Art, Transcendence, Rationality, and Consciousness

A while ago I had a brief conversation with an artist. He said that modern day teaching methods for art are useless and don't encourage people to think for themselves, but just focus on correct materials, still life, and copying from photographs. He also said that music is less aesthetic and less directly perceived by the senses than art, because art is visual and in direct contact with a person's consciousness, whilst music can be experienced with the eyes shut and is transcendent (beyond the ordinary range of perception), and so therefore less conscious and aesthetic.

The fact that modern day teaching methods for art are useless and don't encourage people to think for themselves, but just focus on correct materials, still life, and copying from photographs, implies that there is a lack of imagination and perception that only applies to form and not to emotions and finer or subtler perceptions which could go along with some transcendence.

As a musician, I disagree with the artist that music is experienced or played as less conscious as visual art, as a lot of great music requires a lot of consciousness to fully appreciate, play, or understand it, and I don't think that hearing is less of a direct or valued perceptual sense than seeing. I also don't think that transcendence is equal to a reduction of consciousness, as I partly feel that this is a very Western way of thinking, and which is culturally determined by different ideas on consciousness itself (with the East equating transcendence as higher and not lower levels of consciousness).

For example, in Kant's theory of knowledge, transcendence means being beyond the limits of experience and hence unknowable. This also means being above and independent of the material universe, and so the Western model may be a more materialistic view of consciousness than say a spiritual one, or it may be assuming that transcendence is beyond material reality, when it may just be beyond ordinary, formal, or mundane perceptual experience.

The Western model on consciousness also seems to me to include certain ideas on madness, that if madness is regarded as transcendent, then it is therefore according to that model something less conscious and less aesthetic, when again transcendence might mean a higher consciousness on some level.