Notes on the Aesthetic Motive and Multicultural Education

Leonardo, Vol. 13, pp. 146-148. Pergamon Press 1980. Printed in Great Britain NOTES ON THE AESTHETIC MOTIVE AND MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION* Ralph A. Smith** Many reasons have been given for attending to the artistic traditions of alien cultures. One of these has emphasized that in coming to terms with the arts of culturally different societies we not only discover something novel but also come to have a better understanding of our own assumptions about the relations of art and culture. As the British aesthetician Harold Osborne has aptly put it: 'The best and perhaps the only sure way of bringing to light and revivifying ... [our] fossilized assumptions, and of destroying their power to cramp and confine, is by subjecting ourselves to the shock of contact with a very alien tradition' [I]. But in order for exposure to an alien artistic tradition to have this bracing and revivifying effect, the shock must not leave one completely stunned and baffled. Ifa foreign culture allows no point of contact with the familiar, if no cognitive bridges can be fashioned to approach it, then there is not much hope of learning from it. This need to examine the new and the alien in terms of the common and familiar explains the apparently engrained human habit of searching for unity amidst diversity. This mental habit prompts us to ask, What shall we take to be the common or unifying thread that runs through tangible and important cultural differences? Once more, wemay take Osborne as our text. He holds 'that [it is] the aesthetic motive [that] has been operative throughout history to control the making and appraisal of those artifacts which we now regard as works of art even though it has been latent and unconscious' [I, p. 11]. This awakening consciousness, gradual understanding, and, in modern times, conceptualizing of the human aesthetic impulse becomes the leading and organizing idea in Osborne's history of aesthetics and art theory. I suggest that we take this notion of the presence of an aesthetic motive in making, as wellas in appraising, as the common theme for multicultural aesthetic education. It permits us to assume that whatever practical, social, or religious functions a cultural artifact from an alien society may have performed, or now performs, that artifact also performs an aesthetic function: being informed by the (unconscious or conscious) aesthetic motive of its creator, the artifact is designed to evoke and sustain the aesthetic interest of percipients. The educational significance of adopting the idea of a universal aesthetic function lies in the fact that such an idea licenses the use of the same approach to all cultural artifacts, regardless of origin. Thus we need not be deterred by those who claim that *These remarks were presented in a symposium entitled Aesthetic Education in Cultural Diversity, held during the 23rd World Congress of the International Society for Education through Art (lNSEA) in Aug. 1978 at Adelaide, Australia. **Teacher of cultural and educational policy, Education Building, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, U.S.A. 146 since the full range of meanings and associations of an artifact is accessible only to individuals steeped in the values and traditions of the culture that produced it (which I think is true), any attempt by persons from another culture to come to terms with this artifact isa vain conceit, is in fact an arrogant attempt to impose alien values on the artifact. But if we are right in believingthat the artifact, in addition to serving a host offunctions that we shall probably be unable to understand fully, also performs an aesthetic function, then aesthetic value is not externally imposed on it, and dealing with the artifact from the aesthetic point of view is not inappropriate. In short, if we teach students and pupils how to satisfy their aesthetic interest by approaching noteworthy artworks in appropriate ways, weshall have set them on the right road toward learning to appreciate the aesthetic dimension of artifacts from foreign cultures. That this does not equip them to travel very far along that road I shall explain later. Even if we could all agree, however, that the aesthetic motive and interest are traits shared by all humans, such consensus...