We extend our warmest welcome to you, our most beloved readers. We cannot begin to tell you how happy we are to be publishing this blog dedicated to the visual and media arts. We are also very impatient to share our project with you.
We hope you like the content we post on this blog and that this webpage becomes one of your favourite ones and that each of your visits teaches you something new and interesting. We wanted to use our welcome page to tell you a bit more about the academic discipline of visual and media arts, so you can better understand the topics we explore.
What are Visual and Media Arts
Before we delve deeper into the discussion of the discipline of visual and media arts, it’s important to tell you what that includes. Visual arts are the type of art you can see. They include painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, pottery, jewellery, weaving, and fabrics, as well as contemporary arts such as photography, filmmaking, design, and computer art.
It’s a bit more difficult to define media arts. First, media arts denote the use of modern technology, which isn’t necessary for visual arts. Media arts are intrinsically tied to visual arts as they use components of them to create new works of art.
The art of media arts is to learn from previous works to express yourself creatively with a look on the past, while being based in the future. Apart from creating contemporary works of art, media arts also include the study of media in general. This means interpreting media/arts, critically examining them, and understanding their social and historical context.
The Academic Discipline
Visual arts are arguably one of the first taught disciplines in the history of mankind. In Europe, art education first emerged around the Hellenistic Period (between 4th century BC and 4th century AD). Students were taught by teachers how to draw and sculpt, but they were also taught how to think of art and the process of creating it.
In Asia, and particularly China, calligraphy was formalised and taught as a discipline during the Zhou dynasty (1046-771 BC), while drawing and painting became formalised during the Imperial Age.
Art was usually taught by a master to his pupil in the atelier system, similar to other trades like masonry. This continued for a while, while at the same time, art schools popped around Europe with Italy establishing one of the first (if not the first) schools in the 13th century.
Each new kind of visual art such as filmmaking would eventually find its way to formalised education. However, the critical study of art forms that is offered by media arts has a very specific origin story.
One man can be credited for the formulation of the critical wing of art – Jerome Bruner. The American psychologist sought to reform education by emphasising on interpretation rather than mere memorising of facts. He also believed that the most knowledgeable and reputable members of each field should decide the content of the curriculum, rather than the government.
Couple this new theory of education with the soft social revolutions of the same period (the 1960’s) and you can get a pretty good idea as to how media theory and criticism came to be. This new critically informed program spread quickly around the globe and many university departments began offering courses in visual and media studies.
The first wholly media arts degree appeared in New York City’s The New School that introduced the Media Studies M.A. program in 1975. Now, there are many specialised media arts programs, as well as visual and media arts programs.
Moreover, this is not the stuff of higher education only anymore; middle schools and high schools also adopt some principles of this type of study to better examine the arts and to truly engage with them.
Past and present educational experts argue that creating and examining art, especially starting at a young age, can help students develop critical skills that could be used in other fields such as STEM.
We share these beliefs and we hope our blog is being read by parents and educators who can hopefully see the benefits of critical examination of visual arts for their children and pupils.
Thank you for reading this post and for supporting our blog!