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It reassures me to read spontaneous, underivative variations on vintage jeremiads of mine in a major journal of post-secondary education and a prominent mainstream multi-subject website. Perhaps I wasn’t as crazy as people thought when I had the temerity to offer such cautions in the midst of the photo boom of the ’70s and ’80s. […]
Having witnessed this “northward drift” of grades as a teacher in both undergraduate and graduate liberal-arts programs over the past four decades, I can testify that it’s very real. And I’m willing to wager that, if social promotion ever get traced to its origins in higher education, we will learn that it began in college-level studio art programs, and, even more specifically, in college-level photo programs, circa 1965. […]
One obligation facing any curator engaging with Heinecken’s work for the Museum of Modern Art is to explain to the audience the pervasive influence on the medium of this museum’s Department of Photography as gatekeeper during the period 1965-85, because much of Heinecken’s activity can best be understood as an oppositional response thereto. […]
I consider it a measure of a certain kind of stubborn integrity that Les Krims, Duane Michals, Kenneth Josephson, and Robert Heinecken continued to self-identify as photographers instead of jumping ship and reinventing themselves as picture-makers in one or another of the art world’s approved categories. They knew the dynamics and politics of the art scene, and understood the price they’d pay for their decision. Which made this an act of principle. […]
Can it be sheer coincidence that this standardization of thought and expression in both visual and verbal modes came out of the same environment? I think not. They emerged at almost exactly the same time, from within the same hothouse ― the international post-secondary art-education system. Their virtually simultaneous birth merely manifests that sheltered microcosm’s belated recognition of something the hardscrabble working class has known for millennia: bullshit makes effective and inexpensive fuel, and if everyone’s using it the smell soon goes unnoticed. […]
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 SPJ Research Award 2014 Thought for the Day Ignorance is a condition; dumbness is a commitment.
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SPJ Research Award 2014
Say Goodbye to Lake Wobegon U. (2)
It reassures me to read spontaneous, underivative variations on vintage jeremiads of mine in a major journal of post-secondary education and a prominent mainstream multi-subject website. Perhaps I wasn’t as crazy as people thought when I had the temerity to offer such cautions in the midst of the photo boom of the ’70s and ’80s. […]