Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
- John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Oh, right. One of those irritating exaggerations that only poets can get away with. But Keats had a point. We human beings do invest a lot in visual expression.

Millennia ago, between dodging predators' teeth and claws, the people at Lascaux took the trouble to draw the animals of the day on their cavern walls. Now the young take similar liberties with the walls of subway stations. Those walls also hold examples of a slightly higher art and craft: advertisements subtly designed to send you to the tobacco store or the Chevrolet dealer in a buying mood. On a loftier plane, society builds temples to this penchant for visual form, calls them art museums, and invites the public to come and behold.

Investing time in making and enjoying visual expression is an entrenched human trait. Virtually all cultures display some form of art or visual ornamentation. From racing stripes on cars to the jazzy colors on my new pair of Nikes, human artifacts carry visual symbolism. The look of my Nikes is readier for speed than I am: My feet can't keep up with my shoes! Nor is the visually energized object a modern invention. Consider, for instance, Figure 1, the carved wooden prow of a boat from the Tanimbar Islands, a bit west of New Guinea in Indonesia. This prow made the boat it adorned just as ready for travel as my Nikes. A rooster, symbol of aggression and energy, perches at the bottom while two fish swim between his legs. Part of his tail rises in splendid arabesques. From his neck emanates a swirling motif suggestive of the waves of the ocean. These lines from the Tanimbarese tell us a little more about the intent:¹

Mami yaru o wean manut lamera o.
Nalili vulun masa wean lera fanin o.

Our boat o is like a rooster o.
It wears golden feathers like the rays of the sun o.

Cultures turn visual expression to diverse other ends—not only swift journeys but advertising or religion for instance—and some like our own give play to art entirely for art's sake. All in all, visual expression is a conspicuous part of any person's life and times.

But for all that, in our habits of schooling, we are a long way from agreeing with Keats' urn that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." As far as the usual curriculum goes, it's almost the opposite. If schools concern themselves with imparting truths, they certainly do little enough about beauty or other expressive dimensions of art past or present. The most that many students meet is brief craftlike experiences with paste pots and turkey-shaped stencils. Consider the dilemma of the principal or superintendent or policy maker, even one who has some affinity for art. "What am I to do?" he or she moans. "The parents are after me for higher math and reading scores. Where's the advocacy for art? It isn't there. No one cares."

People should care, of course. Looking within and across cultures, there is every reason to recognize the universal presence of visual expression and its powers of conveying information, provoking reflection, and stirring feelings. But telling people that they should care is a singularly ineffectual way of getting them to do so. So, the question arises: If we do not value visual expression enough to teach about it for its own sake, what else can be added to the argument?

Thinking through Looking
This short book for one thing. It has a double thesis: First of all, looking at art requires thinking—art must be "thought through." The prow of the Tanimbarese boat needs a long and thoughtful look, not just the passing glance, to begin to understand its message and savor its elegance.

Second, thoughtful looking at art has an instrumental value. It provides an excellent setting for the development of better thinking, for the cultivation of what might be called the art of intelligence. We can learn to use our minds better by thoughtful looking at the prow of a Tanimbarese boat—and many other things. "Thinking through looking" thus has a double meaning: The looking we do should be thought through, and thoughtful looking is a way to make thinking better.

Although this book concentrates on the audience role, art appreciation if you will, it's worth noting that thoughtful looking is just as important to the role of artist. After all, artists and artisans have to watch what they are doing to make a work come out as they want it to, or to discover how they want it to come out along the way. However, most people are much more likely to participate in art seriously as audience members rather than as artists or artisans. With the aim of serving the larger number, the focus here falls squarely on the audience role. A thoughtful approach to looking at art will vastly enrich people's experience of and understanding of art.

Now what is this about improving thinking? The notion that students need to think better has something of a following. Over the past twenty years, improving students' thinking has become an enthusiasm among educators and parents alike—and for good reason, since testing programs, such as the National Assessment of Education Progress, have shown that students commonly do not think very well with what they learn. ² But how does art connect with this agenda? In short form, the argument runs as follows.

In routine situations, most people behave intuitively in remarkably intelligent ways. They cope well because they have learned their way around these situations, much as you learn your way around an unfamiliar town. Unfortunately, more novel and subtle circumstances often reveal the limits of our ordinary savvy. Everyday thinking in novel and subtle circumstances often reveal the limits of our ordinary savvy. Everyday thinking in novel and subtle circumsances tends to be hasty, somewhat stereotyped, fuzzy in its details, and rather disorganized. To think better, people need to develop general commitments and strategies toward giving thinking more time and thinking more broad and adventurous, clear and organized ways.

How can this be done? Typical approaches to developing thinking focus on cultivating thinking strategies, stepwise procedures for thinking better. The problem is, learners often find such strategies artificial and unappealing. Helpful as they may be in a technical way, they fail to capture enthusiasm and commitment.

Enter this book. Here it's suggested that looking at art provides a context especially well suited for cultivating thinking dispositions. A disposition is a felt tendency, commitment, and enthusiasm. Dispositions more than strategies (although not to the exclusion of strategies) arguably are the key to helping learners mobilize their mental powers. ³

Art assists in a natural way. Looking at art invites, rewards, and encourages a thoughtful disposition, because works of art demand thoughtful attention to discover what they have to show and say. Also, works of art connect to social, personal, and other dimensions of life with strong affective overtones. So, better than most other situations, looking at art can build some very basic thinking dispositions.

Why Art and Not Auto Mechanics?
The focus on art here may seem idiosyncratic. Any subject matter has its intellectual demands. Why single out art? Why not auto mechanics? Or quantum mechanics?

There is insight in this objection. Good thinking dispositions certainly can be cultivated in the context of auto mechanics or quantum mechanics. Good thinking dispositions can thrive in any subject matter at any level. Moreover, in my view, some attention to thinking in general and the thinking required by different disciplines should be a standard part of education in all subject matters at all levels. ⁴ This granted, some subjects lend themselves more so than others to fostering better thinking dispositions. For various reasons, art is an especially supportive context.

Here are some of the features of art that make it so. I mention them briefly here, taking up each at more length in the last chapter.

Sensory anchoring. It's helpful to have a physical object to focus on as you think and talk and learn. This comes naturally with art, which can be present either in the original or in reproduction, as in, for instance, a picture of the prow of a Tanimbarese boat.

Instant access. Along the same lines, the presence of the work permits checking any point of argument or seeking a new idea by looking, or looking closer, or looking from another angle. Look back at the prow. What do you see now?

Personal engagement. Works of art are made to draw and hold attention. This helps to sustain prolonged reflection around them. You can spend quite a while amidst the visual currents of that prow.

Dispositional atmosphere. As emphasized earlier, the aim here is to cultivate thinking dispositions - broad attitudes, tendencies, and habits of thinking. Art commonly brings with it an atmosphere of heightened affect synergistic with the building of dispositions. "Our boat o is like a rooster o./ It wears golden feathers like the rays of the sun o."

Wide-spectrum cognition. Although we tend to think of art as primarily a visual phenomenon, looking at art thoughtfully recruits many kinds and styles of cognition—visual processing, analytical thinking, posing questions, testing hypotheses, verbal reasoning, and more. What might the fish under the rooster stand for? Could they be sharks?

Multiconnectedness. Art typically allows and encourages rich connection-making—with social themes, philosophical conundrums, features of formal structure, personal anxieties and insights, and historical patterns. For instance, we could understand the prow better through connecting it with the Tanimbarese culture.

Perhaps this brief list reveals something of why art is special. It is not so often the case that we can learn in the presence of compelling objects that engage our senses, allow for many kinds of cognition, connect to many facets of life, sustain our attention, and so on. Art is an opportunity. Let us not miss it.

Beyond "Look and See"
The connection between art and thinking may seem surprising. Too often, our encounters with art fall prey to a "look and see" mindset. We look. We see right away what there is to see, or believe we do. We like it or we do not. And that is all there is to it. But looking at art in ways that make sense of it calls for much more than that. Philip Yenawine, former director of education at New York's Museum of Modern Art, puts it this way:
...art is not supposed to be just beautiful, appropriate for a setting, or easy. Its most satisfying function is that it allows us to exercise our minds. An artwork will establish certain boundaries by its subject matter, style, materials, and techniques. It then lets us observe and analyze these givens by probing and musing. By finding its ambiguities, we can proceed in a game of speculation and interpretation. ⁵

The why and how of this view surfaces in the following chapters. With the image of the Tanimbarese prow to set us on our way, we journey through mingling currents of art and intelligence. Far from a scholarly treatise, the chapters to come offer a kind of practical philosophy of cultivating thoughtfulness through looking at art. I hope that people in general and school people in particular—administrators, teachers, and students—can gain from this inquiry into the better use of the eye and the mind.

Footnotes

1. S. McKinnon, "Tanimbar Boats," in Islands and Ancestors: Indigenous Styles of Southeast Asia, eds. J. P. Barbier and D. Newton (Munich, Germany: Prestel-Verlag, 1988), 152-169, quotation form p. 155.
   
   
2. See National Assessment of Educational Progress, Reading, Thinking, and Writing (Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, 1981).
   
   
3. This case has recently been argued by D. N. Perkins, E. Jay, and S. Tishman, "Beyond Abilities: A Dispositional Theory of Thinking," The Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 39(1) (1993): 1-21. Others who advocate the importance of dispositions include: J. Baron, Rationality and Intelligence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and R. H. Ennis, "A Taxonomy of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities," in Teaching Thinking Skills: Theory and Practice, eds. J. B. Baron and R. S. Sternberg (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1986), 9-26.
   
   
4. D. N. Perkins, Smart Schools: From Training Memories to Educating Minds (New York: Free Press, 1992).
   
   
5. P. Yenawine, How to Look at Modern Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 25.