The S N School of Communication, University of Hyderabad (UoH) organized a lecture on The Future of Art Education with T M Krishna on March 13, 2021. The lecture was presided over by Dean, S N School, UoH, Dr. Thirumal and Dr. Usha Raman who introduced the speaker.
T M Krishna is an Indian Carnatic vocalist, writer, activist and author. As a vocalist, he has made a large number of innovations in both the style and substance of his concerts. He is the recipient of 2016 Ramon Magsaysay Award.
The lecture discussed in detail about the meaning of art in general term that most of us relate with. T M Krishna explained how the word art is used very loosely in our everyday lives, how we equate art to our understanding of ‘beautiful’, and how we need to recognize art as a human endeavor because It was not something that was naturally there, it is something that homosapeins have created.
“Somewhere we all figured that art provides us an opportunity to view the world from a position that is not just about ourselves, that momentary phase where we are able to feel the feeling and not feel the me feeling,” he said.
T M Krishna added, “Art is timeless. Its more about the travel of the emotion, the travel of the experience, the abstractness of the art itself. It then allows you to share with a range and with less limitations of having had to actually experience; which is why when we cry watching a movie, we just cry knowingly that it is just an act and not real.”
T M Krishna emphasized that it is important to realize that all art is not accidental, it is intentional. All art is a deliberate act. “There are to words that we use very selectively: we call some things as learning and some as education. If I practice an art form that is one of the privileged art forms in the Indian social landscape, we would rarely use the word education; we would say learning. On the other hand if we say education we are talking about the marketplace, employment, money, commerce, etc,” he mentioned.
He brought another important point about how art is marginalized according to caste, gender and even sexual preferences and how all these things play an important role in our question of what is the future of art education, irrespective of the art form we practice.
“It is essential that we see caste, gender and sexual preferences play a very important role in the way we have organized art, learning, education, knowledge, formal, informal, institutional, non-institutional, etc. All these things are fundamentally being framed by these societal norms that we have created. If you look at the art forms practiced by the Dalit communities and the trans communities, the greatest art marginalization happens there. Because fundamentally they are the most marginalized people in the society. Dalit art is not even considered as a serious intellectual intentional art activity,” he explained.
Contributed by Soumya Sharma, Department of Communication, UoH.