Personally, I loved my macaroni pictures. Who's to tell me that I glued my pasta elbows to the cardboard pad incorrectly? Sure, not at all may be "good" art, in that what one creates may not always be aesthetically pleasing. But sometimes, the point of art is not to look pretty. The point is often to convey a message. And if the message to be conveyed is that all art should look the same (that there are rules, as South Park Teacher Lady above decrees), then the purpose of art has been defeated.

This comic, which I found on StumbleUpon (great resource whenever you want to find something random and blog about it), brought me back to one of the first sessions in class when we talked about the problems with the concept of "pre-writing." If one "pre-writes," then this implies that there are rules for how to generate ideas, which is entirely false. Ideas are free form, and manifest themselves without a strict adherance to any particular set of rules.

The dynamic that arises here is also present in Quinn's Ishmael. In the discussions between the Student and the Gorilla, they examine how prophets play such a critical role in our understanding of the world. Prophets, says Ishmael, show us how to live, that a right way exists based on some pretermined rules. Here, the prophet is the art teacher, and the listener is the student. The prophetic teacher tells the student how to do something very abstract - artistic expression - based on very concrete rules - what is right and what is wrong. In the book, Ishmael tries to deconstruct the predetermined rights and wrongs of the Student's cultural upbringing, which may be one of the most valuable analytical lessons one can learn. Because really, right and wrong are subjective, and left up to one to decided for him/herself.