Open Inquiry Archive Vol. 1, No. 3 (2012)

Issue Introduction

Postmodernism has exerted a powerful influence on the arts of the Western world for more than a generation. It has been a particularly strong presence in college and university programs aimed at educating a new generation of artists. Indeed, postmodernism has been spectacularly successful in this realm. Once the new idea that challenged  the status quo, it now largely is the status quo. Yet, despite postmodernism’s widespread acceptance, earlier ways of thinking about education in art have never faded away completely. In fact, postmodernist ideas, though dominant in many respects, have remained hotly debated in some circles. In his essay, “A Defense of the Educational Value of Perceptual Drawing in an Increasingly Postmodern World,” Professor Brian Curtis offers his perspective on the effects of postmodernist ideas in the education of artists and about a different path that might be taken going forward. While this paper may not settle the debate about the role of postmodernism in an artist’s education, it enriches ongoing discussion of an important topic.

-G. Arnold

.

Leonardo’s Legacy:

A Defense of the Educational Value of Perceptual Drawing in an Increasingly Postmodern World

By Brian Curtis

University and college art programs once nurtured visual sensitivity, talent, craftsmanship, and creativity. Recently, however, these goals have been displaced by the de-skilling and dematerializing promotion of a conceptually oriented approach referred to as “contemporary cultural practice” or “postmodern art.” Although educators at national conferences stress the importance of instilling visual sensitivity and offering skill-based studio instruction to their students continues to be a re-occurring theme, in practice, neither the teachers nor the students in most art programs across the country behave as if these are meaningful goals. I intend to demonstrate that this discrepancy points toward the erosion of the integrity of art education in institutions of higher learning and that students are better served by hands-on studio instruction in traditional media.

Today’s prospective art students are generally more interested in skill acquisition than in concept driven cultural production, performance, art video, or installation. As a result, art programs that wish to stay current with an overinflated, consumerist driven art market  are pressured to engage in a “bait-and-switch” curricular strategy to fill seats in their first-year studio classes.  Such programs pay lip service to traditional, hands-on studio training while bombarding their students with  courses that aggressively and purposefully dematerialize the art object and undermine the long-standing intellectual underpinnings of our institutions of higher learning.

It is currently the norm for Foundations programs across the country to indoctrinate first-year students with postmodern, anti-Enlightenment intellectual provocations by front-loading their Foundations programs with vaguely constructed courses that are non-hierarchical, theory-dependent, multi-cultural, issue-oriented, and community-sensitive. These multivocal, transmedia  courses privilege digital technology and conceptualization over hands-on studio training in traditional high-art media.

It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that the admitted goal of these “innovative” Foundations programs is to pressure entering students to “unlearn” their “naïve” understanding of what constitutes a work of art–specifically,  the need to disavow retinal, skill-based, quality oriented, media-driven art forms. Two such programs are described by Dr. Jodi Kushins in an article entitled “Brave New Basics” [note 1] which appeared in FATE in Review (2008 – 2009). Kushins documents how hands-on training in traditional media has been replaced by conceptually driven approaches using ‘new media’– she specifically mentions sewing and baking — that the introduction of these ‘new media’ has the stated intention of helping students develop critical awareness of the relationships between concepts and context. Kushins acknowledges that these curricula continue Marcel Duchamp’s denouncement of craft, his assault on good taste and his adamant rejection of “retinal” art.  She then quotes a faculty member from a high profile art institution who unhesitatingly refers to its innovative curriculum as “deprogramming,” in which incoming students are “forced to let go of their previous notions about art making” while being taught that to be an innovative artist demands a wholesale rejection of the longstanding reverence for visual aesthetics and craftsmanship.

This trend is not restricted to high-profile professional art schools. In 2010 at the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) in Richmond, I encountered a similar trend. The call for papers for a session entitled “Busting the Boundaries in Foundation Drawing” read as follows:

 “This panel will investigate moving beyond those boundaries of foundation drawing as observation by presenting assignments and methodologies that cover, but are not limited to, Collaboration Among Students, Architectural Drawing, Drafting, Cartooning, Drawing Science and Nature, Mapping, Representing Popular Culture, Illustrating Fashion and Ornamentation.” [note 2]

The individuals who were chosen for this panel addressed issues of collaboration, pop-culture metaphors, creative writing, and the development of ‘critical thinking,’ despite the fact that the course content presented by the panelists more closely resembled second-hand, warmed-over critical theory. And, critical theory is not critical thinking. If anyone doubts how consistently critical theory is presented as critical thinking, I refer you to the 2008-2009 FATE in Review, in which a twenty-three page summary of the Integrative Teaching Think Tank, entitled “Putting Theory to Work: Building a Foundations Program for the 21st Century,” states:

“the primary purpose of the Foundation year should be an introduction to critical thinking”.

 “a 21st century approach to foundations teaching needs to be tied to pedagogical goals that reflect a deeper and more complex understanding of contemporary society and the world at large“

“Foundations faculty initiate a process of learning that serves as a basis on which the disciplines can build and channels students into more expansive modes of thinking and making.”

In visual arts education, “historical, contextual, and critical studies” take a central role in the verbal and conceptual articulation of the visual.”

“Foundations teachers are then encouraged to revel in their role as generalists – to introduce and blend ideas with passion, knowledge and their own professional experience.” [Note 3]

While I understand why a contemporary art department would want to associate its progressively fragmented and disorganized curriculum with the gravitas associated with the liberal arts that have a reputation for rigor of critical thinking, this initiative is intellectually flawed. Were the art faculty in question truly committed to critical thinking they would begin by actively dispelling the illusion that postmodernism’s rejection of reason and intellectual certainty is compatible with critical thinking. We would also expect disclosure, analysis, and discussion of the anti-cultural and de-civilizing implications of the foundational ideas of the deconstructive postmodern world-view. Studio faculty committed to critical thinking would make it clear to their students that in adopting postmodern cultural practice they are effectively rejecting the principles of the Enlightenment inasmuch as postmodernism discards belief in objective truth, optimism about human progress, egalitarianism, the validity of scientific method as a means to arrive at truth (logic), the universality of reason, and the importance of individuality, not to mention the overarching political ideals underlying the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Oh, those pesky meta-narratives!

Multiple presenters on the Busting the Boundaries in Foundation Drawing panel also made it a point to add, after dismissing observational drawing as something anyone can do, that an innovative conceptual focus was necessary to appeal to the Millennial generation at the Foundations level, because the Millennials crave ‘relevant’ content and team-oriented projects and find observational drawing to be boring. While I do not have time to address such unsubstantiated and shortsighted characterizations about the restricted learning styles of Millennials, I can report that the student drawing examples that were projected during all four of this session’s  presentations consistently exhibited a lack of understanding of visual thinking related to dynamic pictorial composition while exhibiting  little knowledge of the techniques that allow for depictions of coherent spatial relationships.  Perhaps most disturbing of all  was the total lack of a practiced understanding of the inherent expressive characteristics of the media that were used to record and preserve the movement, energy, rhythm, excitement, and “feel” of the drawing process. Language-based conceptual projects were plentiful, but the importance of something as essential as heightened sensitivity to sensory experience was nowhere to be found. What makes this oversight so unfortunate is that receptivity and responsiveness to sensory stimulation are baseline indicators of the fullness and profundity with which a human being engages life.

As widespread in the distain for traditional studio training there are those who believe that sensory experience is at the core of art training. Peter Kaniaris, a professor of painting at Anderson University in South Carolina, reflected on the importance of direct sensory experience in a paper delivered at the 2009 FATE conference in Portland, Oregon titled, “The Visual Impulse: A Lost Metaphor”:

“Rooted in the practice of art is an ancient metaphor: that art is (at its core) an irreducibly visual experience; its “language” and knowledge are unique; its outcomes are like no other outcomes; its value is intrinsically bound to its means. It is a foundational experience that has its origins in the visual impulse, the innate human desire to communicate through visual means. It is the ancient metaphor at work, as old and deep as the paintings of Lascaux.” [note 4]

Drawing attention to and fine-tuning a student’s receptivity and responsiveness to sensory stimulation is what traditional studio training is about. Franklin Einspruch, a painter, blogger, and a remarkably precise writer on art made some penetrating observations about the shortcomings of exchanging trendy concepts for serious skill and sensitization training in a paper he read at the 2009 FATE conference in Portland, OR entitled “The Mind of Materials: Why a Good Education in Art Emphasizes Techniques Over Ideas”:

“We’re witnessing an effort, a hundred years in the making, to legitimize ever-increasing kinds of objects as art, starting with a bottle rack and culminating in a shared meal. This is a kind of freedom, a freedom of possibilities, maximized to an absurd scale that moots a discussion about traditional media training. But it’s a dissipated freedom that gives rise to artworks as lethargic as their titles”.

“But where there is only freedom of possibility, there is effectively no freedom at all. There’s another kind of freedom that we need to address as teachers: the freedom of ability”.

“Against a background of freedom of possibility, which is more or less given, one has to develop freedom of ability by dint of practice— physical repetition of skills with the desire to produce a particular outcome. We should recognize that we are dealing with an entirely different sort of freedom here.” [note 5]

While some might consider my characterization of postmodern pedagogy as extreme, facts, and the majority of topics addressed at national art conferences suggest otherwise. There is ample evidence that the curricula currently in place at a majority of art programs are firmly rooted in a chronological sequence of de-civilizing, anarchical theoretical perspectives.

First there was the Dada dissolving itself in its nonsensical founding manifesto. That was followed by Duchamp’s denouncement of craft, his assault on good taste and his aggressive rejection of “retinal” art. Then came the Futurist manifestos’ exaltation of the destruction of the existing social order and its redefinition of beauty as political struggle followed by Die Brücke’s anti-Enlightenment fascination with primitivism.

These radical perspectives continued with the purveyors of shock art in the 1960s. First was the international network called Fluxus, the manifesto of which called for the elimination of illusionistic art, abstract art, and mathematical art, as well as the promotion of anti-art and of non-art reality. Then came Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers (known to their friends as simply “the motherfuckers”), which was a Dada-influenced anarchist art group connected with the Weather Underground and SDS. Motherfuckers was famous for its disruptive political interventions, such as throwing trash in the fountain at the Lincoln Center, cutting the fences at Woodstock, and faking assassinations. (One peripheral member of this group did, in fact, actually shoot Andy Warhol). And the list continues to the present day with the conceptualists, Pop artists, performance artists, installation artists, video artists, punk rockers, graffiti artists, and the variety of postmodern approaches that have been lumped under the banner of contemporary cultural practice.

The underpinnings of contemporary cultural practice continue to be supported by a cluster of radical postmodern perspectives, such as radical feminism, Marxism, gay theory, multiculturalism, deconstruction, and pluralism. Each embraces ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and chaos while making no attempt at counteracting or transcending the de-civilizing aspects of postmodernity. These assorted perspectives insist that there are no objective standards on which to base value judgments, and that the notion that visual quality and the notion of a singular best are discredited capitalistic white male European ‘master narratives.’ Within this pluralistic model core courses, prerequisites, course sequencing, and the like are considered to be misguided, parochial, chauvinistic, and pernicious and it is anathema to insert intellectual discipline (real critical thinking), structured learning, or skill training into the curriculum. Ironically, whereas ‘openness’ used to refer to the virtue of pursuing good through reason, it has now been co-opted to mean the acceptance of anything except reason.

Because my academic background may not qualify me to singlehandedly challenge the underlying philosophical premises of postmodernism, I will quote a colleague at the University of Miami, philosopher Susan Haack, who is both eminently qualified and highly vocal in her criticisms of postmodern academic practice. She observes,

“When sham and fake reasoning are ubiquitous, people become uncomfortably aware, or half-aware, that reputations are made as often by clever championship of the indefensible or the incomprehensible as by serious intellectual work, as often by mutual promotion as by merit. Knowing, or half-knowing, this, they become increasingly leery of what they hear and read. Their confidence in what passes for true declines, and with it their willingness to use the words “truth,” “rationality,” etc., without the precaution of scare quotes. And as those scare quotes become ubiquitous, people’s confidence in the concepts of truth and reason falters.” [note 6]

 Unfortunately, the sort of meta-twaddle that Susan Haack warns against is precisely that which serves as the rationale for the postmodern redesign of art curricula. At my university, advanced students of contemporary practice are adept at reciting a litany of the names of postmodern theorists: Adorno, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lacan, Lyotard, to name just a few. And curiously, this superficial second- or third-hand familiarity with contemporary critical theory is loudly proclaimed to be critical thinking. However, missing from our students’ repertoire are the great minds from the Western rational tradition, such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.

Not only are our students not being exposed to the intellectual giants of the Western rational tradition; they are not even aware that the legitimacy of postmodernism has been questioned by people such as Alan Sokol, a physicist from NYU who, in 1996, attempted to reclaim the legitimacy of the Western rational tradition from those prone to theory-babble. Sokol wrote a parody of a postmodern article and submitted it to the prominent postmodern journal, Social Text. [note 7] The editors of the journal, undeterred by the outrageously far-fetched assertions in the article and unaware that it was written tongue-in-cheek, published it. He describes his process:

“Throughout the article, I employ scientific and mathematical concepts in ways that few scientists or mathematicians could possibly take seriously. For example, I assert that Lacan’s psychoanalytic speculations have been confirmed by recent work in quantum field theory. Even non-scientist readers might well wonder what in heavens’ name quantum field theory has to do with psychoanalysis; certainly my article gives no reasoned argument to support such a link. — Nowhere in all of this is there anything resembling a logical sequence of thought; one finds only citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions.” [note 8]

While Sokol’s article, in itself, is not evidence that all postmodern propositions are invalid, it does lend disquieting support to Susan Haack’s assertion that in our current academic environment “reputations can be made as often by clever championship of the indefensible or the incomprehensible as by serious intellectual work.” [note 9]

The curriculum innovations that are being adopted at art programs across the country are most often based upon popular-media hype, unsubstantiated facts, poorly reasoned premises, and/or arcane philosophical abstrusiosities. Since history illustrates that innovations can sometimes be disastrous, it behooves us to carefully weigh the importance of what is being sacrificed before rushing headlong into “innovative” curricula. It is a dangerous 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, “those ignorant of the past are condemned to an infinite loop of having to rediscover the wheel.”

The fact that art education is simultaneously riding a pop-culture wave of techno-euphoria has exponentially complicated the de-skilling, de-civilizing, dematerializing, and de-sensitizing direction of art education. While a standard list of the virtues and benefits of digital technology is widely circulated, the real question is whether all or any of it is true, especially since the promoters of digital technology seem to have little or no data to support their claims. There is, however, data that suggests that students with considerable exposure to screen-based technology read less and have shorter attention spans than those with less exposure, making digital technology more like a curse from Pandora’s Box than the wonder tool that is claimed to be. And being sold it is, like the automobile was sold by the automotive, petroleum, and highway construction industries in the late 1950s, as the pivotal element in the equation for human happiness. [note 10] A similar case can be made that the current wave of techno-euphoria in academia is more the result of corporate hucksterism in a hyper-competitive, marketing-saturated, consumer society than of sound social or educational policy.

Another shortcoming associated with the use of computers as learning tools is their reliance on simulation over hands-on manipulation of the physical world. It is important to remember that learning is, at its best, a broad based emotional, intellectual, and tactile experience. It flourishes when all five senses are engaged. Knowledge is enhanced when we learn with our senses and experience the physical world through our muscles and reflexes as opposed to substituting something as mechanical and synthetic as a computer interface for our physical experiences. Without direct awareness of our physical bodies and how our bodies react to and affect wider natural systems, we become unable to separate the natural from the artificial, real from unreal. [note 11] Interestingly, among an increasing number of computer and neuroscientists working in Artificial Intelligence (AI) there is a growing suspicion that artificial intelligence can never be achieved. [note 12] This hypothesis is based in the understanding that human consciousness is fundamentally an intuitive process. Without a body a computer cannot “feel” and therefore cannot develop intuitive and emotional information processing, the corner stone of what it means to be a creative thinker.

What we sacrifice when we promote computers for the easy and convenient access to information that they provide, are the traditional skills of thinking logically, learning to make qualitative judgments, writing clearly, speaking well, developing perceptual and motor skills, and aesthetic sensitivity through hands-on training in drawing, painting, printing, sculpting, ceramics, design, and weaving. Deprived of the ability to think rationally, and raised without integrated knowledge from firsthand, real life experience, students become powerless to discriminate the relevant from the irrelevant and the significant from the insignificant in the information glut found on computers. In a cloud of techno-euphoria students confuse information for knowledge. They become more passive in their judgments, more alienated from their traditions, more devoid of community. Theodore Rozak, in The Cult of Information, admonished us that thinking must always come first in education and that thinking means how to effectively manipulate ideas, compare them, contrast them, and discriminate among them. All of this is more important than having access to information. Knowing how to manipulate ideas is what is important. [note 13]  Students don’t learn better from computers. They learn best from nature, from other kids, from teachers. Without this ability to manipulate ideas, “screenagers,” [note 14]  when confronted with difficult challenges, are condemned to a life of rolling their eyes and muttering “Whatever!”

Despite the fashionable popularity of radical theoretical perspectives and the exalted status of digital technology there are some among us who still look at these issues from an Enlightenment-based, life-affirming perspective. Ellen Dissanayake, for example, in Homo Aestheticus, presents a thought-provoking Darwinist perspective on aesthetics that takes serious issue with the postmodernism denial of the naturally aesthetic part of human nature that has evolved to require beauty and meaning.

“Making special is a fundamental human proclivity or need. Aesthetics is not something added to us– learned or acquired like speaking a second language or riding a horse — but in large measure is the way we are. To make something special generally implies taking care and doing one’s best so as to produce a result that is — to a greater or lesser extent, —- accessible, striking, resonant, and satisfying to those who take time to appreciate it. This is what we mean when we say that via art, experience is heightened, elevated, made more memorable and significant.”[note 15]

Perceptual drawing is an essential building block for making the visual world special. Perceptual drawing has contributed to both the development and maintenance of the “post-medieval mindset,” a mindset that is fundamental to the modernist enterprise known as the Western rational tradition. E. H. Gombrich described this mindset as one of constant alertness, a sacred restlessness and readiness “to learn, to make, to match, remake, seize, and hold” that which is unique and important in human experience. He goes on to say that the symptom of this mindset is the “sketch.” [note 16]

With perceptual drawing being the symptom of this sacred restlessness it follows that a thorough introduction to perceptual drawing will necessarily embody wide-ranging lessons in aesthetics, philosophy, psychology, history, theology, mathematics, mythology, not to mention both rational and intuitive problem solving. It also encourages artistic sensibility (taking care and doing one’s best) and provides the means to heighten and make more significant personal and collective experience. Perceptual drawing is the epitome of multidisciplinary experience. Perceptual Drawing stands as a positive human alternative in the increasing nihilism of an Increasingly Postmodern worldview. This is Leonardo’s legacy.

A class in perceptual drawing engages the full spectrum of human intelligence as described by Howard Gardner and requires students to apply six out of seven of his  most commonly cited types of intelligence. Besides the requisite and obvious Visual-Spatial Intelligence, there are lectures and demonstrations that involve Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence. The physical nature of the drawing process demands Body-Kinesthetic Intelligence. The use of analytical gesture, proportion calculation, geometric schema, and the principles of Brunelleschian perspective rely upon Logical-Mathematical Intelligence. One-on-one instruction and project-oriented activities often require Interpersonal Intelligence. In addition, the concentration and sensory focus required for perceptual drawing has been likened to a meditative act, “the kind of seeing that penetrates the surface of appearances to discern an internal structure beneath.” (This is referred to as Intrapersonal Intelligence.) Of the seven commonly listed types of intelligence only Musical-Rhythmic Intelligence doesn’t play a critical role in a perceptual drawing course. However, it is not uncommon to stimulate intuitive information processing by playing pre-recorded instrumental music for the students during intensive drawing sessions. Perceptual drawing is, unquestionably, a “whole brain” educational process. [note 17]

If Dissanayake is correct in identifying our essential aesthetic needs,[note 18] and I believe she is, then it is critical that we acknowledge the aesthetic, rational, ethical, and spiritual character of art making and art education. I encourage this return to aesthetic sensitivity in the understanding that our long-standing cultural values, far from being the root of evil, are that which give meaning to our lives. In the words of Theodore Dalrymple:

“Art, in its highest expression, explains our existence to us, both particularities of the artist’s own time and the universals of all human history. It transcends transience and therefore reconciles us to the most fundamental condition of our existence. In the history of art, unlike that of science, what comes after is not necessarily better than what came before.” [note 19]

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. This pedagogical model is rooted in the understanding that you don’t need words to think. Making is thinking. Such a course 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. From a Darwinian perspective, as outlined by Denis Dutton in his book, The Art Instinct, [note 20] the above pedagogical model springs from an innate human predisposition to value objects that provide direct sensory pleasure, require specialized skill, require a decoupling from practical concerns, logic, and rational understanding, and acknowledge their place in the traditions of art. [note 20] He goes on to describe art as:

“CHEESCAKE for the mind – delivering a mega WHALLOP of agreeable stimuli concocted to push our pleasure buttons wired in the Pleistocene era.” [note 21]

In closing, consider this 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 the anti-art wasteland that dominates so much of contemporary cultural practice.”

We can make a difference. The choice is ours to make.

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Brian Curtis is Associate Professor of Painting & Drawing in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami, where he is Director of Graduate  Programs in Studio Art and Coordinator of Undergraduate Painting and Drawing. He maintains a website at: www.brian-curtis.com. Contact him here.

Notes 

[Note 1]. Jodi Kushins, “Brave New Basics: Recommendations and Implications for 21st Century Art Foundations,” FATE in Review, Foundation in Art: Theory and Education, Volume 30 (2008 – 2009): 22 – 29.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/81634595/FATE-IN-REVIEW

[Note 2]. FATE session abstract: “Busting Boundaries in Foundation Drawing, SECAC conference Program – Curiouser: Where Cerebellum Meets Antebellum”, Richmond, VA, 2010.

http://www.secollegeart.org/archive/2010_Conference_Program.pdf

[Note 3]. Dan Collins and Mary Stewart, “SPECIAL SECTION: Report from ThinkTank 3 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Putting Theory to Work: Building a Foundations Program for the 21st Century.” FATE in Review, Foundation in Art: Theory and Education, Volume 30 (2008– 2009): 58.

http://www.foundations-art.org/documents/FATE_Volume30_CorrectedFinal.pdf

[Note 4]. Peter Kaniaris, “The Visual Impulse: A Lost Metaphor,” Paper delivered at a session titled Art before N’art, Chair: Brian Curtis, FATE biennial conference, Portland, Oregon, 2009.

[Note 5]. Franklin Einspruch, “The Mind of Materials: Why a Good Education in Art Emphasizes Techniques Over Ideas,” Paper delivered at a session titled Art before N’art, Chair: Brian Curtis, FATE biennial conference,  Portland, Oregon, 2009.

[Note  6]. Susan Haack, “Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism,” Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 21, no. 6 (November/December 1997). 

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/science_scientism_and_anti-science_in_the_age_of_preposterism/

[Note 7]. Alan Sokol, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (Spring/summer 1996): 217-252.  http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

[Note 8]. Alan Sokol, “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies,” June 5, 1996. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html

 [Note 9]. Haack, “Science.” 

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/science_scientism_and_anti-science_in_the_age_of_preposterism/

[Note 10]. Philip Goff, “Car Culture and the Landscape of Subtraction.” http://www.worldcarfree.net/resources/freesources/CarCult.htm

[Note 11]. John Suler, “The Psychology of Cyberspace.” http://users.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/showdown.html

[Note 12]. David L. Waltz, “The Prospects for Building Truly Intelligent Machines,” Artificial Intelligence, Winter 1988 (Issued as Volume 117, Number 1, of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences): 193.

[Note 13]. Theodore  Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (New York: Pantheon Book, 1986), 87-107.

http://www.shkaminski.com/Classes/Readings/Roszak05.html

[Note 14]. Douglas Rushkoff, “Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids,” Riverhead Trade, 1999.  http://www.rushkoff.com/playing-the-future/

[Note 15]. Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 224.  http://books.google.com/books?id=b0BJ0XyqO9IC&pg=PR19&lpg=PR19&dq=ellen+Dissanayake,+not+something+added+to+us–+learned+or+acquired+like+speaking+a+second+language+or+riding+a+horse+—+but+in+large+measure+is+the+way+we+are&source=bl&ots=nZddh4CcJg&sig 

[Note 16]. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 173.

[Note 17]. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983; 1993), 73 – 277.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/education/ed_mi_overview.html

[Note 18]. Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus, 157.

http://books.google.com/books?id=b0BJ0XyqO9IC&pg=PR19&lpg=PR19&dq=ellen+Dissanayake,+not+something+added+to+us–+learned+or+acquired+like+speaking+a+second+language+or+riding+a+horse+—+but+in+large+measure+is+the+way+we+are&source=bl&ots=nZddh4CcJg&sig

[Note 19]. Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and The Masses (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 125.

[Note 20]. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 196 – 202.

[Note 21]. Ibid., 95. 

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Text copyright 2012 Brian Curtis