnation, select feedback about the game - which is historically oriented and issue-based, dedicated to the question of whether art is ever worth dying for - included requests for prior readings to inform players and their game strategies. A cold (i.e., uninformed and unprepared play) session could be quite lackluster, some reviewers stated, with players that had not intellectually grappled with such a question and its implications. But in order for the game to continue to be a playable experience in just 45 minutes, readings simply could not be incorporated. There was enough time to read and digest role descriptions, and not much else.
But a semester length college course - informed by numerous readings, site visits, in-class exercises and discussions which could beef up the depth of game play - was an appealing polar opposite. A dream, even. The opportunity for this came at a perfectly rotten time: I was invited to write a ‘values seminar’ for the small Catholic university that employed me to teach that Roman art and architecture course, just as my father (who never saw my dedication to him in the game’s liner notes) died. In the midst of the first weeks of grappling with this loss and matters of the estate as an only surviving child, I took 15 minutes to write up a proposal.
Because I can be stupidly ambitious. Or perhaps I just wanted something hopeful to DO.
Academic ambition is at once heady and problematic, particularly if you have been programmed by over 25 years of service in small, private, liberal arts institutions that depend greatly upon people who will thoughtlessly put their aims to craft extraordinary education experiences well above their own needs to, say, sleep or enjoy downtime.
Hello. Have you met me?
My faculty supervisor for the Roman art and architecture course spearheaded the mission of having the values seminar course proposal officially accepted, and within weeks, I began collecting far too many potential readings while scouting out any and all sites in Rome for site visit consideration. I amassed an almost unwieldy bulk of possible evidence for - and this is also the course title - Why Art Matters. I then tried to sort and select. Tried. This was a daunting challenge, particularly while relocating my residence from Rome to Atlanta, flying two Roman cats to that new home, managing my father’s estate (including selling a house and three cars) in Virginia, and plans to teach in Rome while living out of a suitcase for a whole semester.
Surmounting the challenge entailed some givens, or so I thought:
If any institution serves as proof that art matters, isn’t the museum a #1 candidate? Devoted to housing, preserving, showcasing and researching art objects, museums - both of the too-large-gilded-frame-hushed-hallways and eccentric-crowded-tiny-house varieties - serve as sites of recreation, intellectual inquiry and plain old art appreciation. Rome’s museums are vast in number and wide in variety. The oldest public museum in the world is there. But you can also visit a small museum dedicated to the history of police cars, too. And for only five euros, the city’s museum pass enables a visitor to take a whole year to delve into a broad swath of civic collections and archaeological sites. Empowering students with these cards meant that I could not only conduct a few site visits during class, I could (and did) assign independent site visits. It seemed important to also acknowledge that while museums offer demonstrable proof of art’s importance, they have widely varied levels of success in this endeavor through exhibition design, programming and facility accessibility measures. Students were given a worksheet to take along on their independent visit, guiding their assessments of these factors, and in class, they informally presented their findings to their peers.
Visitors to the Eternal City seek out art in churches as well as museums. Guide books assert that if you include chapels and other more unique worship spaces, there are over 900 ‘churches’ in Rome. Given that most of these spaces enlist sculpture, paintings, mosaics, and architectural design in their decorative and spiritual programming, they are an unparalleled treasure trove, and admission is free. For this course, I wanted students from a Catholic university (nonetheless a diverse body in both race and faith, while all American) to wrestle with issues involving the intentions of spiritual art, its integral role in Catholicism, and how the faithful literally interact with art on display in a church. An assigned site visit to a church of students’ choosing, in which they were instructed to quietly observe how visitors engaged with the art inside - by looking, praying in front of, touching, etc. - was intended to foster attention to art’s role as a communicative tool within an ideological framework.
And the readings?…I felt strongly that in order to excavate why art matters, we needed to become familiar with some of the first entities of the ancient world who had ideas about what art does and does not do for us as an audience. Plato and Aristotle differed greatly in their views; art could be illusory and deceptive or it could be richly tragic and cathartic. To many people, historically and presently, art has mattered enough to warrant its intentional destruction, so a little reading about iconoclasm was clearly appropriate. An article questioning the validity of seeing religious art as the ‘literature’ of the medieval masses also seemed germane. Later philosophers such as Leo Tolstoy would drive the art-as-emotive content train; John Dewey offered opinions regarding art’s value as experiential. 19th century writers on museum design, collections and programming helped shape the look and feel of the turn-of-the-century (and beyond) museums of America. To help these non-art majors better understand the art world’s odd and fickle culture, populated by collectors, appraisers, accountants and critics, a rollicking read of a portion of James Conklin’s Art Crime was on deck, as well.
Speaking of museums of America, I wanted to plumb the depths of an American’s experiences with them: what did these college age students recall about their earlier visits for school and family outings? Did they leave with any kind of impressions about art’s importance? Did they instead think that (and oh, some DID) museums are…’boring’? These questions came alongside other prompts for in-class discussion, such as ‘how and where do you find art in your everyday world?’ and ‘what kind of art do you have in your home?’ and ‘what does the art you live with say about you and your housemates or family?’ and 'do you know any conspicuous collectors of art (of any kind), and what are they like?’ and ‘do we, as Americans, have a unique relationship with art, compared to our European neighbors?’
Are you breathless yet?
There was a lot I wanted to do! And like any creative person will admit, it was painful to streamline while the ideas were coming in piping hot…especially while I was living in an American extended stay hotel room with my spouse and our two bewildered Roman cats, waiting for a renter to vacate the home we’d been leasing for our six years abroad, and then flying to another state to sell my father’s vehicles in order to buy one for myself, so I could drive back to that hotel…and did I mention? - also teaching two online courses on separate subjects.
Nothing this past summer went the way I needed it to. Worldwide shipping traffic jams resulted in all of our belongings from a seven room Roman apartment finally arriving at our four room American loft a mere two weeks before I flew back to Rome to start this gig. Our living room was a forest of boxes. We were inundated with stuff and no place in which to put it. I was scanning those readings on the unearthed home printer while it precariously rested on a giant stack of cardboard boxes. Endless messages between me and the lead professor for this upcoming study abroad group scrolled through my phone, about the feasibility of those museum cards, would they in fact be worth the trouble, could we do an extra group visit to Ostia Antica on a hot weekend in September, and would my midterm travel time help me conform to the Schengen zone visa rules of no more than 180 days’ stay in Italy? My publisher hustled to get a copy of the game to me. I packed it without really examining it. No time!
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| Daunting situation: where on earth are my books? |
With all loose ends trailing behind me, I arrived at a tiny rented Roman apartment in a building that had an elevator I was not allowed to use, and after huffing bags up four flights of stairs, sat sweating directly under the weakly blowing AC unit and finalized the syllabus for Why Art Matters.
We began class meetings. The students were up and ready for table talk about their lives, experiences and memories related to the course topic. I learned a lot about their diverse backgrounds and preconceived notions of art. There was rarely a moment when someone wasn’t interested in talking. I was relieved.
But I quickly realized that vibing, as they would probably term it, was easy. The actual material was…less easy.
As I should have more keenly recalled from 25 years’ experience in the classroom, their capacity for completing outside reading assignments was quite limited. This was understandably enhanced by their own displacement to student apartments in a more youthful area of Rome, without their customary American resources, language skills and so on. After one class day of gazing about at silently bowed heads hoping to avoid being called on for responding to my questions about the assigned reading, I knew I had to regroup and craft guided reading queries. Regardless of the difficulty level of the content, I had to author guided questions for EVERY READING. I had had no time to generate them in advance, so there were many more hours of sitting underneath that AC unit, reading and re-reading and typing questions as far ahead of their assigned due date as I could manage.
Our group visits to different museums and churches felt, to me, to have been hit or miss scenarios.
We first went to Centrale Montemartini, an old power plant that had been converted into an exhibition space - but left intact, so far as the major equipment of the 1920s and 30s was concerned - in order to see extraordinary works of ancient Rome that had been, until the idea to exhibit them in this unusual space had spawned in the 1990s, in storage. A reading about Rome’s museum history informed this visit with the city’s unique and very challenging circumstances regarding museological, civic and national goals combined with the great burden of being a continuously occupied urban space for over 2500 years. To keep students’ interest fresh (and to thwart what would have otherwise been a scene of them trudging through two giant exhibition spaces in 20 minutes, noticing only a fraction of the antiquities…ask any teacher who has not carefully structured a museum visit with students, and their faces will betray memories of this exact, disappointing experience), individuals were assigned the task of engaging in an aesthetic exercise. After a timer was set for 5 minutes, they were instructed to put away their phones. And all they had to do for those subsequent 5 minutes was LOOK at one work of art that they thought was interesting. They later completed a blog entry that described the experience. I tried to keep their status as non-art majors in the forefront of my mind, and so I actually modeled that blog entry for them later in class, after having performed the aesthetic exercise myself on that same day in the power plant museum.
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| If there is any Roman museum that people overlook but should not, it is Centrale Montemartini. |
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| It really functions as a dual museum experience. |
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| ...and students have a lot of space in which to wander around and even get up to a few shenanigans. |
Our visit to the Richard Meier-designed museum that houses Augustus Caesar’s Ara Pacis - an altar erected to celebrate his imperial achievements and peaceful reign - left me as an instructor feeling deflated.
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| When Mussolini relocated this monument to its current location, he hired an architect to design a pavilion for it. Criticism of the structure - designed and constructed within one short year, alongside other major buildings flanking the same piazza centered by the Mausoleum of Augustus - has been historically linked to growing anti-Semitism in Fascist-era Italy (the architect's father was Jewish) as well as dimming opinions of Brutalist architectural style in later phases of the 20th century. Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo's (1890-1966) pavilion (1938) inadequately protected this important altar (13-9 BCE) from the elements, and yet, still stood until the very early 21st century, when a new structure was commissioned. |
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| When this building complex was first unveiled in 2006, a highly incensed, conservative expert on Roman art and architecture protested it by setting a model of the construction on fire on the staircase pictured here. |
Short, assigned readings addressed the controversial history of the contemporary museum with its spare, white, stone and glass aesthetic, Benito Mussolini’s relocation of the monument itself as well as his unearthing of the adjacent Mausoleum of Augustus, and the Fascist architecture surrounding the piazza in which this whole complex resides. There is a lot to unpack there, and perhaps students’ hesitancy to engage much with me only proved the assertion that some maintain about sparsely furnished museum spaces like Meier’s: they effect a kind of cold distance between the viewer and the art. They make art seem less personable, perhaps?
But as we exited and walked the periphery of the Mausoleum, I pointed out the Fascist inscriptions on Brutalist buildings directly across three streets, and I asked: how do you feel about the continued presence of art or architecture celebrating a terrible past, and what does it mean to edit that past by removing it? I got blank stares. I wondered aloud why no one seemed concerned about this. The response I got from one student was that events like the removals of Confederate statuary happened in the American South, and not in their states of residence (which actually included Texas, but mostly meant Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland).
The Fascist buildings surrounding the mausoleum of Augustus, which is plainly viewed from the broadly expansive windows of the Meier-design museum for the Ara Pacis, are Brutalist in style. Heavy, blocky and solid forms decorated with mosaics and reliefs that celebrate the reign of Mussolini and his ambitions for a new Roman empire not only remain on this piazza today, they are preserved. Luxury fashion house Bulgari is turning this building into a five-star hotel as I write this.
I later busied myself with inserting article links about controversial public art in New England and mid-Atlantic states in our class group chat. I had forgotten about the experiential college bubble that many students (and I was one of them, I frankly admit) live in. Such things happen to other people, elsewhere, but not really so much to me.
Our later visit to the Museo di Roma in Trastevere to view photography (as well as a side collection of hilariously bizarre, life-size tableaux intended to illustrate unique qualities of Roman urban folk history) exhibitions yielded puzzling results. A reading declaring photography a non-art form was meant to challenge pervasive ideas - or perhaps my preconceptions about students' ideas - that since we all now carry fancy photographic devices, we could all make art photography. After wandering the exhibitions and finding contemporary images they either did or did not enjoy, and taking notes on why, I met them in one gallery space to conduct a basic aesthetic analysis of a randomly selected photograph. They were assigned the task of doing the same thing with some of their previous selections and to submit these analyses in a blog entry.
I had hoped that they would formulate some contradictory conclusions about photography as art, and the challenges of creating good photography.
Many of the submissions for this visit blew me away: these non-art majors managed passable aesthetic analyses of contemporary photographs (and that was great!) that they then derided as…not art.
I had swung widely and….missed?
As for the spiritual side of art, we visited the church of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura (Saint Lorenzo Outside the Wall)- the only Roman church to have sustained any bombing damage during World War II. Initially, I drew students into the visit by asking them to recall what they were learning in the adjacent art history course, about architectural terms and medieval church design, about the use of spoils (recycled ancient architectural fragments) and the purpose of a cloister. I then asked them to sit in pews and listen to the story of how the church in which they were sitting was only half original, as the front half had to be rebuilt in the 1950s, because Allied (specifically, American) bombing intended for the nearby rail station wasn’t exactly precise. Fragments of a bomb are on display in the church’s cloister, which is foregrounded by a small, dark hallway plastered with photographs of the smoking ruins of the church in 1942. Interspersed among these photographs are images of the Pope’s visit to see the damage, surrounded by the people of the neighborhood.
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| This church is a bit outside of the city center, but the trip is worth it (and doable by bus in about 20-25 minutes). |
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| Its ancient qualities are in part evident from the numerous lapidaries affixed to its cloister walls. |
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| And of course, among those lapidaries is the bomb fragment. |
The students listened, but seemed to be generally fatigued. They said very little.
Conversely, our visit to St. Paul’s Inside the Walls - the ‘American’ Episcopal church of Rome - was a huge hit.
The rector is a relatively young, warm and enthusiastic guide of the space and the art, and the mostly English mosaics and stained glass of the late 19th century feature the faces of historical figures, including that of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Students seemed energized in response to the rector’s energy. My request for students to see some liturgical objects was met with total openness, and a couple class members were commandeered to help dress the altar in historic textiles in preparation for the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend services. I very nearly wept when the rector held out a communion wafer and spoke about how the ordinary is holy. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. The class ended its scheduled site visits on a high note.
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| This is also a worthwhile visit. |
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| Dating at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Saint Paul's was founded when the Pope declared Rome's acceptance of non-Catholic churches and worship. While the architect was American, the primary artists in charge of decoration were British. Edmund Burne Jones directed the mosaic designs. |
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| Look carefully at the profile of the last figure in this mosaic segment. Recognize him? |
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| Students were more than willing to assist in the altar preparation for the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend services. |
I decreed that the final exam would be an epic finale. We would play my game, Monumental Consequence, and players would be evaluated on how well they incorporated class material into their roles. They did not know what to think, and worried a lot about this new twist. But we prepared: we briefly reviewed the concepts we had covered through the term, and everyone shared a bit about their individual research projects relating to such topics as the the Italian Carabinieri ‘Art Squad,’ the black market for antiquities, museum collections controversies, forgeries, and the emergence of NFTs in the current art world.
On the day of the epic finale, members of the fictional town known as La Ville gathered to discuss whether to send in the civic militia to roust out an invading army that occupied their prized, historic cathedral.
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| M. Fromage the cheesemaker, articulating a proposal to the rest of the citizens of La Ville. "This is what bad ideas look like," said an onlooker. |
Arguments centered around whether risking the lives of neighbors, spouses and friends or just destroying the church (and its dangerous occupants) was more beneficial. The priest withheld his vote, and then changed how he voted. The socialite reminded everyone that her party was being delayed by this event. The player with an important secret never divulged it, and while it was also never divulged for him, he still lost the game.
And the church? It was spared.
I did not take this as a sign that I had convinced anyone of anything. I don’t think that I ever should. The point was never to indoctrinate.
(OK, maybe I’m kidding myself. I *did* want to ‘school’ people a little bit on the value of visiting museums in new places. We read a lot about museums and museum philosophies. We visited them. They analyzed museums as sites of unique experiences and study. And so this comment was a reward:
“I never thought of myself as someone who enjoyed museums until this class and then I realized I found myself actively going out of my way to look for new museums I could see. For example, when I have gone to other countries, I find myself actively looking for churches and museums I can visit. This is something I have never done before, and I am glad I had this experience and am able to now speak on this topic and have more education in art. I believe that when I now go to museums, I will be able to look at art and appreciate it in a way I never did before. I have a deeper understanding and love for art after this course.”
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| While this course was underway, news reports of a climate activist group in Europe staging protests by throwing mostly harmless substances onto famous works of art peppered the media. I will take a 'win' anywhere I can get one, so when I would receive texted images of the already cleaned up works in museums that students were visiting on their weekend sojourns to other European countries, I felt good about my efforts. |
Students’ last blog entries responded to my entreaties for objective feedback. I received a LOT of it.
“A memorable part of this course was having to visit a museum of choice and presented on our experience there. I chose Museo Napoleonico and really enjoyed spending time there. This assignment forced us to get out in the city and explore a new museum on our own. I liked how we had to focus on two aspects to view the museum, as it opened my eyes to a deeper understanding of museum spaces. Additionally, I from that point on was quicker to judge more aspects of our further visits in the course and on my own. Not only did I learn a lot from this experience, but I ended up discovering a museum that I really enjoyed.”
Some predictable stuff: They’d much rather vibe (meaning, discuss what they think or know or experience, rather than access what others have written) than read. But if they had to read, guided reading questions helped. But could the readings be less than 20 pages in length? Or could they be summaries? Because really, in the end, the majority would rather not read. All the site visits (a total of five group, and three individual, on their own time) on top of the (far more) site visits for the adjacent art history class wore them out. The photography museum visit was…the worst. There was nothing impressive about it, they mostly reported, and they found that they liked photography even less than they thought. The Ara Pacis museum visit received almost no airtime.
Surprisingly, the church that had been bombed was, for some, a moving visit. Centrale Montemartini and St. Paul’s Inside the Walls visits were THE BEST. The game as a ‘final’ was stressful, but still a fun way to end the course. One student suggested that the game be played once at the beginning of the course and again at the end. I don’t think that this is possible if we accept the given conceits of the game as it is written, but if they were tinkered with, if possible outcomes were altered…then perhaps.
Why does art matter? I asked them. They provided a lot of answers about cultural meaning and enrichment, about expressivity and individuality.
“Without the arts, our powerful emotions, important voices, move-to-the-groove vitality, vital empathy, life-affirming connectivity, and propensity toward complexity may all wither from neglect, and may even be misused to our detriment. The arts are important because they make us important.”
“Art is what makes the world worth it to live in.”
“Although art may not be as important to me personally, I can see how it can be the center of many people's lives.”
“To me, art matters because it yields communication. I think art is the primal source for communication because it is not just the way for the artist to communicate with the viewer, but it gives the viewers a way to communicate with each other. I spent the last 90 days doing just that with my peers, communicating. Art incites this passion in us that I do not think anything else is able to. It crosses boundaries in a way that no other medium can, and it is its own universal language. Through learning art and viewing art and understanding it, I not only was provided insight into the mind of the artist but into the mind of people that were once strangers, and are now friends. With everything that is happening in the world today, it is just so important that we never stop talking with one another and learn to understand one another. When we lack the words for the conversation, art does it for us. When we need a place to start the conversation, art does it for us. Art is communication.”
“Through this course, I didn’t change my opinion on any primary conversations regarding art, but I did experience a change in my appreciation and valuation of art on a personal level. I’ve realized it’s more than just pretty landscapes and realistic portraitures. It’s a driving force behind culture, and in turn, humanity.”
“I learned not to take art for granted. At this moment of my life, I always just hear music, observe art or create my own art but never really take the time to see it for what it is besides on a surface level. I got to hear the experiences of my fellow classmates and how they perceive art. (Film and theater majors) have really shown me what art can mean for different people who want to turn art into a career and not only a hobby. Hearing how they would be nothing without it really puts things into perspective. Coming to Rome, a hub for art, really made me appreciate it all over again.”
“Art matters because without it, we could not exist.”
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I’m sad to report that I will not have a chance like this one again. The university cannot fly and house me for three months on top of its other expenses for this important program. I thoroughly enjoyed 5 years (subtract one for the pandemic) of teaching the history of Roman art and architecture, and one twelve week term of trying to probe why art matters in a truly exotic site.
Perhaps what makes me the saddest about this outcome is that best iteration of a new course is rarely its original. The sweet spot is usually in the second or third version, in which the variables have been refined and potential problems have been foreseen and assigned back-up plans. Never more needed than in Rome, I will always maintain, as the Eternal City’s post-pandemic tourism has ratcheted up to a boisterous 11 on a 1-10 scale that was already unpredictable. Museums and archaeological sites have rewritten their ticketing policies and completely revised their hours since the height of the pandemic. For a city that has a legendary issue with change, the museums have done nothing but impose - and revise again! - change.
What variables would I refine? The readings, most definitely, but not because they were derided as too long or too dense. I would simply be more selective about which ones I employed. And I would introduce more contemporary readings about more current events. In fact, forcing the search for current news about art, museums, archaeology and the art world seems important for both the presence AND the periodic absence of reporting about such subjects in major news outlets. I’ve also recently acquired a book entitled Why Art Matters, which is a compendium of art-forward essays written during pandemic lockdowns. Surely there is at least one standout entry that would serve the course content.
What variables would I not refine - or refine far less - because I was most impressed by their outcomes? The in-person visits, either as a group or independently assigned. I would need to carve out more time for adequate preparation for another go at the Ara Pacis museum and its environs. The lingering questions about the layers of that place cannot be easily dismissed by another Italian-American student claiming that his fellow people are simply - and sure, quixotically - comfortable with the hundred or so monuments and inscriptions dedicated to Mussolini that still dot the Italian map. It’s far more complex than that, I am certain, and the student who uttered that declaration this past Fall should not have so effectively shut down further dialogue about it. But they did, and that’s on me.
The student reviews of their independent museum visits were pure gold, in part because I asked them to present these reviews to their peers as informally as possible. There was something about stripping away the rigidity of the typical Student Presentation that helped foster greater candor and ease.
And sure, there could be more vibing, but not at the expense of what others before us have written about art and its value. The trick to proper balance most likely involves more artful steering of the conversation about the material. This takes practice. Great questions (and counter-arguments) rarely emerge on the fly.
Do I think that this kind of course can be replicated elsewhere? I sure hope so. I’m tackling the creation of an online version right now. Am I stumbling over the problem of how to achieve that in-person museum visit assignment for a person who could be taking a course on an aircraft carrier or five hours’ drive from any kind of museum? Am I hyper-scrutinizing readings and other content for a jam-packed 6 or 7 week course? Am I concerned that this will ultimately be less riveting a course in an online format? Yes, yes, and oh gosh, yes.
Will I press forward anyway? I will, because Monumental Consequence asks a question that I continue to want to hear answered. Because I have been asking students to more or less blindly accept why art matters every time I lecture about it, or ask them to research it, or invite them to make it (or make it again after judging it). Because I want to pause and establish the reasons for asking and answering the question on the way to loving it enough to keep looking at it, researching it and making it.
“Art is what makes the world worth it to live in.”
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Interested in seeing the course bibliography or other materials I mention in this blog post? Contact me at mblooney001@gmail.com.
