Understanding Art Development: Parsons' Stages and Cultural Differences | Slides Cognitive Development

Essay Review

Mich ael Parsons

How We Understand Art: a Cognitive

Developmental Account of Aesthetic

Experience

Camb ridge Univer sity Press, London 1987

159 pp. £ 17.50

ISBN 0-5 21-3 2949 -3

Reviewed by Ellen Wi nner a nd Howard Gar dner

As we walked thro ugh an alleyway in N anjing, Chi

na, with laundry hanging out from the windows above

and rubble strewn across the gro und, one o f us re

marked to ou r Chinese host: ‘This is the k ind of scene

that a Western artist mig ht use as an im age for a paint 

ing.’ Our host, an ar t educato r, looked puzzled and

disapp roving. ‘Why would anyone wa nt to pa int som e

thing so messy a nd ugly? Where is the beauty here?’

Our deliberate ly p rovoc ative com ment was in

spire d by m any hour s of talk with Chin ese artis ts and

art edu cators abo ut Western v ersus Chine se beliefs

abou t what art sh ould be for. The discus sion often

focused on one disag reement. We argued th at a w ork

of art should open the viewers’ eyes and show them

somet hing in a new way. A c ommuna l stan dard of

beau ty pe r se was unimpo rtant. Wha t matte red was

that th e work be interesting, engaging, eye-opening,

even worl d-building. H ence, what m attere d in art

educ ation was that children learn to see an d t hat they

learn to take risks. In contrast , our Chinese colleag ues

argued that art should be beauti ful. Grea t art ists ar e

able to mas ter a tr adition to perfecti on a nd th en ulti

mately to p ut the ir own p ersonal s ignature on the tra

ditio nal form . Hence, wha t ma ttered in art educati on

was th at c hildren learn the skills to paint in a venera

ble an d value d trad ition . O ur Chin ese colleagues had

no use for - indeed, no u ndersta nding of - art tha t

shocks and s hakes us up.

Duc hamp s’ urinal would fin d no reception in Chi

na; no r would Iva n Alb right’s ‘Into th e World Came a

Soul Called Ida’, one o f the pa intings use d by Pars ons

in his c ognitive -developm ental study of ae sthetic ex

perience . Al bright’s pai nting depicts in v ivid realism

a woman whose body has d eteriora ted with age. We

assum e tha t Pa rsons cho se this work in pa rt bec ause

of its shock value. He wanted to see wh en and how

child ren become able to value a work of art whose

subject is sad, ugly, o r repellent.

On the basis o f over 300 inte rviews with children

and adults ab out a variety of styles o f paintings. Par

sons has di scerned five stages of under standing art.

His stage theory, detaile d in his book, is clea rly ev a

luative in flavor , as are most stage the ories. That is.

each stage is seen as an advanc e o ver the previou s

one. Later stages are more ad equate and allow the

viewer to make bette r sense o f works of art.

According to the argum ent pu t forth, preschool

childr en typic ally reaso n at st age 1. At this stage chil

dren respond with d elight to mos t p aintings and like

painti ngs b ecause of the subje ctive associatio ns they

stimulate . ‘I like it b ecause of th e dog. We’ve got a

dog...’, a child a t this level remark ed of a Re noir

pain ting of a w oman a nd h er dog.

Elementa ry sch oolchildren, who usually reason at

stage 2, talk differe ntly. T he idea o f the subject matter

has become do minan t, and paintin gs are valu ed if

they are rea listic a nd beautifu l. ‘It looks just like the

real thing ’, one chi ld said in p raise o f a work. Anot her

objecte d to the Albright pain ting because ‘No on e

wants to look at some fat, cellu lited lady... Y ou do n’t

like to think of things like t hat.’ This stage is said to be

an a dvance over stage 1 be cause it is obje ctive rathe r

than dom inated by idio syncratic associations. The

child has moved from liking a painti ng becaus e it has

his or her favori te color or object in it to liking it

because the c olor or rende ring is seen as objectively

good. It seems to us that thi s stage is exactly where our

Chinese aesthctic ian wou ld have to be placed.

After stage 2, experien ce with art plays a signifi

cant r ole in dete rmining how far in th e stage sequence

one progresses. Pars ons argues: ‘Where indiv idual

people wind up in th is sequence de pends on what

kinds of art th ey en coun ter an d how far they arc

encouraged to think about t hem .’ At stage 3, the do m

inan t idea is now expr essiveness . A work is good if it

is expressiv e, and the subject ma tter of a work now

becomes what is expre ssed. N eithe r realism n or

beauty m atter an y more. Paint ings arc jud ged in

terms of the in tensity and interes tingness of the expe

rience they produce in the respon dent. This k ind of

criter ion was precis ely the one we were trying to con

vey to our Chinese hosts when we suggested tha t a

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Download Understanding Art Development: Parsons' Stages and Cultural Differences and more Slides Cognitive Development in PDF only on Docsity!

Michael Parsons

How We Understand Art: a Cognitive

Developmental Account of Aesthetic

Experience

Cambridge University Press, London 1987 159 pp. £ 17. ISBN 0-521-32949- Reviewed by Ellen Winner and Howard Gardner

As we walked through an alleyway in Nanjing, Chi na, with laundry hanging out from the windows above and rubble strewn across the ground, one of us re marked to our Chinese host: ‘This is the kind of scene that a Western artist might use as an image for a paint ing.’ Our host, an art educator, looked puzzled and disapproving. ‘Why would anyone want to paint some thing so messy and ugly? Where is the beauty here?’ Our deliberately provocative comment was in spired by many hours of talk with Chinese artists and art educators about Western versus Chinese beliefs about what art should be for. The discussion often focused on one disagreement. We argued that a work of art should open the viewers’ eyes and show them something in a new way. A communal standard of beauty per se was unimportant. What mattered was that the work be interesting, engaging, eye-opening, even world-building. Hence, what mattered in art education was that children learn to see and that they learn to take risks. In contrast, our Chinese colleagues argued that art should be beautiful. Great artists are able to master a tradition to perfection and then ulti mately to put their own personal signature on the tra ditional form. Hence, what mattered in art education was that children learn the skills to paint in a venera ble and valued tradition. Our Chinese colleagues had no use for - indeed, no understanding of - art that shocks and shakes us up. Duchamps’ urinal would find no reception in Chi na; nor would Ivan Albright’s ‘Into the World Came a Soul Called Ida’, one of the paintings used by Parsons in his cognitive-developmental study of aesthetic ex perience. Albright’s painting depicts in vivid realism a woman whose body has deteriorated with age. We assume that Parsons chose this work in part because of its shock value. He wanted to see when and how

children become able to value a work of art whose subject is sad, ugly, or repellent. On the basis of over 300 interviews with children and adults about a variety of styles of paintings. Par sons has discerned five stages of understanding art. His stage theory, detailed in his book, is clearly eva luative in flavor, as are most stage theories. That is. each stage is seen as an advance over the previous one. Later stages are more adequate and allow the viewer to make better sense of works of art. According to the argument put forth, preschool children typically reason at stage 1. At this stage chil dren respond with delight to most paintings and like paintings because of the subjective associations they stimulate. ‘I like it because of the dog. We’ve got a dog...’, a child at this level remarked of a Renoir painting of a woman and her dog. Elementary schoolchildren, who usually reason at stage 2, talk differently. The idea of the subject matter has become dominant, and paintings are valued if they are realistic and beautiful. ‘It looks just like the real thing’, one child said in praise of a work. Another objected to the Albright painting because ‘No one wants to look at some fat, cellulited lady... You don’t like to think of things like that.’ This stage is said to be an advance over stage 1 because it is objective rather than dominated by idiosyncratic associations. The child has moved from liking a painting because it has his or her favorite color or object in it to liking it because the color or rendering is seen as objectively good. It seems to us that this stage is exactly where our Chinese aesthctician would have to be placed. After stage 2, experience with art plays a signifi cant role in determining how far in the stage sequence one progresses. Parsons argues: ‘Where individual people wind up in this sequence depends on what kinds of art they encounter and how far they arc encouraged to think about them.’ At stage 3, the dom inant idea is now expressiveness. A work is good if it is expressive, and the subject matter of a work now becomes what is expressed. Neither realism nor beauty matter any more. Paintings arc judged in terms of the intensity and interestingness of the expe rience they produce in the respondent. This kind of criterion was precisely the one we were trying to con vey to our Chinese hosts when we suggested that a

Western painter might choose to paint something objectively ugly that defies standard canons of beau ty. Stage 3 is seen by Parsons to represent an advance over stage 2 because the individual is now aware of the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. Individual viewers must respond to and interpret a work; only if it moves them should they value the work. At stage 4 the dominant focus is on formal prop erties of the work - the medium, style, color, form, and texture. At stage 2 people look through the me dium to the subject matter; at stage 3 people look at the medium, but see it only as a means of expression, and at stage 4 people look at the medium for its own sake. Stage 4 respondents also see the medium in an art-historical context and can talk about the artistic tradition of the work. This stage is seen as an advance because it moves away from a purely subjective expe rience of art to a more objective focus on the sensuous properties of a painting. Instead of saying, ‘That really grabs me’ (a stage 3 response), a stage 4 response might be; ‘Look at the way the light strikes the tablecloth.’ People now realize that their own interpretations may be inadequate and may be im proved by discussions with others. Interpretations are no longer validated solely, or even at all, by a person’s gut reactions. At stage 5, the highest level, viewers break away from the tradition and become autonomous. No lon ger content only to judge the work as part of a partic ular artistic tradition, viewers now judge the tradi tion. They raise questions about established views. And just as they themselves question, art is seen as a way of raising questions, rather than as transmitting truth. Although other researchers have explored chil dren’s and adults’ understanding of the arts [Ecker, 1973; Gardner et al.. 1975; Housen, 1983], Parsons’ study is. so far as we know, the first sustained effort to integrate a large body of material to construct a the ory of developmental stages in artistic understanding. He is working on difficult turf - the area is new, and there are many theoretical and methodological ques tions that must be addressed. Parsons’ goals are im portant and ambitious; his earlier articles on this topic were deservedly well received and widely quoted; and he has raised a timely issue and collected much valuable data. However, in our view, How We Understand Art is a disappointment: It does not offer adequate monographic treatment of the development of aesthetic experience.

Parsons explicitly and implicitly sets forth several strong claims. Let us examine each of these claims along with the support mustered for each. Is the Aesthetic Domain Shown to Be Different from Other Domains? Parsons argues that his ap proach differs from previous cognitive approaches to art because the latter treated works of art as just ordi nary objects, ‘like soapflakes and armchairs’. He claims to show that our understanding of art is differ ent from our understanding of other things. The prob lem is that it is never demonstrated, only asserted, that previous research treated art objects no differ ently from armchairs. We provide one counterexam ple from our own work on children’s aesthetic sensi tivity. Influenced by the philosopher Goodman [1976], wc have set forth criteria that distinguish art objects from nonaesthetic objects and that distinguish an aesthetic reading of an art object from a nonaes thetic reading [Carothers & Gardner, 1979; Winner et al., 1983, 1986]. More troubling, Parsons fails to show how the understandings of art that he uncovers are in fact different from understandings of other spheres. Unlike Kohlberg [1969] and Piaget [1970], who present extended philosophical discussions of the do mains of moral understanding and epistemology, re spectively, Parsons does not develop an argument regarding how the arts are special. Indeed, he eventu ally embraces the other extreme and claims parallels between his stages and Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. But if there are parallels (and again these are never explicitly laid out), then this weakens the claim that understanding art is fundamentally dif ferent from understanding other things. Has Parsons Shown that His Stages Are Really Stages? Parsons argues that his five stages are ordered in terms of adequacy. And he makes clear that stages 1 and 2 are correlated with age, with preschoolers giv ing stage 1 responses and elementary schoolchildren stage 2 responses. He states that development of the later stages is determined by one’s experience looking at and talking about art objects in a Western culture. Oddly, despite the vast amount of data collected, these claims are never substantiated. The reader will search in vain for the simplest numerical evidence. Nowhere is there even a percentage given. It would be nice to know that in fact the majority of stage 1 and 2 respondents were preschool and elementary school- age children, respectively, and that reasoners at stage 5 were more likely to be art experts than were those at stages 3 or 4. There is no attempt at experimental

reject the notion of verbalizing about a painting. When asked to explain her dance, Isadora Duncan gave the famous reply: ‘If I could tell you what it is, I would not have danced it.’ Poets, when asked to explain what one of their poems means, have simply read the poem aloud. In a recent issue of The Crim son, Harvard’s student newspaper, a drawing class is advertised as one in which ‘we want to avoid analysis and verbalization about the artwork, and deal only with hands-on training and imagery’. We are all familiar with the attitude that a work of art is irredu cible and cannot be explained or even talked about meaningfully. While this attitude may reflect a pose on the part of some artists, it is certainly possible that some artists simply cannot talk about their under standing of art. One would not necessarily want to relegate such individuals to a lower stage than an art critic well-versed in how to talk about art. Conversely, it seems likely that one could learn to talk about art in a stage 5 manner without true understanding. That is, stage 5 discourse could for some be simply a manner of speaking, learned from art history courses, rather than reflective of authentic or valid knowledge about the arts. Such issues ought to have been addressed by Parsons. In a collaborative effort of Harvard’s Project Zero, the Educational Testing Service, and public school arts teachers in Pittsburgh, we are trying to develop means of assessing artistic understanding that make use of verbal reflection but only in the con text of the individual’s own efforts at production [Wolf, 1987-1988, 1988]. Students are first chal lenged to solve some visual problem, such as how to achieve a surprising yet balanced composition. Only after struggling with the materials themselves are stu dents asked to talk about the compositions in their own works or in those of ‘artists’. Students also arc asked to keep all successive drafts of a work in pro gress. Later they reflect verbally on the learning that has taken place. While this verbal reflection may serve as a useful index of understanding, in some cases it proves inadequate. Some students clearly show evidence of visual thinking in their work yet cannot put this knowledge into words. In this case we can look at the revisions in a work made along the way to assess the student’s level of artistic under standing. Our point is simply that sometimes, and for some people, understanding of visual art is not fully verbalizable; hence, to assess such understanding one must look at evidence of visual rather than verbal

thinking. This, we argue, is best done in the context of a student's own efforts at making a work of art. More over, we believe that understanding shown in this way is more likely to be authentic than understanding assessed only through talk divorced from the context of working in an art form oneself. Methodological and Organizational Issues. For a serious book on a serious topic, the treatment of methodology in Parsons’ book is disarmingly relaxed. We already have mentioned the lack of numerical evi dence, even though there must have been plenty at hand. There are other problems as well. We are never told why the author chose the paintings that he chose. We are told only that he picked a ‘reasonably varied’ set. Whether the stages are specific to the particular works chosen is a problem that is never addressed. Similarly, we are not told why the particular ques tions used were chosen. Why these and not others? The questions were changed as the interviews pro gressed. Sometimes the interviewers were parents of the interviewees; other times they were Parsons and his colleagues. We are told nothing about the number of people interviewed at each age, nor about their level of experience with art. Preschoolers and profes sors and graduate students in the field of art were said to be in short supply, but surely an adequate number of such subjects could have been obtained with some effort. And nowhere are we told how the interviews were scored. For example, what happened when someone gave responses spanning several stages (which Parsons, in his discussion of stage, says often happened)? Were people assigned their highest score? Indeed, it is not clear whether people were catego rized into stages or whether each response to each question by an individual was categorized into a stage. Parsons might well accept some of these criticisms of his method, for he says: T have not argued for this account (a cognitive developmental account) so much as articulated and illustrated it.’ But why has he not argued for this account, when he has such an abun dance of data from which to argue? Most readers would like to be convinced, or even to feel that the author is trying to convince them, mustering all the evidence that he can. The reader of this book is left with the feeling that Parsons is not trying very hard to convince. On a more minor note, the book has a disturbing number of errors - references, dates, typographical errors, etc. It would have benefitted from a more

meticulous proofreading. With respect to organiza tion, a criticism can also be raised. Parsons states at the outset that the book is organized in terms of four major topics of discussion about art: subject matter; expression; medium, form, and style; and judgment. Each chapter treats one of these topics and lays out the stages of understanding this topic. Thus, the stages are not discussed as wholes, and it becomes difficult to see how these four topics are connected at each stage. As a result, the reader loses sight of how the stages hang together. That is, it is simply unclear how a stage 3 understanding of subject matter relates to a stage 3 understanding of medium, or judgment. Questions That Might Have Been Raised. Certain questions one might have hoped to see raised are not raised. For instance, does this account apply to all aesthetic objects, only to the visual arts, or only to paintings? While it is certainly not incumbent on the author to provide definitive answers to such ques tions, the book would be stronger had they at least been raised. Parsons is to be commended for his ambitious goals and for the important questions he asks devel- opmcntalists to consider. Aesthetic knowledge can no longer be ignored as a domain for cognitive develop mental study. But considerably more argument and evidence will be needed before we can conclude that aesthetic knowledge is qualitatively different from other forms of knowledge, that it is best assessed ver bally, and that it can be accounted for by the same kind of stage model advanced by Piaget and Kohl- berg. A revised edition that addresses these questions would be well worth reading.

References

Carothcrs, R.. & Gardner, H. (1979). When children’s drawings become art: The emergence of aesthetic production and perception. Developmental Psy chology, 15, 570-580. Ecker, D. (1973). Analyzing children’s talk about art. Journal o f Aesthetic Education, 7, 58-73.

Feldman. D. (1987). Developmental psychology and art education: Two fields at the crossroads. Jour nal o f Aesthetic Education, 21, 243-259. Gardner, H., Kircher, M., & Winner, E. (1975). Chil dren’s conceptions of the arts. Journal o f Aesthetic Education, 9, 60-77. Gclman, R., & Baillargeon, R. (1983). A review of some Piagctian concepts. In P. Müssen (Ed.), Handbook o f child psychology (4th ed., Vol. 3). New York: Wiley. Goodman, N. (1976). Languages o f art. Indianapolis: Hacket t. Housen, A. (1983). The eye o f the beholder: Measuring aesthetic development. Unpublished doctoral dis sertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cogni tive-developmental approach to socialization. In D. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook o f socialization. New York: Rand McNally. Piaget, J. (1970). Piaget’s theory. In P. Müssen (Ed.), Carmichael’s manual o f child psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Wiley. Winner, E., Blank, P., & Gardner, H. (1983). Chil dren’s sensitivity to aesthetic properties of line drawings. In J. Sloboda & D. Rogers (Eds.), The acquisition o f symbolic skills. London: Plenum Press. Winner, E., Rosenblatt, E., Windmucllcr, G., David son, L., & Gardner, H. (1986). Children’s percep tions of ‘aesthetic’ properties of the arts: Domain- specific or pan-artistic? British Journal o f Develop mental Psychology, 4, 149-160. Wolf. D. (1987-1988). Opening up assessment. Edu cational Leadership, 45, 24-29. Wolf. D. (1988). Artistic learning: What and where is it? Journal o f Aesthetic Education, in press.

Ellen Winner and Howard Gardner Project Zero Graduate School of Education Harvard University Cambridge MA 02138 (USA)

Understanding Art Development: Parsons' Stages and Cultural Differences, Slides of Cognitive Development

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Download Understanding Art Development: Parsons' Stages and Cultural Differences and more Slides Cognitive Development in PDF only on Docsity!

How We Understand Art: a Cognitive

Developmental Account of Aesthetic

Experience