Abstract

Jacob Landau (1917-2001), internationally known artist and teacher, can provide guidance about the direction that art education should take, grounded in a profound assessment of the social significance of art education. His late 20th-century arts education theory rooted in a new paradigm--the art-sense & science-sense equilibrium--and practice--love & stress--can help us define the role of the art educator in our 21st-century world. The state of the general culture gives urgency to this. Globalization raises questions about the place of art and the art educator in an information economy. Are makers of images simply purveyors of cultural prejudices, and teachers of artists simply apologists for market culture, indirect providers of consumer-ware for the mass media? The growing interaction of nations and cultures makes these questions more acute. Likewise, image saturation tends to homogenize works of art, threatening to turn them into mere information and rendering them amoral. Answering these questions, Landau maintained that both art and science are distorted and imbalanced by the "technological imperative," and advocated a corrective in restoring the equilibrium of the "art-sense" and the "science-sense" by embracing a new paradigm of art education, thereby severing them from the "technological placenta."