Teaching history of arts and art culture between dialectics and linguistics

Abstract

Analyzing the discussions concerning the art culture programme in the secondary school the author points out two basic emerging tendencies. The first and wider tendency, starting from the modern theory of design (total design; i. e. the design of man’s environment) and having certain philosophic-anthropological orientation, envisages art culture in the dynamic context of the nature-man-work dialectical triangle (culture, form) and develops the idea of art culture from the formative character of total human activities in the co-ordinates of synchrony and diachrony. The second programme tends to look at art culture primarily as learning »visual language«, whereby its linguistic-structuralist character can be recognized together with the complete isolation of forms on the synchronic level. As a founder of the theoretical basis of the first programme the author has a critical attitude towards an independent linguistic approach to ant culture and accepts it only within a wider dialectic model, supporting his arguments by the works of the linguistics of de Saussure, Wiener, Chomsky and Martinet, and by the design and art theoreticians such as Gropius, Maldonado, Eco, Pacio an Argan.