Question #2

2. Are they more or less resistant to new art than a similar sample would have been 10 years ago? 5? 50?

Hmm. Neither. Nuh.

I'd argue that high school students are neither more nor less resistant to cultural/aesthetic innovation now than in the 1990s or 1940s (or the 1600s when I grew up). Why? Then and now, they have no exposure/undertanding/interest in cultural innovation. Institutionally, we fail to provide the context, the histories of art, of artists nudging their medium forward, to do more, to ask more, to know more. In fact, in these days of hyper-testing, we have fewer and fewer art and music classes period.

As a culture, it takes at least a generation for new art to take hold, then only after mainstream media co-opts it (e.g. the field of advertizing using concrete poetry techniques in their ads). I still have students who haven't caught up with Picasso's Blue Period. Dada? Surrealism? Stravinsky? Abstract-Expressionism, Fluxus, John Cage, Concrete/visual poetry, mailart, Language poetry? Those movements are so far off their map, it's easier to not go anywhere at all.

Resistance resides in ignorance, willful or as the product of culture. That ignorance has not diminshed in my lifetime.

Comments

[Chris]

Hmmm. This tempts me into writing another batch of questions, but many of them are related to things I asked in later questions, so I'll refrain for now. (But I wonder: Have I caught up with Picasso's blue period? I mean I don't reject it as "not painting", but I also don't find it terribly interesting or beautiful -- it's fine, but not my thing.)