Log
Aesthetic Incompatibility
Aesthetics is sometimes an insurmountable obstacle when dealing to with two groups of people: clients and students. I have strong minimalist tendencies, while the majority of clients that I work with are something bordering on maximalists.
When I’m teaching, I often find that students are diametrically opposed to my aesthetic; that my students often abhor design styles that I find sophicated and refined. In the past, my initial reaction was to try to convince the objectors that the design in question is effective and interesting. It almost always failed because aesthetics is, in large part, about taste and personal context.
My job as an educator is not to pass on an aesthetic: my job is to help students think critically. The questions of “Why” and “How” are more important than “What.” Students need the skills to make good decisions about aesthetics more than they need to subscribe to a particular “high” aesthetic. It’s taken some time for me to accept this, but as I’ve matured as a teacher, it’s become much easier.
In undergraduate school, the big joke among art students was the professor who critiqued his (specifically his) students by saying, “It needs a little spot of orange right there,” pointing, in typically high modernist, Greenbergian fashion, to a small area of an abstract painting. Such asinine, though perhaps mythical, comments exemplify just the type of “teaching” that results from the promotion of aesthetics. To foist my view of what looks good onto students lowers me to the level of ridicule that I once felt for the pretentious professors who tried to do the same to me.
01/25/03 06:57PM Design Teaching
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