I like the ideas of postmodernism but I have come to despise their misuse. 

In college I majored in philosophy and and wrote my thesis on Suzanne Langer, who could be called a "prepostmodernist" because she thought that our intuitive organizing function of sense gives form to existing objects and sounds and that art is an externalized equivalent of nameless, nonverbal forms in the mind.

Nietzsche's idea that there are no facts but only interpretations fascinated me and so did Bishop Berkeley's theory that matter is composed of ideas. I also appreciated Samuel Johnson's stone-kicking refutation of Berkeley. 

Even today I find much pleasure in the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler's position that "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon" and cognitive scientist Donald Hofmann's idea that consciousness and its contents are all that exists.

But then, at other times I find myself thinking like a neo-platonist, sitting in a cave looking at mere shadows of some remote external reality.

Perhaps some philosopher will take external and internal reality and construct some kind of unified field theory. It won't be me. I like ambiguity, and I find it difficult enough to resolve a painting, much less a construct a theory of everything.   

Many years ago, when I heard the ideas of Postmodernism, I was naturally interested. Postmodernism raised concrete experience over external reality and abstract principle, and it realistically accepted conflict. It seemed to accommodate an artist's view that we are put in the world with every right to construct one of our own, and encouraged a corollary sense that as our species grows up it becomes more attuned to the freedom and development of the individual.

As time went on, however, I saw that the very interesting ideas of postmodernism lent themselves to corruption in the practical sphere. Small minds take big ideas and diminish them for their own purposes, channeling that which is intellectually stimulating into rationalizations for immediate goals. This process is woven into human history; we see it today in the misapplication of religious principles, for example. The interesting observations of original Postmodernism have become corrupted, in real life, to vehicles of oppression on the one hand and excuses for a careless disregard for even the most useful rules and limits on the other.

In corrupted postmodernism, the assertion that nothing can be proven or demonstrated beyond a doubt means that any clear proposition can be disqualified or intrinsically weakened before it can be put into effect; that so-called "larger truths" cannot be demonstrated and that values depend on immediate circumstance has been twisted to imply that external truth and value are unusable concepts; that there can be no proof of goodness in art indicates that value distinctions are expendable fabrications and must be suppressed;  that all things deserve a fair hearing means that all things are of equal value.

The practical consequence of this perversion is paralysis. Like so many isms, this corrupted postmodernism usurps individual choice, insisting that we listen not to the inner voice of common sense and reason but to the outer voice that applies relativism to all spheres of human activity, denigrating strongly held conviction and belief derived from experience. Instead of providing skills to empower individuals to make choices from strength, corrupted postmodernism preaches a value-free hypertolerance which dismisses all consequences of these choices, thereby preparing the killing field where brainwashing and power politics can gain a foothold.  Tyranny spreads its roots in the fertile soil of irresolution.

 Corrupted Postmodernism is a powerful weapon for discrediting anything it chooses. In fact, as has been amply shown, it discredits and disproves itself, but this matters little to its adherents because it is so useful in academic life.

It is not useful in everyday life because there is too much common sense operating there.  We do not act in accordance with absolute truth, or proof. If someone says "watch out for the truck" we do not pause to determine whether a "truck" is a social construct. Truth, in everyday use, is merely part of the social contract. Proof is a specialized process for use in the laboratory and the courtroom. Intellectualized dismissal of everyday reality is unworkable.  Can you imagine postmodernist police work? Postmodernist restaurants that give you a menu and no meal?

Corrupted Postmodernism only comes to life in the academy, where reputations rise on hot air.

Even within the academy the application of postmodernism is severely limited. it has little chance in science, for example, where systematic proof and hard facts still count. It will not convince an architect that a building foundation should be eliminated because it is some kind of discredited "ultimate principle". It will not convince book writers to scramble the order of the alphabet because it is a construct of "western white male hegemony". Architects may make buildings that look like bad 1950s metal sculpture, and writers may babble nonsense and jargon. But, as the song says, the fundamental things apply, as time goes by.

But corrupted postmodernism can flourish where there is a weak culture of established utility. It is attractive because it talks tough while at the same time flushing out all the hard parts; much of the attraction of this new approach is that the strenuous work of teaching a skill has been alleviated, making it easier for everyone, teacher and student alike. Wherever there is an intrinsic lack of rigor coupled with the need for competitive advantage it has spread like a kudzu vine: in the humanities, and, in that most vulnerable area, the teaching of art.

In art history corrupted postmodernism has had a field day. Art is basically useless - you cant eat it, drive it or live in it - and it is made from very common materials. We value it because it is the only thing we have which is made to be as good as it can be in a circumstance of minimal function which emphasizes the characteristic of "goodness" alone. Judgments of value, though surrounded by words like buzzing bees, are still made nonverbally. Corrupted postmodernism has ridiculed the very notion of superior art in favor of various cultural products of marginalized and disadvantaged groups,  but the common response to art, and its valuation, is continues to be a nonverbal and emotional. These are the experiences that justify art's place in our value system, and this is how the system works. No one can say what good art is but we keep on making the choices anyway. In a public sense, a million such small decisions go into the emergence of what we call the "best".

Because Art History is a field of study in which the underlying principle of valuation cannot be articulated there is a hunger for the pseudocertainty of theory. Art historians, who have always been leery of any emotional involvement with art, have now learned to cope with it not only by the classic dodge of symbolic interpretation but now, thanks to postmodernism, by using art objects as exemplars of cultural circumstance and principle, thereby making  art history a kind of specialized sociology.

Nevertheless, art history, infested as it is with corrupt postmodernism, still looks at and talks about art. There is no wholesale abandoning of basic course materials, merely a revision of the consideration it gets. As wrong-headed as that may be it is does not amount to abandonment of the curriculum.

The teaching of studio foundations is another matter.

It is not easy to find out what is being done to foundation study in the name of Postmodernism, because the available descriptions are so painfully jargonized and nonspecific that it is impossible to tell what is happening in the classroom. It appears, however, to be quite drastic. I have had to rely on acquaintances and web sources and anecdotal evidence for specific information.

Clearly basic drawing and the skills associated with it have been reduced. There are discussion groups and language-based assignments, and courses to indoctrinate cultural relativism. When traditional drawing is taught there is less pressure to correct drawing skill and more verbal representation of politically correct subject matter.

Foundations are called that because that's what they are: basic training of the eye and hand. Teaching studio proficiency introduces the mind to the great jungle of materials and imaginative possibilities that are the stuff of art, the "buzzing, blooming confusion" which is the environment for discovery and expression. The radical substitution of conceptual content for skill-building clearly strikes at the roots of of a rich discipline that has evolved for half a millennium.

It amounts to the destruction of a habitat.

Original Postmodernism would encourage the teaching of foundations because it is a kind of empowerment, a facilitation of observation to understand what you are seeing, not according to some dictum but through an enhanced ability to relate to external fact. Corrupted postmodernism does just the opposite, interposing a conceptual wall between the student and the world. Art has little to do with proofs and truths and absolutes; it orders experience to provide us the means to intuitively discover the best in ourselves. Turning this great human enterprise into an academy of political correctness, a signpost to so-called "larger issues", is nothing less than barbaric.

It is also very dangerous academically, cruel, even. When you deplete foundations the whole structure of skill-building collapses, depriving the student of the competence to bring materials together into a coherent esthetic whole. They will have BAs and BFAs and MFAs and no visual skill, thereby debasing the degree itself. I usually hear it rationalized as "that's how it is out there and we have to prepare them for it". OK, maybe as an MFA seminar this might be justified. But accommodating a necessary evil does not amount to a studio education. 

As head of the painting program at the University of Miami I talk to parents all the time. They want their kids to learn how to draw and paint. Many have seen and heard of programs that substitute concepts for skills and they are uniformly horrified. You can say they are old fashioned and out of synch but let's be realistic - they are paying the bills and the administration is going to listen to them. 

I have heard endless stories about conflicts created within the ranks of faculty by the introduction of postmodernist concept-based programs. This is to be expected, and it is exacerbated by the inflexible approach of radical postmodernists, who, like religious zealots, insist on the eradication of the old order. The damage to smooth pedagogical functioning, which in most art departments is imperfect at best, is obvious.

It also affects incoming faculty who, however thoroughly they have been trained in the techniques of making and teaching studio art, must, in many schools, whistle the postmodernist tune or lose any chance of employment or tenure. And when the counterrevolution comes, as it will, the perpetrators will be retired and the hapless followers will bear the brunt. We are asking for trouble. The backlash will be ferocious, and relearning the old skills and methods will be long and painful.

 Postmodernism openly declares that everything is political. Do we really need more politics? Can we leave not even a brave veneer of lip service for the old ideals of the academy as a sanctuary of freethinking where many schools of thought contend?

And if we must have the thought police and political correctness and corrupted postmodernism, then let us have a monastery somewhere, like the medieval Irish monks, and let us retreat and teach drawing while the vandals lay waste.