I'm surprised you don't think there could be any more to art history/criticism than either "Look, it's a picture of a duck" or postmodern babble.
I am perhaps a bit oversensitive to the word "understanding", which was what I was mainly pointing at. Every time I met this word in connection with art or literature, it was someone trying to impose her aesthetic preferences on me while signalling her superior cultural sophistication. I am not completely ignorant about history of art, I paint as a hobby and usually spend more than fifteen minutes in a gallery. But all my school experiences with learning to understand art or literature or music - as opposed to learning how to draw or write or sing - was a boring exercise in snobbery.
Even with the uniformly blue canvas, looking at it can be an interesting opportunity to learn about who painted it and why they thought they were doing it (even if you don't agree with their rationale or take it at face value), and maybe spend ten seconds trying to see it through their eyes. Even if you ultimately conclude that it sucks and that the painter was stupid and wrong about everything, it's not less enjoyable than just seeing the blue canvas and spending ten seconds being baffled or bored by it and then moving on.
This can be said about almost anything. Look at a chair, a railroad track or a dog's leash and ponder about the maker's intentions and motives. Almost any product of human effort is worth ten seconds of thought, usually more interesting than with a blue canvas. Singling out paintings for such an argument is privileging the hypothesis. And remember, modern art advocates even don't tell us to think ten seconds about any object we happen to look at. They tell us to spend much longer time thinking about objects classified within the quite arbitrary category "art", pretending that those are especially interesting or important. They aren't. Rothko's thoughts about colour fields on one of his paintings are no more interesting than my neighbour's thoughts about the shape of his new flowerbed; after all, both are of comparable complexity and take about the same time to complete. I have had discussions about the blue canvas (I remember neither the author nor the name of the painting) when my friend said that I can't pronounce the canvas worthless - perhaps the choice of the exact colour was the unique act of creativity and the precise uniformity reflects the author's genius. It's silly.
This can be said about almost anything. Look at a chair, a railroad track or a dog's leash and ponder about the maker's intentions and motives. Almost any product of human effort is worth ten seconds of thought, usually more interesting than with a blue canvas. Singling out paintings for such an argument is privileging the hypothesis.
Very good point - it's interesting to imagine a guide giving tours in an ordinary city showing ordinary things like cars, fences, houses, lamp posts etc. talking about their design and manufacture. If well done, it may be more instructive and thought-provoking than the average art gallery visit! But it would be dreadfully low-status.
In school we learn wonderful things like how to find integrals, solve equations, and how to calculate valence electrons of elements based on their atomic numbers. Because, obviously, they will be very important in our futures -- especially if we become artists, musicians, writers, actors, and business people.
We learn so much in school. Yet, when most people look at paintings they don’t truly understand them. When most people listen to music, they don’t really know what they’re hearing. Most people would fail simple music theory tests, even though many have listened to music most days of the week since they were babies!
Similarly, if you have working eyes, you should ask “Why do shadows look like they do? What color is snow, really? Can I predict the colors of different colored materials at different times of the day? If not, why? I have been seeing them for years, haven’t I?”
I think the problem here is that people can’t understand what is really important. Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microiology, etc. are interesting to learn, perhaps. But, they are relatively advanced topics. People don’t use them in daily life unless they are professionals. Why not learn things that we think about every day instead of those that will frankly be useless to most?
Why don’t we learn how to understand our senses?
Learning about sight, sounds, thoughts, etc. should fit in somewhere in the first year of high school. Everyone needs to learn the physics of art and color (e.g. this and this), music theory, rationality, and logic.
For example, why should people start learning (or pretending to learn) philosophy, the art of thinking, in college? Should we be able to make life-changing decisions without even knowing how to spot errors in our thinking?
As a science researcher, I know first hand how hard it is to find a good balance between being well versed in worldly topics and being focused on a field in order to excel in it. But, both of these areas of study should not be called the true basics, in my opinion.
As president of my school's philosophy club, I took a different approach to teaching the basics of philosophy and thinking than traditional classes do. Instead of asking students to discuss the lives and ideas of famous Greek philosophers, I asked them to analyze their own lives and make their own philosophies. As expected, they were terrible at it at first. But, by the end of the year people began to actually think about the world around them.
So, my point is that we should -- in life and in school -- emphasize actual everyday thinking more.
The biggest challenge is that it takes so long!