This paper presents a methodology for exploring the potential of artificial intelligence in supporting divergent thinking within academic arts education. Thirteen students from Rome Fine Arts Academy engaged with excerpts from Shakespeare's "Hamlet," using artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Kobi, Chat GPT, and Midjourney to…

Using exercises based on the stacked mattresses image from the tale of "The Princess and the Pea," combined with Ecker and Kaelin's Aesthetic Inquiry ladder schematic, will help art educators schematize their thinking and talking about art in the classroom. Whether by selecting phenomenology or another philosophical method for navigating…

For centuries societies have understood the importance of art in relationship to other disciplines. Many great artists were also writers and poets. Many artists were well educated in classical literature from which they drew inspiration for paintings and sculptures. The document argues that the obvious meeting place for the two disciplines of art…

In order to understand the place of Herbert Read both in 20th century aesthetics and art education, one needs to carefully consider the entire field of English art and aesthetics from 1900 to the beginning of the Second World War. This time frame was dominated by the thoughts of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, and works both literary and visual, of the…

"The Ring Toss," a gum-print six-by-eight-inch photograph produced in 1899 and first published in 1903, has become one of photographer Clarence White's most noted images. It is an example of soft focus, or fuzzy pictorialism, a type of American art photography most practiced around the turn of the century. This analysis of the photograph…

This paper discusses the ideas of Conrad Fiedler, a 19th century German philosopher of art, concerning art criticism, or the judging of works of visual art. In addition to a brief biography of Conrad Fiedler, the paper's main subject is Fiedler's ideas on art criticism as expressed in his book "On Judging Works of Visual Art" (1876,…

This study (N=103) sought to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the art criticism abilities of an experimental group of preservice elementary teachers who had received supplemental instruction in visually analyzing works of art and the art criticism abilities of a control group who had not received the…

This paper describes postmodern theory as a paradigm composed of concepts and ideas. It does not describe postmodern theory as if it were developed logically from a simple premise, because it was not, nor can the postmodern paradigm be described in neat, concise terms. The paper presents a review and explication of postmodernism's theoretical…

In general, children between the ages of four and eight criticize works of art based on their subject matter, color, pattern, or related combinations of these criteria. Between the ages of 8 and 11 children begin to notice their feelings, the artist's ability, and the expressive qualities of a picture. After the age of 11 children become…

A method of pedagogical art criticism can be used to examine meaning in one of today's most pervasive forms of visual imagery: the advertising image. It was necessary for the art critical method to accommodate the following components of advertising imagery: (1) history; (2) purpose in a capitalist society; (3) function in society; (4) effects on…

This paper reviews some of the recent research relative to the thoughts and writings of the English art critic, Clive Bell, one of the leaders in British art criticism for the first part of the 20th century. Bell's conception of "art as significant form" is considered with specific reference to the following educators: (1) Roger Fry and…

The four content areas of discipline based art education (aesthetics, art criticism, art history, and art production) should be addressed in every art education unit planned and taught to students. All four content areas are addressed in the process of formal art criticism therefore every unit/lesson that utilizes a formal art criticism also…

This paper explores the question of introducing a critical pedagogy of representation into the art classroom, what it means and how it works. A critical pedagogy of representation holds socially transformatoryugoals that work toward a critical democracy. The approach affords opportunity for oppositional readings of texts and images by opening up…

If visual art is to be taught as a substantive part of the public school curriculum, then it's content and structure need to be translated into a curriculum that provides continuous cognitive and psychological growth and development. While discipline based art education (DBAE) acknowledges the values of art production, the content of art should…

Until recently, little scholarly attention has been paid to the art found in children's books. This study describes a project with a fifth grade class in an effort to increase their ability to critique book illustrations. Ten slides from picture books were shown to one experimental and one control group. Students were asked to critique the…