Art History In today’s Mixed Berry Shake tx…

(Art) History

In today’s Mixed Berry Shake (tx 4 great name Ciara! 🙂 Kate expressed the concern that students in this new media age are so focused on new tools / toys and how they can gain an audience with them that they don’t care to / have time to, appreciate the history of their own medium.

Some famous artists thru history have burned their heritage as a way of making space for their own practice. So perhaps this isn’t as new as we think.

We all seemed to agree that Context, and Contextualizing Relevance can go a long way to engaging students.

Lots of people were outraged when Ted Turner infamously colorized so many classic films. He didn’t actually colorize Citizen Kane, but he did colorize just about everything else. Over the years however I’ve heard some people express that in balance it was a good thing. That to a lot of young people, B&W = Irrelevant. And that by colorizing the films Turner not only made money, but he made them, or some part of them at least, accessible to a new generation that might not have otherwise seen them at all.

Every now and then somebody gets to be Robert Rauschenberg and have Art History PhD candidates (if, you know, the American president doesn’t persuade them to stop wasting their time) pour over every mark you ever made on a scrap of paper and contemplate the resonance of the multiple meanings of those marks. But for most of the rest of us, perhaps having our work “colorized” by future generations is better than being forgotten altogether.