Art Can Teach Critical Thinking

When I was a kid in art school I found it most difficult to talk about art or to talk about my own artwork. For me, it took years of going to museums with friends and discussing the art that we saw to be able to use the abundance of adjectives that exist to describe art. Now as an art educator I find one of my greatest challenges is to get my students to talk about the images and design projects they create. Many art students want to use non-judgemental words like Different or Interesting. As adjectives, Different and Interesting describe nothing and everything.

So here's what I do. I have created an adjective menu from which each student can peruse and choose the word that they feel best describes a piece of artwork. The adjectives students choose do not have to be judgemental. Words such as: symmetrical, asymmetrical, energetic, balanced, meticulous, imaginative, resourceful, seamless, flowing, frenetic, elegant, bold, humorous, challenging, ambitious, provocative, soothing, peaceful, fun, playful and on and on. None of these words inflate or diminish artwork. The words serve to describe the art.

If you look at a definition of critical thinking, it "consists of a mental process of analyzing or evaluating information, particularly statements or propositions that people have offered as true. It forms a process of reflecting upon the meaning of statements, examining the offered evidence and reasoning, and forming judgments about the facts."

One could say that even being able to attach appropriate adjectives to art is the beginning of judging or critiquing art. And since all art is not created equal it is important for art students to learn to discern qualitative differences in art. One of the ways I lead my students through the critique process is by repeating the rules of the assignment and asking of each artwork or homework as we look at it, "Does this answer satisfy the minimal rules of the assignment?" After we have looked at all of the art/homework I like to ask which ones were the best or the most striking. There are always one or two art homework assignments that stand out to everybody and we focus on the success of these works rather than lingering (too painfully) on the failures of other design assignments.

By asking students to establish a hierarchy in their aesthetic you semi-consciously get them to acknowledge that everything that is created is not necessarily artwork. Being able to discriminate between excellent, good, and poor works of art is essential to learning critical thinking.

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