Bibliographic record
Abstract
The difficult art-work is not formally considered an appropriate part of today's arts curriculum, as a glance at authorised classroom resource lists quickly confirms.By excluding from formal compulsory education the conceptual challenges offered by difficult work such as the poetic experiments of the Dadaists or the book-works and textual interventions of contemporary artists, we encourage a closed concept of art and can hardly be surprised at public outcries against avantgarde invention.This paper argues for the inclusion of difficult art-works in the secondary-school arts curriculum.George Steiner's four levels of poetic difficulty are used as a way of demonstrating which difficulties are included in the curriculum and which are peculiar to art-works but rarely studied.Examples of classroom applications are used to illustrate each of Steiner's four levels of difficulty: contingent, modal, tactical and ontological.It is argued that ontological difficulty distinguishes many of the art-works that have evoked public indignation and outrage; they ask blank questions and thereby challenge conventional concepts of art.This ontological difficulty is considered in light of Immanuel Kant's concept of aesthetic/reflective judgement and the discussion is brought full-circle with the question: If engagement with difficult art-work fits Kant's description of how aesthetic judgement postulates "a universal voice about a liking unmediated by concepts", how can secondary-school arts education neglect the conceptual difficulty of modem works and claim it is teaching art in its unique capacity for teaching to be critical?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.071 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".