I’m trying to make the musical intervals stick in my head through associated songs, a technique I’ve only just discovered. I’m painting each interval on canvas, first the minor second, exemplified by the theme of the movie “Jaws.”
The article excerpted below recommends drawing pictures of things you want to remember. Uncertain about the upshot of my experiment, I’m reminded of a joke involving someone at pains to remember the means by which he meant to remember the thing, while the thing itself is perfectly remembered.
… In an arts integrated curriculum, students would sketch their vocabulary words, or learn some of the material as songs, or act out molecular motion with their bodies… The children who had learned the material in the curriculum that made use of the arts remembered more, and the effect was largest among the children who were less strong academically, the ‘lower performers.’
“Working through some creative endeavor, we’re really resolving uncertainty,” [Ronald Beghetto, a professor of educational psychology] said. “We approach the blank canvas.”
(Perri Klass, “Using Arts Education to Help Other Lessons Stick,” NYTimes, 3-4-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
The Agony of Deaccessioning
Paintings line the basement storage space at The Indianapolis Museum of Art, which has graded its entire collection to help determine what art it may want to sell or transfer to another institution. Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields; Lyndon French for The New York Times.
This article has useful and graphic information about how and why so many art museums display so little of their collections. At first blush there is ample fodder for irony for persons possessed of the notion that art’s first purpose is to be looked at. There are,
however, extenuating circumstances and complicating factors in the dilemmas that museums face.
First, the problem: “Most museums display only a fraction of the works they own… There are thousands, if not millions, of works that are languishing in storage.” Museums are confronting “a history of voracious stockpiling and the pressure to acquire still more.”
Wealthy people bestow much swag other than pictures and sculpture on museums: doilies, clothing and costumes, accessories, home furnishings, textiles, etc. All these treasures compete for scarce exhibition space as well as ballooning resource requirements for proper preservation when not on display.
In museums’ defense, however, “… many [undisplayed works] are prints and drawings that can only sparingly be shown because of light sensitivity.” There is, too, the argument that “… preserving the best of the past [even in storage] — no matter how unpopular it may temporarily become — is the purpose of museums.” Also, — surprise! — a percentage of donated works are mediocre, “not even worth showing,” according to one museum veteran.
So, while philanthropists aren’t always experts in picking masterpieces, neither are they always modest or humble people. Many donors dictate the terms of their gifts, effectively bossing from beyond the grave in many cases. Donors of art works valued at $400 million to the Art Institute stipulated that the donation has to be on display for the next fifty years. “I got the deal of a lifetime,” one of them said.
(Robin Pogrebin, “Clean House to Survive? Museums Confront Their Crowded Basements,” NY Times, 3-10-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.