Lecturer says it’s ‘ridiculous’ that LV lacks art museum

By Kristen Peterson

Friday, Dec. 4, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Aaron Betsky, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum, ended a recent lecture here with a question and answer period that quickly became an open discussion of the obvious: Las Vegas lacks an art museum.

“It is ridiculous that a city as large as this does not have a public art institution, not because every city has one, but because you need art to blow your mind, and you need it to blow your mind when you are 6 years old,” Betsky said.

That is because art is a teaching aid and should be tapped early in one’s life, he says.

But that depends on whom you ask.

Educators and arts organizations ardently argue the positive effects that visual arts have on young minds.

Books, seminars and papers discuss its relationship to critical thinking and to becoming a more well-rounded human being.

But finding academic proof linking brain development and visual arts is not so easy. Studies about relationships between music and brain development are much more prevalent, as are the results of those relationships. That includes ongoing research by the Dana Foundation, a private philanthropy focused on brain science, immunology and arts education.

When it comes to the relationship between brain development and visual arts, “there is not a lot of conclusive data,” says Sara Wilson McKay, an assistant professor of art education at Virginia Commonwealth University. Wilson McKay heads the Seminar for Research in Art Education, a 39-year-old group that serves as an exchange for ideas about research in art education.

She’s hunting for examples of how art affects learning.

“In visual art there are a lot of methodical possibilities — critical thinking, problem solving, risk taking and experimentation among them,” Wilson McKay says. “I don’t think we effectively know how to describe what and how art moves and changes us. What we can describe is an occasion when it did.

“I’m interested in stringing together many moments of significant learning in and through art to see if there may be better ways of talking about the moments art matters in learning.”

Wilson McKay’s argument isn’t based on the hard science that some people would like when discussing arts in education.

The National Art Education Association is one of many organizations that promotes theories by author and former Stanford University professor Elliot Eisner, whose studies also are not based on hard science, but push forward the idea that art teaches differently by demonstrating that problems can have multiple solutions, that there are many ways to interpret the world, and that language is limiting.

The theories seem to have some merit, especially because the ambiguous nature of art, particularly modern and contemporary art, invites questions.

In 1967 philosopher Nelson Goodman formed Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to study art as a cognitive activity.

One of its programs, Artful Thinking, is designed to help students develop thoughtful learning skills, partly through the “artful thinking palette,” which zeros in on “observing and describing,” “questioning and investigating,” “reasoning,” “exploring viewpoints,” “finding complexity” and “comparing and connecting.”

Research continues to produce books on the issue. In “Cognition and the Visual Arts,” psychology professor Robert Solso examines what happens in the brain when one looks at art by breaking down the properties of vision, how the eye correlates with the brain, perception and perspective and eye movements.

Would students be better learners if they had exposure to the visual arts?

If so, then Las Vegas is shortchanging them, many local educators say.

Anita Getzler, a high school art educator in the Clark County School District, echoed Betsky’s concerns.

“I’m working with high school students in beginning art classes, and 95 percent of these kids have never been to an art museum,” she said. “The children in these schools in this city in are really suffering in their lack of experience in art. I don’t think the people who live in this city know that.”