Dada called for the rejection of all retinal art

Nets are regularly installed over the windows of numerous
Chinese factories to prevent suicides caused by inhumane working conditions

A voilent workers' uprising known as the Luddite Rebellion was an attempt by
crastsman to slow the socially and economically disruptive effects of industrialization.
The Brittish government sided with the factory owners and violently suppressed the rebellion.

George Tooker's haunting painting (left) depicting the souless vacuum
created by the post-industrial knowldege economy

Jerry Mander, a former director of the International Forum on Globalization, described the ultimate goal of economic globalization as the creation of a corporate monoculture. Currently more than 70% of global information (film, books, newspapers, entertainment imagery, and Internet outlets) is controlled by seven global media corporations whose declared motivation is to protect corporate interests, increase profits, and expand market share. These seven media mega-corporations represent the greatest concentration of ownership in any industry. Unfortunately, the mass conformity that results from this corporate mass communication has been shown to weaken the publics’ judgment, erode their independent spirit, and reorganize the modern personality on a predicate of passive consumption”.

Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book, The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brain,” documents neurological research on learning and memory that indicates that we learn best “when senses and thoughts are concentrated.” The behavior that best promotes this kind of concentration is slow reading from a book or interacting with the physical world as in working with ones hands. Overloading our cognitive capacity consistently results in diminished comprehension and blocks the brain’s ability to form the associative neural links that we call intelligence. Internet usage promotes a state of permanent distractedness that damages our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. What we are witnessing are minds consumed by a medium. Using the Internet impedes deep learning and thinking.

Carr points out that the Internet’s cognitive overload also disrupts emotional development. Empathy and emotion maturity have been shown to develop most intensely when the brain processes data slowly. As the Internet reroutes our neural pathways and diminishes our capacity for contemplation it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts. Being deprived of concentration and empathy are a proven recipe for becoming less human.

In September of 2012 a Duquesne University study in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled Moral Reasoning in Computer-Based Task Environments found that “technology in enabling negative behavior” and diminishing the subjects use of principled moral reasoning” and that “rogue online behavior doesn’t just pertain to academics.” The author of this study now wonders whether “science has outpaced the ability of society to adapt.” “If it’s online, is it cheating? Cheaters don’t think so”

Despite the devastatingly negative social, political, economic, cultural, and educational implications mentioned above institutions of higher learning are among the worst offenders for promoting ever expanding uses of digital technology. Making matters worse is the fact that a preferred engagement with virtual reality institutionalizes the preference for concept over percept by actively amplifying higher education’s long-standing privileging of rational intellectual pursuits over the intuitive insights that are generated by hands-on activities. While admittedly this ‘sterilization’ of the perceptual has roots dating back to Plato’s idealism, the current institutional climate that fosters antagonism between visual and verbal forms of knowledge has all but forced art departments to abandon the long-standing, intuitive understanding that there are non-verbal ways of communicating that are essential. Richard Sennett reflected the essence of the non-verbal communicating in his book, The Craftsman, with the phrase “Making is thinking.”

Making things in the physical world requires touch. The ancient philosopher Anaxagoras understood the importance of touch and its relationship to thinking when he said “It is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals.” Touch has long been understood as a major component of what makes us human. In the 1950’s the psychologist Harry Harlow conducted studies of the effects of touch deprivation on infant monkeys. He put a wire frame “surrogate” mother with a milk bottle in one cage and a wooden mother covered in terrycloth without a milk bottle in the other. The infant monkeys clung desperately onto the terrycloth mothers for hours, ignoring the desire for food in exchange for the softness of the terry cloth. The touch-deprived monkeys in Harlow’s studies all experienced stereotypic developmental and behavioral abnormalities. These monkeys engaged in self-clasping and rocking behaviors and were disinterested in their environment. They avoided socializing with other monkeys, were timid, and disliked being touched. When they did interact with other monkeys they were very aggressive, had difficulty finding sexual partners, were often unable to mate properly, and regularly abused their mates and offspring . Recent experience with the severe emotional problems of children adopted from Eastern European orphanages where there is little human contact reinforces the fact that humans, too, thrive on touch.

Working with our hands makes us more human. Art training based in manual skill acquisition and traditional aesthetics provides that. Hands-on training requires a student to look deliberately, look intensely, seek meaning in experience, and pursue a state of complete awareness of what it is that they are accomplishing in the physical world. From a Darwinian perspective, as outlined by Denis Dutton in his book, The Art Instinct, the above pedagogical model springs from an innate human predisposition to value objects that required specialized skill in their making, that provide direct sensory pleasure, that require a decoupling from practical concerns, logic, and rational understanding, and that acknowledge their place in the longstanding traditions of art.

To further complicate matters, the curriculum innovations that are being adopted at art programs across the country are most often based upon popular-media hype, digital hucksterism, unsubstantiated facts, poorly reasoned premises, and/or arcane philosophical abstrusiosities. Since history clearly illustrates that innovations can be disastrous it behooves us carefully weigh the importance of what is being sacrificed before continuing down the path of so called ‘innovative’ curricula. It is a flawed misinterpretation of the maxim that “those ignorant of history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past” to suggest that history is only a repository of failed ideas. A corollary maxim reminds us that “those ignorant of the past are condemned to an infinite loop of having to rediscover the wheel” and if that eventuality actually does come to pass please understand that it will be a craftsman using his hands who reinvents the wheel.

Because all humans inherit a common central nervous system at birth it is of utmost importance that we structure foundations curricula around our shared perceptual mechanisms so as to provide our students with a understanding of the design elements, principles, and manual skill training that constitute a well-balanced studio foundation.

Unfortunately, however, the intellectual provocations of Marcel Duchamp that severed the link between direct perceptual experience and the inherent value of a work of art have become the guiding principles of contemporary art school curricula. One common characteristic of the majority of pro-Duchampian, anti-Darwinian conceptual practice practitioners is their distain for using their own hands to create their work. Whether it is outsourcing the manufacture of the work or simply hitting “splat P” on the keyboard this dismissive attitude originates with Duchamp himself who stated that the execution of his ideas to be boring. From the early 60’s when Warhol began his excursions into Neo-Dada, we can trace a long and increasingly unskilled tradition of postmodern Duchampians outsourcing manual activity. This embrace of Duchamp as a paragon of what an artist should be has led to a wholesale elimination of the artist’s role as craftsman along with a de-emphasis or dematerialization of the art object and, as such, is utterly antithetical to the cross-cultural definitions of art making traceable back to the Pleistocene era. Creativity, rather than being a Duchampian escape from conventionality is actually a by-product of skill acquisition cultivated through long practice and repeated confrontations with the real.

To counter the de-humanizing trend in our conceptually oriented, digitally dominated learning environments it is our responsibility to actively defend the value of hands-on training in traditional media. Touch is the cornerstone for direct sensory experiences from which artistic intuition is derived. Taking care and doing one's best provides the means to heighten and make more significant personal and collective experience. The craft of art is active engagement with an external reality while pursuing the shared goal of excellence. Developing intuitive understanding of the pursuit of quality through concentrated manual tasks can’t be downloaded it can only be lived. Slow media training is essential.

Let me close with a heartfelt exhortation, “Teach your students to care, Encourage them to feel. Demonstrate the joy and satisfaction that comes from being constructive rather than deconstructive. Provide them the tools to actively respond to the things in their experience that are beautiful and alive. Instruct them on how to draw, paint, sculpt, model, print, and weave before exiling them to Cyberspace and the anti-art wasteland that dominates so much of contemporary cultural practice.

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