I wanted to end this very hot. humid, and WET New York summer week by recalling a swell dinner I had once with Merce Cunningham and Laura Kuhn, Director of The Cage Trust.

Richard Kessler on arts education
I wanted to end this very hot. humid, and WET New York summer week by recalling a swell dinner I had once with Merce Cunningham and Laura Kuhn, Director of The Cage Trust.
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For those who have followed Dewey21C, hopefully you’ve noticed that I have been silent since the end of July. A month off from work followed that last post, and as we’re blowing through September, I have started a new chapter in my career as Dean of the Mannes College The New School for Music.
It’s not all that often that one gets a month off. It was a month that I viewed as time to leave behind the past seven years at The Center for Arts Education, while clearing my mind for the very new challenge of leading a music conservatory that is part of a fairly unorthodox university (The New School). It didn’t hurt that one of the founders of The New School, and father of its initial educational design was none other than John Dewey.
There is so much that I want to share about these early days in my tenure. I thought it would be a good call to start with something that had that sort of cold water in the face feel as soon as arrived at The New School.
In K-12, the pathway to college is and has been for many years the brass ring. Ten years ago it was simply getting students to college. For arts educators, we were being asked what we were doing to increase the high school graduation rates, with the presumption that graduates would move along to college at increasing rates, in addition to simply ensuring a higher high school graduation rate and all that it implies. Slowly it became about college and career readiness, which is the key frame for the Common Core Standards. What should a student know and be able to do in college and career. One way or the other, K-12 policy has been about getting more and more students to college, even if remediation rates are alarmingly high.
At the very same time, higher education is under fire. In almost every respect higher education is being challenged, whether it’s on the basis of cost, design, relevancy, etc.
Some say it’s better to attend DIY college. Others question the value of the degree altogether. It’s too expensive. It’s too abstract. The model is busted. There is no accountability. There is no data. It is hand cuffed by tenure and unions. Freshman enrollment is down. Students are taking longer to graduate.
Naturally, the above includes just a few issues in common with K-12.
You have to admit, at the very least, how fascinating it is to witness a sort of accountability movement in higher education, one which at time calls to question fundamental value, while at the very same time, most of K-12 policy continues to triangulate on moving students to college.
For me, at my new position, there is one particular question from K-12 that I find to be the perfect lens to peer through: what should a graduate know and be able to do. It is through that particular frame that I believe assessment and improvement is possible at my new job.
an ArtsJournal blog
If avant-gardists such as Merce Cunningham and John Cage were indeed national “artistic treasures,” they should have been able to attract generous private support. The problem is that their work (unlike that of choreographer Mark Morris, for example) has never been able to appeal to a wider audience than artworld insiders.
Forcing the public to foot the bill for their “experiments” is a deplorable idea. By their own admission, such experiments amounted to anti-art (that is why the public has rejected it). For evidence, see the analysis of their work and what they said about it in What Art Is (pages 220-29)–which I co-authored. The relevant pages can be viewed at Google Books: http://tinyurl.com/nnvhpm.
Michelle Marder Kamhi, Co-Editor, Aristos (An Online Review of the Arts)
That’s too sadly pissy a comment (Ms. Kamhi’s) to leave as a comment to a truly great artist. On the contrary, I was strongly impressed by the number of just plain folks who left tributes to Merce at his Salon obituary. I don’t know nuthin’ about dance, my wife isn’t an artist of any kind, but every time we saw Merce’s company dance we were blown away by the number of things you could *do* with dance that we never could have imagined, the number of dance issues we never realized we could understand. His work far transcended its experimental origins and became something for everyman.
It’s a damn shame that this country won’t give great artists anywhere near the funding they need to do their work. Equally sad is the number of beginning artists who will never develop fully because they are not allowed the time and materials. Someday this country’s historians will look back on a stunted artistic world that was never allowed to blossom. Instead, we had reality TV (which I suppose fits Ms. Kamhi’s criterion for appealing to a wider public).
Cunningham’s is and has been for many years now to a very wide audience, relative to the dance field. Cage’s star continues to rise and his influence on music continues to grow as well.
I doubt that Mark Morris has greater appeal than Merce, however you slice “appeal.”
I think that Mark would laugh pretty hard being presented as a mainstram counterbalance to Merce Cunningham. Apparently, Ms. Kahmi, you’ve never heard Mark speak and most likely know little about his work. For if you did, you might be using Paula Abdul rather than Mark Morris as your example of experiments and the deplorable state of public financing thereof.