Art, Excess, and Education

Book excerpt: This book concentrates on the deep historical, political, and institutional relationships between art, education, and excess. Going beyond field specific discourses of art history, art criticism, philosophy, and aesthetics, it explores how the concept of excess has been important and enduring from antiquity through contemporary art, and from early film through the newer interactive media. Examples considered throughout the book focus on disgust, grandiosity, sex, violence, horror, disfigurement, endurance, shock, abundance, and emptiness, and frames them all within an educational context. Together they provide theories and classificatory systems, historical and political interpretations of art and excess, examples of popular culture, and suggestions for the future of educational practice.