Other researchers have approached the question of whether art can be taught from a scientific perspective; Glicksman is more optimistic than Winner. “Talent is strange because there [are] definitely people who are smarter than other people and more talented…but everybody can learn a high degree of skill,” says  Glicksman.

At the Center for Educational Applications of Brain Hemisphere Research, Glicksman was involved in continuing the work of Dr. Betty Edwards, an art professor whose 1979 book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” changed the standards of visual art instruction. The book, grounded in brain hemisphere research, emphasized focusing on the relationships between different components of an image rather than trying to draw what the artist thought something should look like.

“All these people who say ‘I can’t draw’ because they don’t have some innate ability really can learn to draw with complete realism and skill, up to a certain level,” Glicksman says. He distinguishes between the ability to paint or draw realistically and the ability to be creative; drawing is a learnable technique, a tool that can get you closer to artistic accomplishment.  However, a piece of visual art needs innate intent and vision to be successful.

Glicksman’s discrimination between the ability to become technically proficient and create visionary new work is a subtle but significant distinction.  Perhaps the disparity lies in the individual’s intrinsic motivation and inspiration.  “It’s good to have training, but first you have to have determination. You have to have something to say,” says Memory P. Risinger, who teaches the Freshman Fiction Writing Workshop. According to Risinger, successful writers are those who keep writing because of an internal desire to create, not because they are compelled by external rewards. If it is true that intrinsic desire must precede training, then the question of teaching art becomes more complicated; the most effective teaching techniques may fall flat if a student does not feel internally motivated to make art.

CYBORG COMPOSERS

Perhaps the best way to determine whether art is teachable is to delineate creativity into divisible components and try teaching it to a machine. Harvard professor Krzysztof Gajos defines creativity in the same formulaic fashion he might create an algorithm. “Creativity is novelty plus quality plus surprise,” he says.   Another researcher attempted to teach creativity to a machine and succeeded, but not without creating controversy.

University of Santa Cruz researcher David Cope created a computer program in the 1990s called Experiments in Musical Intelligence, nicknamed Emmy. Emmy’s more efficacious successor, Emily Howell, is a daughter program that successfully composes original, modern music. Emily Howell produced full musical scores modeled off the work of classical composers and eventually published an album. The end products were so convincingly made that music scholars were unable to tell they were artificially generated, raising questions about the importance of human creativity.

Nevertheless, Emily Howell still needed a human to sort through the computer-produced sequences. According to Gajos, a creative work has two distinguishing characteristics. First, it combines things that we have never seen before. Second, it breaks an implicit constraint. Salted caramel, Gajos gives as an example, was a creative dessert invention because it broke the implicit boundary between sweets and savory flavorings. “It takes enormous insight to figure out what these implicit constraints are,” says Gajos. It is a formidable challenge for a machine.

I listened to the computer-generated album “Emily Howell: From Darkness, Light” and though the chords formally sounded fine, the music struck me as strangely hollow and lacking singularity. People find themselves drawn to certain art works not simply because they are beautiful, but because they communicate something about the human mind on the production side; this emotional understanding cannot be taught to a machine.

SKILL SPILLS OVER

Although opinions differ on the degree to which artistic ability can be taught, most agree that the rewards of art instruction extend beyond the final product. The educated can become more intellectually courageous, more critically aware, more confident.

Sheema Golbaba ’14, a documentary filmmaker, knows firsthand that VES classes can have significant spillover effects. Golbaba’s VES professor transformed her initial idea for her final project, but the interaction changed more than what she turned in that semester. “Learning to be a little more open-minded [in my VES class] and to think about things in [different ways] helped me a lot, not only in my development as a person…but also [in] my other classes….I said, ‘I need to do something I’m a little uncomfortable with.’ And I don’t think I would have done that had I not been challenged previously.”

Firsthand accounts like Golbaba’s of students learning broadly applicable lessons through the study of art abound, but scientific research lags behind on substantiating these claims with evidence. In 2006, Winner and other researchers at the School of Education combed through ten studies dating back to 1950 on the effects of arts education in primary and secondary schools. In the majority of cases, there was no relationship between arts instruction and a boost in students’ academic accomplishments, but Winner and her fellow researchers did identify several other “studio habits of mind” that correlate with art instruction: persistence and engagement, express abstract concepts, creative risk-taking, observation, reflection, and knowledge of the art world.

Shari Tishman, director of Project Zero at the School of Education, says the question we really should be asking is not whether we can teach art but what the goals of this instruction are. “Developing technical expertise is only one of many [goals]…. Other goals might include teaching students how to think creatively, how to observe closely, how to pose interesting problems, how to look beyond the obvious, how to engage in productive critique, and how to look for balance and rightness of fit.  If these sorts of things are goals, it doesn’t make sense to design [a] curriculum or evaluations that focus predominantly on the somewhat esoteric goal of high-level technical expertise.” To Tishman, if expertise is not the goal of art instruction, then the answer to the question of whether art can be taught is changed dramatically, and perhaps the methodology of art education should change as well.

It’s a valid point, especially in a community that expects a high level of success in every endeavor. Not all works that start at the Carpenter Center will end up on display in one of the  galleries next door, but what students learn in the process of creation, from prose to painting, is inherently valuable. “The function of a writing class is similar to the function of reading. It helps young people to become themselves,” says Cole. “That’s the goal of the university at large....The end result is sometimes terrific poems and sometimes it is less terrific poems, but that is less important than becoming yourself.”

­—Staff writer Ola Topczewska can be reached at atopczewska@college.harvard.edu.