Browsing by Author "Goldswain, Warwick"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Elitism in contemporary art : investigating high school learners' responses to the Cape Town Art Fair
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Goldswain, Warwick; Costandius, E.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This research was initiated as a result of my experience as an art learner in a high school and at university, where notable disparities in the approach between the institutions became evident. Traditional schooling seemed out of touch with contemporary strategies, while contemporary art displayed elitist tendencies of its own. The purpose of this research was to investigate the various manifestations of elitism in contemporary art. Problems included historical elitism in art, as well as contemporary strategies that were difficult to link to movements of the past. In a South African context, issues of concern included the isolation of public and private art entities from the wider demographic, as well as outdated strategies of art education at school level. Secondary purposes of the research were to investigate the response of high school learners to the Cape Town Art Fair (CTAF) and to investigate how school is implicated in creating disparities between education and contemporary art. The research was conducted using empirical case studies of 24 high school art learners from Curro Durbanville. This adopted the form of a written questionnaire about learners’ experiences of the CTAF and focus group discussions about selected artwork from the CTAF. The paradigm for this approach was interpretive, since multiple measures of observation were used. An inductive content analysis method was used in evaluating the data. The findings of the research were that learners preferred naturalistic art over alternative aesthetic strategies. Learners struggled to comprehend the conceptual content of the work, while strategies of appropriation or irony were generally misinterpreted. The fact that most of the artworks engaged relevant issues made it “different from the art museums”, although many learners expressed a desire for more “positive art”. Learners noted the diversity of art shown at the CTAF, although it was felt to cater mainly for buyers and those with appreciation for art, and to lack public engagement and space for up-and-coming artists. The conclusions of the research were that buyer-and-seller models such as the CTAF were largely isolated from the wider demographic of South Africa, who were physically and economically marginalised. The lack of alternative spaces made these models the dominant means of public engagement with art. This was further problematised by the tendency of art to exist in an intellectual and wealthy preserve. School strategies of art production also seemed outdated, adding to the observed disparity. These strategies emphasised narrow ways of seeing perpetuated by an emphasis on “the conquest of visual appearance” and notions of the art object (Danto 1997:125). These strategies were disparate from contemporary trends since they exclude alternative, connective, intuitive, or spiritual ways of seeing, which might themselves offer possibilities for new ways of being.