The near-destruction in the western world of a centuries-long tradition of visual education could be described – hyperbolically but not misleadingly – as having been accomplished overnight. The inherited gifts of that tradition are now being casually, ungratefully and even malevolently thrown away. In its chronologically long-range survey, What Happened to Art Education? provides the context in which the extraordinary […]

Artist Paul Wilks responds to Eric Coombes’s tour de force of an essay (Criticism and the collapse of culture, The Jackdaw Mar-Apr 2011) Matthijs Van Boxsel cites, in The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity, a ‘Fame Machine’ devised by Villiers de l’Isle Adam, (1883) in which fame could be manufactured ‘by organic means’. Simply put, the ‘machine’ is a theatre but with […]