Wednesday, May 27, 2015

What I Didn't Learn in School: Diane Ragsdale's Crash Course on Beauty and Aesthetic Values

I have an unusual education for the director of an art & history museum: a degree in electrical engineering. Engineering taught me to be a tinkerer, a builder, and a problem solver. It taught me that you can design a different future. That experiments are crucial. That you can make things instead of just talking about them.

I value my engineering education. But every once in a while, I look at my brilliant colleagues with liberal arts backgrounds and wonder what they know that I don't. A lot, I suspect.

I've been getting a taste of what I'm missing by devouring Diane Ragsdale's terrific series of blog posts about the course she is teaching on Approaching Beauty for business students at UW-Madison. Diane calls it "Beauty Class," but it really seems to be about aesthetic valuing: identifying beauty in its many forms, and developing a personal aesthetic sensibility.

The course is roughly split into two parts: defining beauty (both universally and relationally, through "big idea" texts, videos, museum visits, and artist lectures), and exploring beauty (through encounters in formal art contexts and the wider world). Start here, and get ready to spend a lot of time with each post. You'll burrow down rabbit holes of gorgeous videos, cerebral reading lists, and provocative artist talks.

I didn't know I was hungry for this until Diane shared it. I've filled some gaps in my cultural education through a career in museums: reading, looking, exploring, listening. But it's mostly just content. I can identify artworks by famous artists. I can tell a local story from 1849. I'm stacking up bricks of content knowledge. But that doesn't mean I know how to build a wall.

Diane's course is teaching me how to build a wall. How to identify beauty, how to disagree about it, how to be generous with it. 

It reminds me of higher-level math classes in college. The best courses were about manipulating numbers to generate meaning, not computation. We used the word "beautiful" to describe the best mathematical proofs. Diane is teaching me how, when, and why artists use the word.

While I'm grateful to Diane, I'm also surprised. Isn't it strange that I have spent years working with curators and artists, and I'm just encountering this now? Why don't we blog about it and talk about it and present conferences about it? I've experienced a smidge of it in dialogues about curatorial authority, cultural differences, and race. But there are less political conversations to have about it, too.

In week one, Diane shares a powerful video of choreographer Bill T. Jones "translating" a dance phrase to unlock its technical, narrative, and emotive power. Diane's course is for business majors. Perhaps we're most explicit about our values when forced to translate them for foreign ears. 

I fear we in museums are not translating and making our aesthetic values explicit enough, often enough. I know my education is sorely lacking, so maybe I'm just missing a body of shared knowledge that everyone else has. But I'm surprised how I'm amazed how often I've had conversations like this with museum colleagues:
Them: I love this piece.
Me: What do you love about it?
Them: [long pause followed by mumbling]
The same professionals who shy away from talking about aesthetic values are completely comfortable talking about aesthetics. We are constantly talking about aesthetics--commission this artist, change the lighting, move that painting, change this phrase--but rarely about the values that underlie them. 

Is it impolite or impolitic to share our aesthetic values? Too personal? Too subjective? Too elitist? Too hard?

What do you think?

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