Integrative and Disintegrative Art

This article compares and analyzes two seemingly opposite approaches to visual arts that can be called integrative and disintegrative. They are usually seen to be contradictory, and the latter is often favored in contemporary art discourse. The article suggests, however, that the integrative approach hcan still be quite as favorable to art as the disintegrative one. Both views are useful for certain purposes and in the context of individual art works they are often actually intertwining. Especially from the perspective of art education, it is easy to understand the different implications of these views. This is because in that context the approaches are typically sharply accentuated and thus clearly visible. In this article, special focus is therefore placed on the means by which these concepts may be raised in visual art schools and universities, although the issue has much wider relevance.