Insight from another side: what art education can learn from Aurobindo

Visual culture theory tends to undermine aesthetic hierarchies by arguing that they do not derive from any intrinsic qualities in artworks and are merely there to sustain social class distinctions. In so doing they create a tension with traditional concepts of art education. At the heart of this tension is postmodern critical thinking, which places ethical concerns at the heart of art evaluation. These ethical concerns contend that it is essential to expose subtle regimes of dominance and to empower students to resist them (although visual culture theory is itself subject to the same lack of hierarchy in its judgements). Aurobindo Ghose proposed that intuition is superior to rational and critical processes. His view was that intuition is the main way in which the deepest self of an individual, group or discipline can be realized and expressed. I argue that art education should draw on Aurobindo's ideas in order to develop a new relationship between the aesthetic and ethical that does not subordinate art to ethics or politics, but seeks to make it a more powerful instrument of spiritual development.