Natalia Okolicsanyiova

Česká sekce INSEA
Jun 25
2 min read

Updated: Jul 18

1.46 Other Beauty (Paper) – virtual

Natalia Okolicsanyiova – Department of Fine Arts Education, Faculty of Education, Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia – virtual

Abstract:

My research focuses on the field of feminist art pedagogy and art education. I will analyze issues related to identity formation of art educators through a critical insight into art interpretations stereotypically embedded in art history. The formation of future art educators' value judgments about the aesthetics and content of artworks is largely conditioned by gender stereotypes embedded in artistic interpretations.

As art education has often been argued in the past as teaching visual and aesthetic qualities, there is a concern that it is the 'visual' part of art that may be interpreted narrowly, analysing only what can be observed with the eyes. This kind of teaching was characteristic of modernist conceptions of aesthetic experience, which distinguished between the visual, the intellectual, and the practical or ethical aspects of life. Most contemporary theories of visual culture typically assume that aesthetic vision, cognition, and ethics, especially social ethics, are deeply intertwined.

One assumption that needs to be nullified in the process of becoming visual culture educators is the belief that aesthetic vision can be isolated from other socially constructed experiences. In my teaching practice, I am troubled by the fact that a large proportion of students has difficulty accepting distorted aesthetics of the human form in acclaimed works of art. In my professional courses, I often encounter student’s resistance to the creation of distortions of the human form. They do not find the required visuality appealing, but on the contrary, unattractive.

At this point, two issues come together: the incorrect interpretive level of the artwork and the inexorable influence of mass media power on the development of self-monitoring, which will be one of the links to psychoanalytic research on the construction of identities. In my contribution, i will research the art teaching processes about beauty as something distinct from the known, the determined, or the dictated.