Alluring, well-designed advertisements and the messages they conveyed to children were a debated issue as television and video usage increased in schools during the 20th Century.
Dr. Seuss for Holly Sugar, 1940
The Advertising Artwork of Dr. Seuss
www.libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dsads/#intro
This is a great image. I can't think of any other subject that can benefit from technology more than art. It's a device that you can find any major painting on so it's an endless source of inspiration. It's also a device you can share and get feedback on your own art, which for an artist is crucial for growth and success. Most importantly, it's a great tool to create art. I was really into graphic design in high school, because I was pretty artsy but had no drawing skills. In middle school and elementary school, we had no computers to do graphics on like this, so art classes were quite frustrating for me. Unless we were doing a craft, I would be bored or self-conscious. Then when I got to high school I took two levels of graphic design and it was great. Using photoshop you could do things you couldn't do on paper, layers, filters, and other exciting things. I created some really great things and used a tool that helps me connect to other bloggers and helps me be creative without much offline skill. Photoshop is great, because you can make art without much art skill, which is something I think a lot of people don't have. That's not to say though, everyone is an artist, much like how not everyone who writes poet is a great poet or everyone who takes pictures is a photographer. You still need an eye for design and the skill to edit, revise, and create in the first place. Anyone can gaussian blur something, but someone with a good eye will know how much, know when it's appropriate, and will know the steps to take after to make the blur stand out and be effective. Teaching future art students how to use technology for their benefit will create a future of people who are really excited about art, since kids like me will be able to connect to art in a way they just can't on paper.
ReplyDeleteHi Greg, your capacity to think beyond your own subject matter are an asset to you. Thanks for doing one thing I couldn't do with this assignment, which is expanding the uses of the computer for art education beyond 1990 and into the present. In the late 1980's through 1990, when I was in middle school, computer uses for art were pretty limited to a few emerging design softwares and making ascii pictures with 0's and 1's. You spoke about how we can now use the internet to access art; an example is that the permanent collections of major museums are now archived on the internet and is an incredibly useful learning tool. Modern artists have their own websites and blogs too, so the information is endless and requires thoughtful filtering. This concept of accessing world-wide information via internet stretches across all subject areas, and will be particularly useful to us future teachers for designing the all-important interdisciplinary lessons. However, we will probably struggle with access to computers for every student in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to expand off of your last sentence, Laura. Due to the budgets and struggle to simply get computers into a regular classroom, the art classroom will most likely be one of the last classes to have a room with multiple computers and internet access. But as you and Greg both agreed, it truly is an excellent source with tons of museum archives and collections posted online for us to use for FREE (which is why it should be in the classroom for students to use and access)! I like that your image shows the computer next to other art 'tools'. The computer is also an amazing place to share your art with other artists and get feed back from people around the world, through art blogs or deviantART- online art sharing site. Besides being a medium for creating art (like In Design, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc) the computer is a great tool for research and sharing, as I just mentioned. It's also a valuable tool for exposing yourself to new types of arts and such. I find myself constantly going into forums to find out the best way to make something or the best type of paint to use, or how to go about starting a 3D woodcarving. It's a great tool in many ways!
ReplyDeleteLaura, there is no other picture that would better exemplify the point you are trying to make. Advertising and "educational news programs" has indeed sparked major debate in schools. If we show advertisements to our students they would be told what to think not how to think. This is the goal of advertisements...isn't it? Don't get me wrong, showing advertisements to students is not necessarily negative, as long as they are being used appropriately. For example, we could show our students an advertisement for Coca-Cola and ask them to identify different ways the marketers are trying to convince us that their product is better than the rest. Or we could ask them to think of ways to improve on their structure, to make their ideas more convincing. There is always a teaching opportunity and perhaps the administrators who believed using television to teach students were not entirely wrong.
ReplyDeleteLaura, interesting photo. Can you help me understand what your choice of technology is and how it relates to schooling?
ReplyDeleteI chose this image because it is a perfect example of art doing it's job, that is, to deliver a message, and the technology of advertising doing it's job, which is to sell. Thanks to the war and the industrial revolution, the 1900's were a time of propaganda posters (which were racist and biased), print ads, and a new influx of television and video advertisements. Many parents and educators were not thrilled about having more advertising pushed on their children by distributors who placed their TVs and video equipment in schools for educational purposes. It was debated, and is still an issue today, because children are not fully equipped to make judgements on issues of consumerism. I found that all of this advertising was actually exposing students to a wide range of artists, artistic styles, concepts and art making techniques, although I could not find any research as to whether or not they were studied in school. The post-war propaganda posters pushed industrial training, exercise and foreign affairs, and they were extremely racist and gender-biased. I chose this 1940's Holly Sugar print ad because it was created by Dr. Seuss, who was an up-and-coming author and illustrator of children's books at the time. The artistic style, subject and colors of the ad and even it's creator clearly target children. The underlying message is "processed sugar is better than nutritious food." I cannot help but wonder if some of the current health issues and poor dietary habits have roots in these kinds of advertisements. Propaganda and advertising were used to "school" children and adults alike, because they conveyed one point of view en masse, without encouraging their viewers to question or contest the subject matter.
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