Neil C. M. Brown

Are We Entering a Post-Critical Age in Visual Arts Education?

The current institutional boundaries of the arts are subject to challenge from various quarters. In a similar way the boundaries of school syllabi in the arts are under reconstruction. This commentary lists a number of reasons why it is that the boundaries between subjects in the humanities such as the Visual Arts, History, English, and Social Studies are being redrawn. These reasons focus on the socio-critical frameworks that are

Performing Digital Aesthetics: The Framework for a Theory of the Formation of Interactive Narratives

ABSTRACT Interactive narratives are inextricable from the way that we understand our encounters with digital technology. This is based upon the way that these encounters are processually formed into a narrative of episodic events, arranged and re-arranged by various levels of agency. After describing past research conducted at the iCinema Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, this paper sets out a framework within which to build a relational theory of interactive narrative formation, outlining future research in the area.

The Imputation of Authenticity in the Assessment of Student Performances in Art

This paper explores the terms under which students are entitled to be accredited with the authorship of their assessment performances, arguing that artefacts on which assessment performances are based engage students in much the same way as actors are engaged by their roles. By reference to three alternative examples, it shows that accreditation of performative outcomes depends upon the assumption of historically fragile nominal, rather than natural, links between outcomes and the students who enact them.

T_Visionarium: the aesthetic transcription of televisual databases

This paper takes the form of a series of thematic reflections on digital aesthetics. These reflections are focused around an experimental artwork, entitled »T_Visionarium«, we are currently developing at the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Centre, University of New South Wales and ZKM, Karlsruhe. The essential thrust of the paper is to suggest that databases can be productively approached using aesthetic and philosophical concepts of transposition and ascription rather than the conventional archaeological concepts of access and retrieval.

Creativity as Collective Misrecognition in the Relationships Between Art Students and Their Teachers

This paper investigates the teaching of creativity as an exchange of symbolic capital between art students and their teacher. The authors test the proposition that trading in creativity between teachers and students, like the exchange of gifts in Bourdieu’s analysis of the Kabylia, is subject to silence about the truth of the exchange. Through semantic analysis in a pilot study of the studio transactions among a class of year 11 students and their art teacher, clinical evidence emerges demonstrating how respondents collectively mis-recognise ‘violations’ of student originality in exchange for enhanced chances of creative success in an external examination.

The Relation Between Evidence and Action in the Assessment of Practice

The need for “active, creative, and critical workers who are ‘life-long’ and ‘life-wide’ learners” redirects teaching and learning away from its focus on the logic of axiomatic disciplines, to an emphasis on practical reasoning and the critical navigation of knowledge. However, conflicts in the relation between practical reasoning and practical outcomes present problems for curriculum and assessment. By contrast with the binding relation between evidence and belief, the necessity of attaching a motivating reason to evidence for it to function as a desire within action, relocates the assessment of practical reason into the gap between the object and outcome of practice. This paper analyses the role of evidence as a function of the agency apportioned to it by practical reasoning. It argues that complex institutional practices such as teaching are motivated by commitment to desire-independent reasons. Nevertheless, the formation of these desire-independent reasons is even prior to those desires tailored in respect of evidence emergent within past practice, creating an infinite regress in the causal relation between evidence and practice. The paper draws on a variety of practical examples to illustrate how misrepresentation of the authority of evidence in the creation and operation of desire independent reasons, falsely apportions evidence with the authority to frame rational courses of action.

The Paradox of Virtuosity in the Practical Arts

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Aesthetic Fallacies in Perspective

This paper examines the long-standing opposition to critical explanation in the arts and art education. Drawing on examples from the logic of Monroe Beardsley’s three aesthetic fallacies it shows how aesthetic meaning in art depends upon the intentional representation of beliefs. It argues that representations do not impose ontological preconditions on artefacts as reductions to a single truth but act as a way of constraining, or framing, the sense of references to artefacts within relational networks of causation. These frameworks are not relativistically interchangeable but meta-represent meaning in artworks from alternative points of view.

The Representation of Practice

This paper critiques action research and similar models of investigation into design practice. It argues that action research is compromised. On the one hand it is too scholastic while, on the other hand, too caught up in practical ends. In viewing research into practice as a scholastic “project” action research privileges values of rational over irrational transactions favouring goals of remediation rather than understanding in the explanation of practical production. Integrating the theoretical work of Cornell realist Richard Boyd with Gilles Deleuze’s systematic interpretation of Foucault’s theory of knowledge-power, this paper advances a functional account of artistic practice. Rather than a linear process proceeding from inception to outcomes, artistic practice is portrayed as a set of interdependent agencies held in homeostatic relation. The paper goes on to illustrate the practical agency and functional relations underlying two related examples of creative practice in design.

Introduction to Studies in Philosophical Realism in Art, Design and Education

This chapter introduces the topic of Philosophical Realism in art education. It positions Philosophical Realism in relation to the threat of philosophical revisionism and the corrosive effects of pluralism in the latter half of the twentieth century, its conceptual development within the Occasional Seminar Series held at The University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, and its continuing application over twenty five years through the Visual Arts curriculum of the New South Wales (NSW) Board of Studies. The chapter goes on to provide brief descriptions of the chapters in the book that is divided into three parts. Part I (Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6), develops the concept of Philosophical Realism in art, design and education. Part II (Chaps. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16), focuses on the critical application of Philosophical Realism to concerns in the field of art, design and education. Part III (Chaps. 17, 18, 19, and 20), considers the implications of Philosophical Realism for practice in art, and education with a focus on design and innovation. The chapter makes reference to other papers that, whilst important to the development of Philosophical and Practical Realism, were omitted from this book. Selected examples of recent research that amplify the scope of Philosophical Realism are also identified for future publications.