Kamhi: An Old School Way of Thinking (120+ Years Old)

What did I just read?

No seriously Kathy what id you just have me read!

These were the literal thoughts going through my head when I got done reading the sixth page of the article. Kamhi appears to want to basically throw out all art from the past 120 years. If it isn't traditional drawing, painting, or sculpture according to Kamhi it might as well be worthless.

How about some examples because there is no way it could literally be everything in the past 120 years!

Wanna bet?

Pop art?
Nope, an artist is "too detached" from it and they are trying to sell something so its not art.

Photography (from a film sense, she doesn't talk about digital and frankly I'm glad she doesn't)?
Nope, its way to mechanical and it is completely real world so an artist brain doesn't work hard enough. Also because its based on light and chemicals so there is way to much out an artist control and rely to much on "luck".

How about abstract art depicting spiritual values like the work of Kandinsky?
Wrong again. Even though they used the "proper medium" and their intentions were right they still managed to fail.

Kamhi believes that art focus to much on symbolism and decoding and not from an obvious pictorial standpoint. She also implies their is an issue when viewers of different ages, primarily pre-schoolers, can decode the same image. In other words Kamhi believes that age is more important benchmark to view art, then perhaps the idea that each stage of visual learners can view the same work differently. My translation from all that? If its not painfully obvious, you have to think about it, and its not traditional then it isn't art.

While reading the article I wanted to play devils advocate. When it comes to her argument for photography I wanted to argue that she was misspoken and was trying to speak about photojournalism, when speaking about the photo's of Iwo Jima in particular. Thus I would have tried to argue that photojournalism isn't art (P.S. I do completely 100% believe this type of work to be valid) but the hard work of Ansel Adams and others like him still is. However upon reading more on her stance on photograph in the article and in her notes I still couldn't even try and support that.

My one question I would like to ask her is that if painting and sculpture are the only real forms of art then what about the work of Rodin? Knowing that his work was rejected throughout his life because it was no depicted "how it was supposed to be" would she call it art? Since Rodin tried to capture someones essence and not how they actually looked I feel Kamhi would also deem his work a failure.

I did find an article that I like that supported the idea teaching Visual Culture called 
The Role of Visual Culture Studies on Primary School Students' Interpretation of Visual World
http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.mul.missouri.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=8122835c-b7da-44c8-a302-5e282a46a21c%40sessionmgr13&vid=1&hid=19
In it I found most important that students found it more enjoyable than the traditional ways they were taught and believed that could actually learn more from it!

Overall I found this article extremely difficult to read. Between Kamhis backwards minded thought process, and her complete disregard for so many different mediums I was not able to take her seriously.