I agree with a lot of things that were said in this book. He reinforced some of my thoughts about what types of media are acceptable to educational institutions. My thought is that they are unacceptable because white men predominately controlled the higher education system and they had no frame of reference for art outside of their mediums. So textiles, ceramics, etc. are usually looked down on as forms of art since they can also be practical.
A few Quotes:
What I want to stress here is not how we are connected to the past but how strongly we are disconnected. For practical purposes current art instruction doesn't involved a fixed curriculum, a hierarchy of genres, a sequence of courses, a coherent body of knowledge, or a unified theory or practice. - p.38
Behind this assumption is the idea that what artists do is different in kind from what electrical engineers or physicists do: in theory everyone can understand art, but only some people can understand engineering or physics. And in the end, everyone needs art, while only some people could be said to need the expertise of an electrical engineer or a physics. Art is ideally or potentially universal: it has to do with the people's feeling an dinner lives, and so it isn't a specialty known only to a few individuals. - p.63
Artists are educated differently, typically with fewer non-art subjects, and that contributes to the fact that artists make art that expresses their own minority subculture and not the culture as a whole. -p.64
p. 73-78 are especially good.
They all boil down to one central problem, which has been with us since the early Renaissance: the notion that the crafts are not as important as the arts.
Our indecision about crafts, decoration, and design suggests that it's a deep-seated inequality, built into Western culture: we just feel it is true that chairs have a different value from paintings. - p.83
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