TEACHING STATEMENT
At a certain point in my teaching career I realized that some students (especially among freshmen and sophomores) enroll in art classes because they believe that art is easy, or just fun. Indeed, unlike other academic disciplines, art is a sphere of activity that does not like to keep its norms for too long; it is where rules are constantly contested, resisted, and redefined, and where what were once taboos or aberrations can – and have been – turned overnight into new norms or forms. This is why art has a reputation as something casual, and for some students represents a tempting refuge from their more restricted disciplines or ways of life. In light of such experiences, I see my teaching goals and objectives as follows: on one hand, I try not to ruin my students’ early expectations— namely, that art indeed has something to do with freedom, pleasure, beauty, the sublime, and truth. At the same time, however, I work to assure that they will graduate with a more complex understanding of “beauty,” “freedom,” “the sublime” or “truth” than the ones they enrolled with. I could reformulate my goals and objectives by referring to the German Idealist notion of Bildung, which
is a form of cultivation that preserves an initial impetus or quality, but raises it to a higher or more critical level of thinking.
