Wrapping up for the week
Post #1327 • April 10, 2009, 7:40 AM
First of all, I've installed our fourth and final paper delivered at last week's FATE panel: The Visual Impulse: A Lost Metaphor (PDF) by Peter Kaniaris, Professor of Art at Anderson University in South Carolina.
Art education in universities, colleges and art schools has undergone a massive transformation over the past 20 years – a transformation that is as beguiling as it is destructive. It may appear inexorable, if implausible, to the teachers who have been in higher education for more than two decades, a dismal outcome of post-modernity and digital technology. Before our eyes, the twin enchantments of technology and critical theory appeared and visual illiteracy found its home in academe. These allurements nest and nurture a final retribution – the eviction of the pure aesthetic, the pictorial, and pedagogical traditions one by one. For those students who will experience academe’s new magic, it may mean they will not know the visual domain as a form of knowledge, and thus will be unable to comprehend the visual language becoming largely blind to its unique capacity. They will acquire a degree, yet will remain uneducated purveyors of simulated images; legates of the digital age and post-modernity.
Secondly, Peter Cowling has posted his interview with me at Loveart.
Looking is not some semi-conscious activity that only gains significance when we connect it somehow to life. It is life. Hui-Neng said that the meaning of life is to see. If we get that wrong, we might as well throw in the towel as art writers.
Last but not least, I will be presenting The Moon Fell On Me at What We Do at the Rhode Island School of Design tomorrow at 1:30. Please come out if you're in the Providence area. I'm getting my presentation together today, which means there could be a new episode of TMFOM up rather soon.