The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art June 1971 [antikvár]

Annual Report for 1970 The year of 1970 was largely concerned with the hopes and plans raised by the prospect of using the facilities of the new Education Wing, which was opened in February 1971. Education is an almost holy word and can conjure up visions impossible of fulfillment. Pragmatically, what do we propose to do? And where does this educational process end? It would be neat to propose a single path to a single end—and it would be false. Perimeters can and should be established; and one should violate them occasionally if only to test their strength. One of the elements of our chosen perimeter is the original work of art as the prime mover in the art educational process. We do not subscribe to oft-repeated contemporary comments that the "art object" is dead, that the museum is either a mausoleum or an ivory tower, that history is irrelevant. The enjoyment and understanding of a work of art must be made on its own terms. The world of art, past and present, is a kind of never-completed mosaic. Art does not progress in a cumulative sense as does research in the natural sciences. Always in being, always meaningful, art is constantly susceptible both to temporary subtraction—the Enlightenment made the "Dark Ages" invisible— and to temporary addition—each generation makes some embarassing "contributions" to greatness written in disappearing ink. But even with all these ephemera, the mosaic still exists as an accepted part of our educational perimeter. Other introductions to these annual reports have made the point that it is physically impossible for an art museum, any art museum, to be an instrument of "mass education." This is a task that should be assumed by our much larger systems of public education. We can try to influence the appropriate "mass educational" media, and we can try to educate and move a considerable number of varied individuals—teachers, professionals, or laymen—who can in turn move others. If this considerable number is an elite (terrible, pejorative word !), it is an elite with only one acquired thing in common: a commitment to the visual arts. This other element in our perimeter, then, is made up of individuals. Last year 45,027 children and high school students and 21,027 adults attended scheduled Museum classes and educational events, less than half our usual enrollment but all that we could accommodate during construction. And while the 310,289 who visited the Museum under the final trying conditions of finishing the new wing can well have learned something from "gallery going," we hope that a major result was enjoyment. Within this educational perimeter anything goes. There are lecture classes, "old fashioned" but still effective. Dance, film, film-making, doing, discussing, art treasure hunts, image as sound, sound as image, tribal art, illuminated manuscripts as narrative art, Chinese handscrolls as musical art through time and movement, representational art as design, abstract art as symbolic image— the possibilities within the circle can never be fully exhausted, but as many as possible should be savoured short of exhaustion. 163