Dear Eduardo et al. 

I couldn't agree with you more.  The clue is in our name: "The Drawing Research Network".  For me the "Research" bit signifies that this is a service (or ought to be) that I can embrace as a place where drawing is taken seriously as a form of knowledge with a rich history and with fascinating and immense potential.  I understand that the democratic nature of the medium means that inevitably tastes vary and so do peoples idea of what constitutes quality.  

But there is a difficulty here, if the forum aspires to be taken seriously, moreover if we as drawing researchers wish to be taken seriously by our fellows in research across the disciplines then we need to get real.

One of the most important aspects of my own education in art was the development of judgement and discernment.  Hans Georg Gadamer in his book "Truth and Method", is good on this when he insisted on a validation of the place of taste and its truth claims in the face of the overwhelming dominance of scientific method in our academic structures.

To learn or to teach drawing is to learn and or to teach discernment and connoisseurship.  How can one make something of quality if one cannot recognize quality. A decline in the teaching of "drawing" leads inevitably to a decline in such connoisseurship.  

This is the buffer we run up against here.

Working in academia I have often endured the view when it comes to the assessment of artistic work that: "... oh well it is all so subjective really isn't it?! and this from colleagues in related fields working in art schools! People otherwise quite prepared to have questions of innocence or guilt decided by judges, and questions of value decided by dealers and surveyors and questions of life and death decided by doctors at least partially on the basis of judgement, discernment, dare I say it learning (an old fashioned word in our current instrumentalist academies).

If we do not embrace our own traditions in this regard, traditions of learning in the form of taste, discernment, judgement and connoisseurship, we will deserve our peripheral role in academia. 

By the way I am not defending some cannon in terms of a meta-narrative, lets have the Tracey Emins the Elizabeth Peytons the Art Brut etc. etc. etc. ... but lets not take the trivial seriously and expect to be taken seriously ourselves. 

Yours

Tom McGuirk        

    
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eduardo Corte Real" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Monday, 15 February, 2010 13:42:32 GMT +01:00 Amsterdam / Berlin / Bern / Rome / Stockholm / Vienna
Subject: Re: fiddler on the roof drawings

Dear DRNers,

I kindly ask you to pay attention to the subject on the mails. There has 
been an intersting discussion about a life drawing performance that I 
would call "Fiddler on the roof drawings" under the subject "New DRN web 
pages". The subject is important when you conduct a search in the 
archives. Some years from now a drawing research historian may conclude 
that these Fiddler video was on the DRN webpage... :0)
Cheers,

Eduardo

PS: I knew already this video. It produces the expected result in the 
audience. It works for the purposes that was designed. You could not 
expect other from this kind of vaudeville act. Drawing is not here at 
stake but the vaudeville effect. There were some tears in the side of my 
eyes, I confess.



penny somerville escreveu:
> Yes I agree with that - it was a highly polished and rehearsed 'performance'
> of an emotional narrative - and I found her dress and hair very distracting
> - and disturbing - but it still left me a bit speechless, kitsch though it
> was.  Maybe we wouldn't be so struck by the kitschness has we been closer to
> the events of the narrative..
> Penny
>
>