READING PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26.

Public art programs: research update

Researchers agree that art participation is an important leisure pursuit, with benefits not only to the individual, but also to the community. Art participation can be active, where people create or perform the art, or passive, as is the case when an audience views a performance or a person visits a gallery. 

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Researcher Howard Spector suggests that active art experiences benefit all age groups by providing individuals with the means to freely and creatively express themselves. Self-expression, in turn, promotes individuality, bolsters self-confidence and improves motivation and attitudes towards academic performance. Both active and passive art experiences can provide the benefits of discovery, stimulation and relaxation (Oliphant 2000). Furthermore, people's participation in art enhances their development and expands their thoughts about culture. In short, art can make individuals more socially conscious. 

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Communities committed to providing opportunities for experiencing art are considered more livable because they are attractive to businesses and industry and they offer a higher quality of life for residents (Riley 2002). Tourism is strongly linked to art; art is believed to stimulate tourism in a community, and vice versa. Art-related tourism generates tourists and revenue, attracts high-income consumers, extends the tourist season and is a "green" form of the industry (Hughes 2000). Revitalization efforts have increased in many cities because of the strong presence of art opportunities.

Art programs can be highly effective in reducing community problems related to delinquent behavior and truancy in youth (Spector 2000). The Philadelphia Department of Recreation Mural Arts Program (MAP) is one such program. It began in the early 1980s when the city undertook to remove graffiti in the city while creating a positive, productive and creative outlet for adjudicated graffiti artists, as they used their talents to beautify public spaces through the creation of murals, instilling a sense of pride, excellence, diligence and civic responsibility. 

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In recognition of these and other benefits, communities are finding many ways to ensure that the public is provided with opportunities to experience art. Public art programs are one way. These programs are typically administered by government, which commissions or mandates works of art for display in public spaces. Public art works can include street furniture, decorations, paving and landmarks, and may take on many forms, including sculpture, decorative ironwork, mosaic flooring and murals. The primary purpose of public art is to bring art into everyday life, to energize public spaces and to arouse society's thinking and imagination. 

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Despite the significant benefits that art participation can offer to individuals and communities, only 35 percent of the American adult population visit museums or galleries at least once during the year, and only about 25 percent attend a live performance (Bradshaw 1998). Even fewer (14 percent) participate directly in photography, painting, drawing, sculpting, dance (other than ballet), creative writing or classical music. If art experiences are so beneficial, why aren't more people participating?

To help researchers shed light on this question, the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision-making through objective research and analysis, developed "A Behavior Model of the Participant Decision", which can be used to investigate people's inclinations about participating in an art activity (Yoshitomi 2000). According to Yoshitomi, each person has a disposition related to his or her interest in engaging in an art activity; a person's disposition is based on sociodemographic characteristics, social or cultural identity, personality and previous experience. The RAND model clusters participants into three groups according to their disposition toward art participation: those disinclined to participate; those inclined to participate; and those currently participating. 

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The RAND findings reveal that the disinclined perceive themselves as being uncomfortable or unfamiliar with art. This disposition might occur among people who do not value art and who have not received art education, or who perceive themselves as unsophisticated or lacking skill to participate. The inclined are interested in participating, but may be constrained by particular barriers such as cost, time, and proper attire. Current participants are those who are involved, and influence or encourage others to participate. Researchers suggest that a strong relationship exists between childhood and adult art participation rates. Individuals with a greater number of childhood art experiences are more likely to have higher rates of participation as adults. Although 90 percent of Americans believe art instruction is important for children and should be offered in schools, almost 40 percent of schools either offer no art instruction or have art instructors with no formal art training. 

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One recreation organization working to make sure children get exposed to art is the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, which offer two innovative programs: The National Photography Program and the National Fine Arts Exhibit. Both are designed to get children excited about art. The photography program promotes new art that is technologically produced, including video and computer graphics, but primarily focuses on photography. The program provides club members with the opportunity to achieve personal growth and receive artistic recognition through instruction in photography. Participants also display their work at local, regional and national photography contests. The second program is the Fine Arts Exhibit. This encourages artistic expression, creativity, cultural appreciation and the development of artistic skills through classes, special events, exhibits and competitions. It allows participants to explore a variety of mediums, including drawing, painting, print making, collage and sculpture.

Because art experiences provide so many important benefits to individuals and communities, it is important for community programs to facilitate opportunities and provide encouragement to increase participation in a variety of programs.

READING PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40.

200 Years of Australian Landscapes at the Royal Academy in London

This exhibition promises to chart the evolution of a nation through its art, but not everyone agrees with the reasons behind the choice of artwork 

A For the casual viewer, the exhibition of landscapes, Australia, selected by the Royal Academy of Art will be a spectacular guide through Australian art history. Included in the exhibition are a range of artists and styles, dating from the earliest days of colonial art and progressing through expressionism and modernism to the artists of the 20th century, culminating with the current generation of Australian artists. It is hardly surprising, then, that this results in a flexible, wide-ranging notion of landscape. 

B But this landmark exhibition gives rise to some questions, and perhaps problems, regarding Britain’s relationship with its former colony. By choosing a style of painting at which British artists excel, the Academy could be seen as inviting criticism that hints at a telling attitude towards art by comparison. But it is the very theme of landscape painting that makes this a controversial selection. To consider if condescending is perhaps too strong, but for Joanna Mendelssohn, Australian critic and Associate Professor at the University of NSW’s College of Fine Arts (COFA), there is a suggestion that British artistic values have directed this exhibition, rather than allowing Australia the freedom to demonstrate its maturity. 

C  What Mendelssohn found surprising about the exhibition was the underlying rules for the selection of works seemed to have been so conservative. Since the landscape is a very strong British artistic theme, it appeared to her that when the British looked to the art of a former colony, there was a tendency for them to think that those colonies would continue to be like the British themselves. In reviewing Australian art, the British insisted on looking at the genre of landscape painting. 

D Because of colonial ties, it was inevitable during Australian art’s formative years that it would reflect Britain’s devotion to the beloved landscape before its own character and idiosyncrasies took shape. And while Mendelssohn’s concern over the exhibition’s conventional selection is valid, the Academy is nevertheless embracing the peculiarities of Australian art from the mid-19th century onward, albeit within the boundaries of landscape. 

E  Australia is curated by Kathleen Soriano, director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy. ‘Certainly the influence of English, French or German art is much more evident in the early periods, in the early 1800s to mid-1800s,’ she says. ‘What I wanted to show was how Australian art develops a real distinctiveness, associated with the landscape and the light.’ 

F  The fusion of ‘tradition’ of the European kind with something more specifically Australian, and often personal, is crucial to the exhibition and extends particularly to some of the more contemporary artists involved. Sydney-born video artist Shaun Gladwell is a good example of this. Gladwell’s most famous piece, which is featured in the exhibition, is Storm Sequence (2000), a video of Gladwell skateboarding on the Bondi seafront as one of Sydney’s signature brutal storms lingers offshore. It is his acknowledgment of landscape (or seascape) tradition, coloured by Gladwell’s own individualism. ‘To exhibit my work in this show might make some sense because I was interested in Turner and the idea of atmosphere affecting vision, something I was really interested in around the time of Storm Sequence. I was thinking about this tradition of Romantic landscape, but I wanted to make it personal,’ says Gladwell. But he didn’t want to just embark on borrowing imagery from elsewhere. He wanted to bring it to his experience and his world through skateboarding and beach culture. 

G So while it may seem narrow for Britain to reduce Australian art to the genre of landscape, there can be little denying that British landscape painting is still relevant to a current generation of Australian practitioners, however indirectly. 

H Visitors to the exhibition encounter Australian Aboriginal art first, the idea being that these works warrant a prominent position because they were ‘first’. Over the last couple of decades, London has hosted many successful exhibitions of Aboriginal art in smaller spaces, but for Soriano, Australia represents an opportunity to place such art within the context of new relationships to the art of the settlers and white Australia. ‘One of the reasons landscape was seen as being the right theme was because Australian art started in and on the landscape,’ she says. ‘[The exhibition] is a beautiful meshing of the two different kinds of art that allowed me to bring them together comfortably and honestly with this theme. It was important for me to present Indigenous art to audiences, and I felt it was most accurate to be seen as part of Australian art history, rather than a separate exhibition of its own.’

I Meanwhile, Australian critic Mendelssohn also points out that London is increasingly less important to today’s generation of artists, and this somewhat weakens the ceremony surrounding the exhibition in London. ‘China is the most important art market in the world,’ she says. ‘If you’ve made it in Shanghai, you’ve made it. The world has changed. My students in Australia, who come from all over the world, really want to see Venice Biennale and Art Basel, but they’re less interested in going to London. When I was growing up, London was the destination, and then when I was at university all the smart young things wanted to go to New York,’ she added. ‘Now they want to go everywhere. There’s no such thing as the centre and the periphery like there used to be. It’s much more complicated.’