Too Secure for Words: Academia's Plain-Language Problem

I recently heard a news story on WESA-FM, the National Public Radio affiliate in Pittsburgh, on a program at the University of Pittsburgh on coding. It seems that some zillions and zillions of jobs are going unfilled nationwide, and some eight thousand in the Pittsburgh area alone. The story said that mid-career professionals who were contemplating a career change was the perfect applicant they were looking for the program.

Fun With Texture: Demo from a Cartooning Workshop

This sheet was drawn on Strathmore medium drawing 400 series 9" x 12" creme paper as a demonstration for a cartooning sketchbook workshop at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2008. I enjoyed those workshops immensely. They were usually held in summer, although in recent years I became too busy with graduate school to be able to offer them. For years the museum refused to offer cartooning instruction, insisting by policy that educational offerings coincide with works on view in the museum galleries. Finally, in 2004, with the R. Crumb retrospective as part of the Carnegie International that year, I was invited to give instruction.

 
Since then the museum has canceled adult education workshops in drawing, painting, ceramics and other traditional media in favor of lectures relating to contemporary works of art. It is nothing short of tragic to see the museum art world forsake interactive drawing, the basis of all the visual arts (including architecture, cinematic storytelling/storyboarding, theatrical set and costume design, etc.) for passive dispensation of theory. The proper response to art is artmaking, not idle attendance at a lecture.

Two CMAs and the Second Commandment: A Digression

The current artworld, centered in public museums housed in large, monumental neoclassical buildings, have run the risk of succumbing to an ideology centered on their own self-importance as elite palaces of culture rather than democratic institutions of municipal and civic engagement. Cleveland's museum early in its history built a palace but emphasized education for all classes of Clevelanders, and despite the impulse to move to the right, has managed to successfully balance the two; but Pittsburgh, unfortunately, has not. Under its current leadership, Pittsburgh's CMA (as opposed to Cleveland's CMA) has embraced the ideology of contemporaneity in which various pseudo-Dada practices form the basis of high-flown intellectual discourse. But such mere pseudo-political conversations as can result from the contemplation of found objects, installations, performance and the like, while often interesting and verbally challenging, are rarely as rich as the contemplation of visual art that are works of the mind, as manually-generated images almost by the very means of their origins almost inherently are.

The mistake that over-educated, verbally-adept critics, curators, theorists, and art historians continually make is to disregard visual composition such as only the hand produces as thoughtless, or at least not as thinking on a level comparable with words. Old-fashioned craft, according to this ideology, is reserved only for the wordsmith and never the image maker, who is invariably regarded as a capitalist sell-out for rendering illusions corresponding to apparent reality, or at the very least mechanical and uncritical like a camera. Likewise, such honorifics as thinker and genius are reserved for the writer of texts, and even the title artist, when bestowed upon maker of conversation pieces, is not done without the most arch and patronizing irony. The bias for text over image runs very deep in our culture, going back at least to the Judao-Christian second commandment, which Max Horkheimer claimed as the basis and justification for contemporary critical theory.*

In any case, one hopes that the ascendance of logos and the iconoclastic impulse that has subtended much enthusiasm for modern and contemporary art over the past century or more will prove to be only a temporary aberration in our culture, and for a return of drawing to the educational environment of the city of Pittsburgh, and to the artworld nationally and internationally, in the very near future.

*See Max Horheimer, letter to Otto O. Herz, September 1, 1969, in Gesammelte Schriften, volume 18 Briefwechsel 1949-1973 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996) p. 743; cited in Sven Lüttken, "Monotheism à la Mode," in Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 304, 310, note 11. Lüttken attempts to make the rather unconvincing argument that a total ban on representative art is a valid form of criticism of the image and the proper role critical inquiry, suggesting the temperament of critical theorists.

For more on drawing, see The Withering Away of Drawing. For more on the Dumbadze anthology, see After Critical Thinking.

The Fig Leaf of Cognitive Training: Navigating Our Mediated World by Conforming to Contemporaneity

In response to “The Crisis in Art History,” which I cited in my previous post, Amy K. Hamlin and Karen J. Leader, in “Art History That! A Manifesto for the Future of a Discipline,” characterize art historians as having “Highly developed visual discernment, a deep knowledge of history, [and] a nuanced understanding of cultural heritage.” They assert, “we need art historians because they are equipped to teach the skills urgently required by twenty-first century citizens to navigate the complexities of a visually driven information age.” The last point, that the study of art history is vital to navigate our mediated world, is related to the rationale I heard in my old department: that art history, unique among college offerings, uniquely offers an irreplaceable training in visual analysis. Any criticism of the curriculum, pedagogy, or methodologies currently trending in art history, for Hamlin and Leader, are attacks on the humanistic development of critical cognitive faculties; the real problem, as they see it, is rather the exorbitant expense acquiring a college education. [1]

This is a disingenuous argument for two reasons. First, while art historians are equipped to teach some of the skills required for citizenship in the twenty-first century, they are neither uniquely equipped or even the first choice for doing so. If we seriously want to prepare individuals to navigate modern visual media, if not inoculate them to the more subtle forms of visual manipulation deployed by advertising, political campaigns, and visceral entertainment, what is called for would be a practical and theoretical course in film editing and theory, and it would be mandatory in every undergraduate curriculum.

For starters, the Odessa Steps sequence from The Battleship Potemkin would be analyzed frame by frame (preferably in an old Moviola), and students would have the opportunity to edit their own footage (and tell their own truths or fabrications) in Adobe Premiere. The theoretical writings of Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein would be read and debated (preferably vehemently, in a café), and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, one of the most brilliantly edited movies I can think of, would be dissected for its fluid technical mastery and somewhat crude cultural and ideological assumptions. Static images would be studied as well, particularly in their juxtaposition as storyboards or comic strips. (I am, of course, describing my own early training in the study of comic book storytelling, except that I viewed the Odessa Steps on an 8mm film viewer, and spliced together a few shots together on 16mm with pieces of adhesive tape, the old fashioned way.) Still life and figure drawing would be optional but strongly encouraged, as well as basics of photography (composition, lighting).

To this course of study, art history could perhaps be offered as an ancillary curriculum for those wishing to explore the ways in which manual images were made prior to the advent and inexorable conquest of photography and cinematography over the past 175 years, as well as studio courses for those wishing to master manual image making (figurative drawing, painting, sculpture) for themselves (filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Fellini, and art theorists such as Meyer Schapiro were all skillful and gifted artists in their own right, practices that informed their work).

Donald Simpson (American, b. 1961), Light Up! (With Apologies to Tony Smith), 1979. Photo-mechanical transfer on photo paper from found clip art, 8 1/2" x 11". Collection of the artist. © Donald Simpson, all rights reserved.

To another of Hamlin and Leader’s points, that art historians having a “Highly developed visual discernment, a deep knowledge of history, [and] a nuanced understanding of cultural heritage,” Patricia Mainardi and Pepe Karmel, in “The Crisis in Art History,” already dispute that. With the surge of contemporary art study threatening to overtake that of “historical art” (i.e., precontemporary art), the authors see an increasing neglect of historical study and a cheapening of the art history curriculum. Mainardi laments, “the vast amounts of wealth now moving through the world of contemporary art, in museums and auction houses, galleries, and international art fairs” are seducing art history students away from “the libraries and archives of previous generations.” She notes, “Wherever contemporary art studies have become dominant, the same results are apparent.” Students no longer study “the art of different periods and cultures,” but instead focus on the art of the twenty-first century, and almost exclusively on texts written in English.[2] Karmel notes that the average time to complete a dissertation in art history overall is 4.2 years; for premodern topics, the average is 5.5 to 6.3 years; modern art, 3.9 years; but for contemporary only 2.6 years. Karmel remarks,

You interview the artist a few times, you persuade the artist’s gallery to let you see their files and their photo archive (the real-world equivalent of a catalogue raisonné), you read the published criticism, you follow up on the artist’s remarks about texts and ideas that influenced him or her. Then you sit down and write. The resulting text may be very good. It may become a terrific book or exhibition catalog. But it simply is not the same thing as a PhD dissertation in other fields of art history. And the degree it earns should not be a PhD.[3]

What Hamlin and Leader’s (and my old department’s) defense of art history ignores is the overwhelming expenditure of energy, not on training students to navigate our mediated world or even to visually analyze right-wing print propaganda, but on genuflecting before all-powerful art world institutions (including the academic discipline of art history itself). Why would one-of-a-kind treasured works roped off in a museum, or a Jeff Koons guarded by bouncers at London Frieze,[4] best serve as examples of visual phenomena for such study anyway? Art history involves all kinds of fascinating side trips into aesthetic theory, the chemical analysis of pigments, and internecine doctrinal fights, but very little of this is of any practical use to the college student trying to make critical sense of the media barrage emanating from her smart phone. As I said, justifying art history on such grounds is tantamount to advocating the study of the history of world religions as the surest remedy for high blood pressure since we all need a quiet, meditative break from the frenzy of our lives now and then. It is absurd.

Far from a useful training in the navigation of our highly mediated world, art history is currently little more than an indoctrination into the current world of art. It is crucial to make this explicit as the wealth of that art world increasingly seduces and obtains a stranglehold on academic programs, away from the study of what Mainardi calls “historical art” to contemporary product, of which we are urged to “think historically” as Terry Smith puts in is ubiquitous writings on contemporary art.[5] Of course, it is not impossible to consider the present from an historical perspective. Indeed, an historic sensibility is desirable; hence the study of history. However, rendering pseudo-art historical judgments on what is valuable in our present visual culture, judgments that are immediately ratified and reified by institutions with the power, authority, and economic clout to makes such choices forever fixed and unalterable by later generations (by the inclusion of certain works in public exhibitions if not permanent collections and in textbooks) is not a historical process at all. Such complicity in contemporaneity is not a critical function but corruption itself. It is scholarship shilling for the current art world.

From this view, the promise of cognitive training can only serve as a cynical fig leaf to what is really going on in art history programs today: the spread of conformity and complicity in the pseudo-cultural machinations of capital.

Notes
[1] Amy K. Hamlin and Karen J. Leader, “Art History That! A Manifesto for the Future of a Discipline,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 138-144; quote p. 139.
[2] Patricia Mainardi, “Art History: “Research that ‘Matters’”? (pp. 305-307) in Patricia Mainardi, “The Crisis in Art History,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, vol. 27, no. 4 (December 2011), pp. 303-343; quote p. 306.
[3] Pepe Karmel, “Just What Is It That Makes Contemporary Art So Different, So Appealing?” (pp. 318-327) in Patricia Mainardi, “The Crisis in Art History,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, vol. 27, no. 4 (December 2011), pp. 303-343; quote p. 326.
[4] See A.A. Gill, “Frieze Until the Numbness Sets In,” Vanity Fair, January 2014, pp. 44-45; p. 45.
[5] Terry Smith, “Contemporaneity in the History of Art: A Clark Workshop 2009, Summaries of Papers and Notes on Discussions,” Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture [http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu], vol 1 (2011), p. 13.

Independence Day: Celebrating Non-Conformity

Names have been omitted to maintain an aura of confidentiality. If you can connect the dots, you know too much. Plausible deniability is truth. If the shoe fits, for God's sake, don't continue running around barefoot over sharp tacks.

At the beginning of this past spring break, I posted a series of remarks on social media about some of my quite recent graduate school and college teaching experiences, as well as some general observations on academia and my chosen discipline. By their very nature, these random and in some cases nearly incoherent remarks neglected to dwell on the many wonderful and positive experiences I have enjoyed over more than a decade of college, and my deep appreciation and gratitude for the opportunity—and amounted to little more than letting off a portion of the steam that had built up over various irritations and perceived injustices I felt during that period of time. Initially, I had only intended to make a single snarky quip or two concerning a recent development that had stuck in my craw; but one remark led to another, and another, and another, and within no time I had compiled myself quite a little diatribe. Since no more than a handful of social media acquaintances (none from my immediate academic environment) had offered their comments on this thread, I convinced myself that the conversation had remained private and of no interest to anyone besides those who had directly participated. In any case my remarks would have made little sense to few outside of an immediate workplace circle, since after all no names had been used, and the situations described could have only been recognized by a handful of coworkers (and perhaps in the abstract by a few outsiders who were in some way acquainted with analogous stresses and irritations of university life). Still, in reading back the postings the following day, I decided that in their rough, stream-of-consciousness form, replete with certain rhetorical exaggerations and more than a few unkind characterizations of the name-withheld variety, were not fit to be left dangling in cyberspace, so I completely deleted them. Having successfully purged myself of a good bit of pent-up negative energy, I promptly forgot the entire incident and enjoyed the rest of my spring break, relaxing and preparing for the final month of school. No harm done—or so I thought.

An irrelevant cartoon from seventeen years ago (my lucky number).

Alas—the following Monday, much to my horror, I learned that some person or persons (whose identity remains both completely unknown and utterly irrelevant to me) had observed the thread, cut, pasted and converted it into a PDF, and circulated it (reportedly) to “everyone” in my department. My remarks, in other words, had gone “viral” among an inconceivably small and inbred group that included friends, colleagues, advisors, and even a teacher’s aide, few of whom hitherto had ever so much as “liked” any of my other social media postings, and none of whom apparently held me in high enough regard to tip me off that my remarks had become the subject of departmental scrutiny and discussion. Imagine Martin Luther’s embarrassment had his rough and nearly incoherent notes for the ninety-nine theses been leaked before he could realize a more refined, final draft and you’ll understand something of my chagrin on stylistic grounds alone. But of course, the story does not end there.

As classes resumed the following week, I was summoned to the department office to be called on the carpet. My ersatz social media musings—which had been made virtually, off-campus, on my own computer and utilizing my own internet connection—had been deemed, quite arbitrarily, an appropriate and material workplace issue (this after a long history of ignoring complaints I had made concerning actual, non-virtual workplace behaviors—observed with my own eyes and experienced first-hand). Options such as mandatorily-sentenced therapy, the withholding of future letters of recommendation (just as I was beginning my crucial post-departmental job search), the launching of personal defamation lawsuits, and even summary firing were all discussed matter-of-factly as very real possibilities, as though any or all of the above (or threats of retaliation in general) would have only been perfectly reasonable and understandable coming from those who presumed to call themselves scholars. Indeed, the only reason I agreed to meet was out of a genuine concern that my 130 undergraduate students would have had to suffer replacement instructors for the last few weeks of class—a reckless and destructive action I was convinced the powers-that-be were in spiteful enough of a mood to take.

“This stuff is out there,” I was told repeatedly, as if the deleted thread contained nuclear secrets that would eventually and inevitably fall into terrorist hands (ironic that those who profess an admiration for Edward Snowden or Julian Assange have a very different take on the free flow of opinion when it concerns far more mundane matters closer to home). My remarks, only briefly posted on the internet, had a life of their own, or so the reasoning went—a trope conveniently denying the willful agency of those who had, for whatever motives, consciously cut, pasted, and circulated those postings to colleagues, who had indeed “pushed” them even to those who were not customarily online nor otherwise paying any attention to my social media persona. To underscore the gravity of my predicament, I was reminded of certain policies prohibiting the use of university equipment and networks to circulate materials that could potentially be, among other things, defamatory or in violation of copyright—a complete irrelevancy since, as I said above, I had used neither university equipment nor networks to offer my remarks, but posted at home using my own personal computer with my own internet connection. On the other hand, the person or persons who had cut and pasted my copyrighted postings, probably with the goal of defaming me (it would not have been the first time such a thing had happened in my experience in this happy, collegial environment) and almost certainly by utilizing university equipment, networks, and email addresses to distribute them, had violated this particular policy on several counts—an irony no doubt completely lost on the powers-that-be.

In point of fact, my original remarks were no longer “out there” at all. Of my own volition, long before I was even aware that any colleague had seen them, I had deleted the thread from my social media page and expunged it entirely from the internet, although presumably the PDF still resides on several offline personal hard drives (I have in my possession only a blurred print-out passed along to me by a fourth or fifth party). Little of the contents of my original remarks bears repeating, least of all verbatim, and I am not going to do so now. Consequently, unless you participated in or happened to have seen the thread when it was live online, you will have to take my word for it when I characterize them as the stuff of typical profane griping of the sort commonly overheard in any after-working-hours bar, all but meaningless outside the context of the long-running private conversations in which they originated. In other words, it is material that could only cause harm if intentionally pirated by tattle-tales and magnified by malice, and then only to the extent to which any given remark may have hit a truthful nerve or two (in other words, if the shoe fits, wear it). On the other hand, if you only happen to have read the pirated PDF or learned of its contents through third parties, please be advised that you are culpable in an extremely tawdry conspiracy and paradoxically cannot admit any acquaintance at all with what I’m talking about—let alone feign outrage—without confessing to your own monumental lapse of ethics. In any case, you hardly count as my friend or colleague any more—but only you would know that, not I. Nota bene.

This Stasi-like behavior—the secret surveillance, informancy, scrutiny of furtively obtained materials, “telling mommy” and bidding her to take action, to say nothing of the subsequent shunning and other career repercussions I have had to endure since—needless to say, is in itself far worse than anything I could have asserted in my initial posted remarks or even have dreamt of alleging. The entire incident—from the oppressive environment prohibiting any form of criticism to the repressive actions taken as a consequence—speaks to the dysfunctional and poisonous culture that prompted their expression in an uncontrollable and unconstructive outburst in the first place. Although these actions do not retroactively affirm any of my individual complaints explicitly, they certainly do nothing to dispel them, and tend rather to generally confirm their validity—at least as topics that should be discussed and debated among fair-minded friends. In any case, it is utterly reprehensible behavior, especially coming from a group of individuals who presume to call themselves educators, and most of whom, individually if not collectively, I continue to hold in high esteem (including those who, it pains me to think, conferred upon me my degrees). It speaks volumes about the curious phenomenon in which erudite and enlightened individuals—in this case those of whom in their own scholarship, classroom teaching, and committee advising demonstrate openness, honesty, collaboration, and a willingness to transgress almost any boundary for the sake of critical inquiry—can devolve collectively into an expedient affiliation based on little more than careerism and self-seeking: autocratic, authoritarian, intolerant of dissent, demanding of absolute conformity at all costs, to say nothing of the blatant violations of university policy, principles of academic freedom, and simple human decency that are in abundant evidence here.

I alluded to this matter in another posting on this blog, and was reminded of it recently when I came across this commentary on the I Ching reading, number 13 (a fateful number for me), T’ung Jên/Fellowship with Men, in which the six in the second place reads, “Fellowship with men in the clan. Humiliation.” Of this, Wilhelm Baynes remarks,

There is a danger here of formation of a separate faction on the basis of personal and egotistic interests. Such factions, which are exclusive and, instead of welcoming all men, must condemn one group in order to unite the others originate from low motives and therefore lead in the course of time to humiliation.*

The “one group” in this case are the dissenters, non-conformists, and heretics who cannot keep their mouths shut, some of whom have been among our most valuable educators.

*Wilhelm Baynes, The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. Cary F. Banes (Princeton University Press, 1950/1967), p. 57.

The Withering Away of Drawing

A generation ago, one could go to the theater to see acting, a dance recital to see dance, a concert to see music, a comedy club to see comedy, a movie theater to see cinema. Today one can still attend those venues and see those creative expressions, mutatis mutandis, in forms that are approximately recognizable and arguably more sophisticated (the dancers, musicians and directors I know all report that today’s performers are all better trained than ever). But whereas a generation ago one could go to a museum or gallery to see art (drawing, painting, sculpture—I will refer to drawing as the global stand-in for all the traditional forms of handmade imagery), today one can only see emaciated installation, careerist curatorship, and pleonastic critical theory. The marble palaces and temples of art built a century ago no longer showcase the works of the hand, but the utter conquest of logos. In terms of the art world, no one seems to draw anymore.

The question is not whether such vapid contemporary practices as installation, performance, “big photography” and the like are valid forms of creative expression, dependent though they are on a kind of literal-minded, overeducated, flatfooted verbal elaboration (the wall text, the audio tour, the credential-fetishizing CV), but why these synthetic rituals merit our attention at the expense of drawing, painting and sculpture. Why have these “new” practices attached themselves, like a cancer, to the visual arts, and not to the performing arts, or to creative writing? 

One can still read a book on paper, Kindle, or ipad, and still expect proper spelling and punctuation. But hardly any visual artist of any art historical stature (and there is no other kind) since Jackson Pollock has bothered to study perspective or anatomy. Life drawing, that quaint empirical practice of delineating the present nude human figure (to say nothing of the a priori drawing of invention and/or from memory the Old Masters had mastered), has persisted in art schools for the past several decades not with the ambition that students master the tradition so much as to demonstrate how hard, if not impossible, it is to create an image the old fashioned way. Indeed, a semester or two of such inevitable frustration is as much as anyone can be expected to take before retreating permanently into video or the auratic manipulation of space (the kind for which one has to be there), or, to do what art students have always done at art schools since the Beatles: form a band.

Marxian contemporary theorists, impotent to further the Withering Away of the State or to facilitate the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, have succeeded at least in one revolutionary project: shooting the wounded in the image wars. The humble draughtsman, the last proletarian, agent of the bourgeoisie, reduced to the slavery of advertising and illustrating children’s story books since the nineteenth century, routed by photography and ethnically cleansed by digital editing software, suffer the final genocide at the hands of superstar curators and Distinguished Professors of Contemporaneity. Herded into the internment camps of Madison Avenue while photography was still monochrome, even that reservation has disappeared as “art directors” have long since lost the ability even to sketch on the back of a napkin. We no longer go to the gallery to see anything as primitive as marks made on surfaces by actual human beings, but to see aesthetic experiences manufactured by expensive machines (“new media”), enabled by the linguistically adept with exegetical texts. Theory furthers the conquest of Capital at the expense of the human, just to prove it can accomplish something. When the revolution comes, one will be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, but no longer be able to draw a straight line (no one has done that anyway since before the Frankfurt School moved out of Germany). O, Brave New World!

Histories of modern art are written as if the public lost its appetite for representation and figuration before 1900. This ignores the fact that illusion has never enjoyed a stronger (long) century. The average eyeball today spends more time than ever looking at pictures than actual reality, but God forbid those illusions should be drawn by hand. Puritanical Christianity, Talmudic Judaism, and aniconic Islam, those warring Ibrahimic religions, at least can agree on one thing: Thou Shalt Make No Graven Images—by hand. Click, cut, and paste –that’s okay. But paper and pencil are the Devil’s implements. Even comic books and “hand-drawn” animation, those last bastions of the analog, are so larded with faux hand-lettered fonts, Photoshop coloring, and vector-based smoothness that all evidence of the hands has been processed out, sanitized, sterilized. Why force a child into a life of cultural disadvantage by giving them a box of crayons and construction paper? Start them off with a digital device right away—this will make them better consumers, further deplete the planet’s fossil fuels, exacerbate the internal contradictions of Late Capitalism, and hasten the Future Communist State.

In 2004, Rosalind Krauss declared that charcoal was dead, while attendees at a contemporaneity conference, with their inert ballpoint pens and legal pads, scribbled down her every word. In 2010, Thom Mayne told an auditorium full of Carnegie Mellon architecture students that drawing was romantic, but completely irrelevant to what was happening in (important) architecture today. (I happened to have witnessed both utterances.) Artists who once illustrated the Painted Word (that cheesy, dated text by Tom Wolfe) now produce conversation pieces for Frederic Jameson. Otherwise, they are effaced by Art History; just ask Arthur C. Danto or Boris Groys. Drawing has been reduced to something a few of us do in our sketchbooks for self-expression, like diarists compelled to transcribe their innermost thoughts, or poets who never expect their poems to be read by other human beings. Drawing by hand has no place in contemporary art, which may be defined as works which have no reason to exist other than for theoretical interpretation: a mixture of bad art and bad philosophy. (Which gives rise to the question: Is it more important for a contemporary artist to be bad at art, or bad at philosophy?)

One has to wonder how humanity, completely devoid of the ability to draw, can be understood as being more human than before. What can account for the utter hostility of the logos to the traditional hand-generated image? Why are we inclined to accept the cold, hard, indifferent document produced by the camera (even when it is blatantly manipulated, edited, processed a dozen different ways) as truth, but regard the illusion produced by the hand of the artist at the ol’ drawing board as apostasy? How is the twenty-first century mind improved by art that sucks (i.e., is not worth looking at)? How did things get so bad? Such a circumstance can only be attributed to the emaciated condition the various illusion-generating technologies of modernity have left the vulnerable craft of drawing, susceptible now to the pernicious bullying of the verbally adept but otherwise politically impotent.

[Another way of stating this is: Why must (visual) art history necessarily end up with a shark in a tank of formaldehyde or the mind-numbing fully automated (and mindless) spectacle of the Visionarium variety, but the histories of music, drama, cinema, literature and other forms of creative expression go on, business as usual, as unmolested outlets of humanism? Why do they get to have all the fun while art historians are saddled with such a depressing, unhappy ending? What is it about drawing that gets under the skin of those who are able only to think in words?

 

Let installation continue. Let theory continue. Let the myriad practices of “new media” continue. And let them go on being celebrated in temporary biennials that take over resort cities and find housing in repurposed, formerly dilapidated urban buildings in rundown neighborhoods. The overeducated are entitled to their art too, and certainly their little occasions for wine and cheese (where else can they all dress in black?). The question, I repeat, is not the validity of these (pseudo-) intellectual enterprises, but why this scourge has been visited upon the quaint, workmanlike picture gallery, apparently sparing other forms of creative expression. After all, one doesn’t get hit over the head with October when one attends a musical comedy, and one certainly doesn’t expect to have Critical Inquiry shoved up their ass when one goes to the movies (even an art film), ordinarily. But it sure as hell is inescapable in public venues for the once-analog visual arts.

Since they’re not really being used, a modest proposition: Surrender the galleries and museums to those to whom they properly belong, artists who draw (and paint and sculpt). Assuming, in our unabated modernity, these can still be found.