Education Week - April 27, 2016 - 12

Tech Closing
Access Gaps
To Art Works
resolution digital images mean
that students can access millions of
artworks, or move through virtual
spaces, where their parents might
have had access to only a few hundred lower-resolution images.
Having access to precise reproductions of art in the classroom
matters, argues Fowler of Plano
Senior High. Images are "the nextbest thing" to studying works of art
in person, he said, and "a lot of intricacies can be missed if an image
isn't high quality."
Some of the resources where the
images are housed are public, such
as Smarthistory or the Google art
project, while other image repositories, like nonprofit Artstor, require
schools or districts to buy an institutional license. Behind its paywall,
Artstor also offers a slew of essays
and teaching resources targeted
specifically to the AP Art History
exam.
The overall effect, said Zucker, is
"an explosion in access to images,"
including the ability to study a
huge number of works outside the
traditional art history canon.
While educators and cultural
institutions have generally supported the movement toward making artworks available through
digital images, the enthusiasm is
not universal. Since the 1930s, the
philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin has warned that the
proliferation of reproductions of
original artworks risks diluting the
impact of the original object.
According to Ian McDermott, the
collection-development manager at
Artstor, some museums, particularly in Europe, are wary of relinquishing virtual access to what
they refer to as their "cultural patrimony."
In other words, while many museums cite cost as the largest barrier to offering schools or the public
digital access to their collections,
some are worried about ceding
control of digital assets, and others
are concerned that virtual access
could serve as a substitute for visitors coming to their institutions in
person.
Furthermore, a more existential
concern for Western traditionalists
is how the larger collective image
library has opened the door for modern schools of criticism to pick apart
what they see as the proven ways of
critiquing art.
As those voices have become more
prominent in recent decades, the
canon and its "political foundation"
have become "more and more suspect," said Harris of Smarthistory.
In that context, the College Board's
new AP Art History course, which
jettisoned numerous European Baroque and Renaissance artists for
a larger share of non-Western artists, is more evidence of a wider sea
change in cultural values.
In addition to Smarthistory, other

Brandon Thibodeaux for Education Week

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

Students gather in a gallery
of neon art by Stephen
Antonakos as they move
through the Dallas Museum
of Art.

"

These are
21st-century
learners
who are
just more
engaged
in multimedia."
TIFFANY ALVAREZTHURMAN
Teacher
Plano Senior High School

12 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 27, 2016 | www.edweek.org

ed-tech platforms are giving educators an unprecedented ability to manipulate or enhance the quality of
artistic reproductions in ways that
would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
Greg Bryda, a doctoral candidate at Yale University, produced
the Wölff app, a free mobile application launched last August that
gives educators a platform to manipulate and zoom into details of
high-resolution images during
their lessons through touch-screen
technology.
The application, which Bryda developed to address his own teaching needs through a Kickstarter
campaign, is named after Swiss art
historian Heinrich Wölfflin, who
pioneered the method of side-by-side
slide comparisons in the early 20th
century.
Despite the advantages a high-resolution reproduction can have in certain instances, Bryda believes there
is no substitute for the original, and
museums should not be concerned
about the in-person attraction of
their collections.
According to Bryda, the better an
image is, the more likely students
are to go out of their way to see the
original in person.
"The first time a student sees a reproduction followed by an original,"
Bryda argued, "they realize how important it is to see the original for
all other artworks, because they are
always different."

Streetview-applications that are
improving markedly with the plummeting costs of virtual-reality headsets like Cardboard.
Those applications are especially
important for giving students an
understanding of architecture, as
Brooks, the Texas student, explains,
"with people and cars and streets,
you get a different idea of scale and
space."
Dana Howard, the K-12 relationship manager for Artstor, which has
its own library of 360-degree highdefinition panoramic images, says
the files are especially valuable in
"leveling the playing field" between
well-heeled students and those who
can't afford to travel.
Beyond virtual reality is 3D printing, which holds some promise for
the possibility of recreating nearly
identical copies of artworks from
nearly the same materials.
The gulf between the experiences
that students like Brooks describes
of witnessing flat, digital images of
Van Gogh's "Starry Night," to seeing
the thick textured layers of impasto
oil paint in person, could soon become a thing of the past.
In partnership with OCE, a division of the camera-maker Cannon,
Dutch researcher Tim Zaman has
succeeded in scanning and reprinting topographically faithful reproductions of works by Rembrandt
and Van Gogh with an oil-paintlike
polymer.
While Zaman is quick to say that
his reproductions are not perfect cop-

Virtual and 3D Viewing
New technology, however, continues to close the gap between virtual
reproductions and physical reality.
Art history teachers are already
taking their students on virtual
tours of faraway places like Versailles through Google Maps and

ONLINE ONLY STORY:

L.A. museum takes irreverent
approach to youth outreach.
www.edweek.org/go/artmuseum

ies of the original, they offer an unprecedented degree of fidelity to the
original object.
Bryda acknowledges that reproductions are getting ever closer in
accuracy to original artworks-a
trend that has museums appropriately concerned about protecting the
aura that surrounds their collections,
as well as their bottom line.
While cautioning against "fetishizing the original" pieces of art, Bryda
said that original artworks will always have primacy.
After they're created, original
works "have an afterlife," he said,
by virtue of their historical presence
in society, and the physical changes
they endure over time, which he argues reproductions will never be able
to fully capture.
Coverage of trends in K-12 innovation
and efforts to put these new ideas
and approaches into practice in schools,
districts, and classrooms is supported
in part by a grant from the
Carnegie Corporation of New York
at www.carnegie.org. Education Week
retains sole editorial control over the
content of this coverage.
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Education Week - April 27, 2016

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