# Interventions, experimentation, markets # ## Does art education match today's creative practice? ## ## Florian Cramer, (Paul Rutten), 4-2013 ## Summary: This paper revisits two major traditions - one intellectual, one vocational - that have constituted Western art education. In recent years, cross-disciplinary work forms emerged in contemporary art and design, and gained momentum in international and local creative practice/industries. Established art academy curricula, with their implicit concepts of art and design, do not yet reflect this change. In this light, the 2013 curricular reform of the Willem de Kooning Academy is radical. ## Idealism and Fine Art ## ### Plato ### When academia (Ἀκαδημία) was invented by Plato, visual artists had no place in it. According to book ten of the _Republic_, paintings are a "third from the truth"[^1]. Plato thought of painters as imitators, in accordance with the classical Greek concept of mimesis. Instead of purveying ideas, they created, in his opinion, further mirrors and shadows that deflected the philosophical truth. This set the model for iconoclasm in later centuries, both in Christian and Islamic cultures. An exception was granted to music, at least partly. While most harmonic systems and all instruments except lyre and harp were banned from the ideal republic, music was at least recognized as creation of beauty[^2]. Here, Plato was indebted to Pythagorean thinking with its discovery of corresponding laws of symmetric beauty in music, mathematics and macrocosmic nature. This exception had far-reaching consequences for the very definition of the arts in the European Middle Ages. Along with grammar and rhetoric (as the precursors of linguistics and philology), dialectics (as the precursor of philosophical logic), arithmetics, geometry and astronomy, music entered the canon of the _septem artes liberales_, the seven liberal arts. The disciplines that prefigured later visual art and design professions, including weaving and architecture, were delegated to the canon of the lower _artes mechanicae_ such as agriculture, cooking, blacksmithing, martial arts and trade. ### Middle Ages and Renaissance ### This normative divide still exist today, and is nowhere as present as in art and design education: one the hand, the "liberal arts" model as the humanist continuation of the _septem artes liberales_, on the other, the model of vocational art and design craftsmanship as (an often class-conscious) continuation of the lower _artes mechanicae_. Financed by the Medici family, the Italian neoplatonist Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino broke through this divide when he founded his new Platonic Academy in 15th century Florence and worked in a close exchange with painters like Botticelli. Through its complete integration of Pythagorean thought, Renaissance neoplatonism was fundamentally based on aesthetics and a metaphysics based on beauty. Botticelli's "Venus", later Raphael's "School of Athens" and Leonardo da Vinci's geometrical drawings of the human figure, conversely are perfect examples of visual art striving for the same level of both transcendental and mathematical-harmonic beauty that Plato had only recognized in music. ### 20th century ### From the Renaissance to today, the history of a significant part of Western visual arts could be told as a continuous struggle for emancipation from the lower crafts and acceptance into the higher liberal arts. Through the break with scholastic science in the anti-universitarian academy movement of the 17th century, the liberal arts transformed into the modern humanities and sciences. A notion like "concept art" - coined by the philosopher and artist Henry Flynt in 1961 in full awareness of these historical issues[^3] -, "dematerialization" or "artistic research" do not describe anything new in this respect. On their most simple level, they express artists' desires to emancipate themselves from the lower crafts and have their work accepted as intellectual labor; figuratively speaking, to be accepted as thinkers into Plato's republic. Thus seen, "conceptual" art is straightforward idealism whose program had been put down by Hegel as far back as in 1828: "Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place."[^5] The notion of artistic research still carries the potential of exceeding the confines of conceptualism since its implication is twofold: not that artists conform to academia and standard notions of intellectual labor, but to cut through idealism and emancipate practice as thinking. In Western continental philosophy, the same attempt had been made by Martin Heidegger and philosophers following him like Jacques Derrida; in East Asian intellectual traditions, such ontological and deconstructive thinking goes back to the beginnings of Taoism, in the same century as Plato. It is therefore not surprising that the divide between fine art and applied art does not exist in countries like China and Japan except as imported Western culture. ## Crafts Ontologies ## Instead of being resolved, the dualisms of Western art may only have shifted: from "mechanical" versus "liberal" arts to "applied" versus "fine" arts, or, design versus autonomous art in the 19th and 20th century, and to "creative industries" versus "artistic research" in the 21st century. After the sweeping subsidy cuts for the arts in the Netherlands (which equally affect commercial designers receiving commissions from arts institutions), art school students perceive these as their two most important career options today[^6]. The question remains whether they are mutually exclusive. From a sociological viewpoint, artists' desire for intellectual recognition in Platonic academia was a class struggle resulting in upward social mobility. The Renaissance painter as a maker, researcher and independent business person manifests the arguably earliest example of what Richard Florida calls the "creative class" - a definition that is by far not restricted to creative industries but includes almost any kind of high skill labor[^7]. Class consciousness manifested itself, on the other hand, among those artists-designers who refused this career path and continued the medieval crafts and workshop system, gradually transforming it from guilds into cooperatives. The Arts and Crafts movement of the 19th century, founded on the socialist ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris, was more than just a counter-reaction to the industrial revolution. It can just as much be seen as practical opposition to idealist notions of art, including Hegel's assertion that art lost its significance because it had "rather been transferred into our ideas" [^8]. The turn from metaphysics to ontology, or (in the terms of contemporary philosophy:) from purely speculative to object-oriented practice,[^9] was practiced in Arts and Crafts before Heidegger theorized it[^10]. Heidegger drew on van Gogh's painting and expressionist art; the life reform movement, which began in the late 19th century and continued into the 20th century, constituted the historical link between both periods. In the 20th century artist movements, Arts and Crafts' practical philosophy continued in obvious and less obvious places. The direct legacy of Arts and Crafts in De Stijl/neoplasticism and Bauhaus is well-known and -documented [^12]. Both revised Arts and Crafts' anti-industrial program into modern industrial design. Even more significantly, they radicalized the literal equation of Arts and Crafts towards a radical fusion of fine art and design. Theo van Doesburg's 1917 manifesto of Neoplasticism ("Nieuwe Beelding") equally addressed "the painter, the architect, the sculptor as well as the carpenter" ("Zoowel de schilder, de architect, de beeldhouwer, als de meubelmaker") as visual designers of every aspect of life and proposed the same principles for their work[^12]. Blurring the lines between fine art and design has remained a characteristic of arts and visual culture in the Netherlands. It is equally characteristic for Dutch art education which, with few exceptions, has been modeled after the Bauhaus curriculum from 1922: A foundation course ("Vorlehre" - "propedeuse") is followed by elementary instruction in composition, colors and materials, instruction is grouped around material-/media-specific workshops in the school. Just like Arts and Crafts were a counter-movement to 19th century fine art, art schools with Bauhaus-derived curricula were a counter-program to classicist art academies modeled after the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris that had been founded under French absolutism by Cardinal Mazarin in 1648. It is less known that central ideas of Arts and Crafts and Bauhaus were continued in two art movements of the 1960s that are commonly associated with the opposite ideas of conceptualism and dematerialized art practices: the predominantly American (but also European and Japanese) Fluxus movement, and the continental European (predominantly French) Situationist International. George Maciunas, founder and central organizer of Fluxus, demanded in his 1963 Fluxus Manifesto to "purge the world of bourgeois sickness, 'intellectual', professional and commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art" and "FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front & action" [^13]. Never mind the seeming opposition between the beauty ideals of Arts and Crafts and the countercultural audiovisual aesthetics of Fluxus, Maciunas (an architect and graphic designer by trade) followed Ruskin's and Morris' footsteps in many aspects. Like them, he envisioned Fluxus as affordable art for the common people. Hence Fluxus' focus on street theater actions and small edition artists' books and small objects and boxes produced as multiples and sold inexpensively in "Flux Shops" in New York and Amsterdam. Maciunas' elaborate "Expanded Arts Diagram" integrates popular amusement such as American Vaudeville with music, avant-garde art and design into one alternative vision of contemporary art. For the first time in a Western 20th century art movement, it significantly included non-Western, Japanese contemporary art. In its time and later, Fluxus' program has been characterized as total art that equated art and life. While these aspects did exist in the movement, they narrow it down to romanticist art programs. In 1798, Friedrich Schlegel wrote down the vision of romanticist poetry as "a progressive universal poetry" whose "destiny is not merely to reunite all of the different genres, and […] make life and society poetic", embracing "everything […] all the way down to the sigh, the kiss that a poeticizing child breathes out in an artless song" [^14]. By the late 19th century, this idea had transformed into the late romanticist concept of the total art work (credited in Maciunas' Expanded Arts Diagram as "WAGNERISM WHOLE ART")[^15]. But the performance scores that were typical for Fluxus, such as George Brechts "Word Event" which merely consists of the word "EXIT", undermined any Wagnerian expectation. Their minimalism, pronounced absence of higher meaning or metaphysics made them ontological exercises. They were inspired both by Western existential philosophy and Japanese Zen. Fluxus objects like Maciunas' extensive diagrams moreover defy classification as art, graphic design and (anti-academic) research. The Situationist International even operated under the disguise of a research organization. Its main activity was the publication of a quasi-academic journal. One the groups that had founded the Situationist International was the "International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus", created by the Danish painter Asger Jorn after the breakup of the artist group COBRA. The "Imaginist Bauhaus" departed from the same question that had been underlying Arts and Crafts and Bauhaus beofre, in Jorn's words: "WHERE AND HOW to find a justified place for artists in the machine age."[^16] Accordingly, Jorn characterized the original German Bauhaus as an "answer to the question: What kind of 'education' do artists need in order to take their place in the machine age?"[^17] In Jorn's view, post-war functionalism such as the design school of Max Bill had reduced Bauhaus' original ideas - for which he credits, among others, Ruskin - to mere functionalism. His 1957 manifesto of the Imaginist Bauhaus is likely the first document that literally demands artistic research: "We want the same economic and practical means and possibilities that are already at the disposal of scientific research, of whose momentous results everyone is aware. Artistic research is identical to 'human science,' which for us means 'concerned' science, not purely historical science. This research should be carried out by artists with the assistance of scientists" [^18]. In other words, the purpose of artistic research is not to promote artists to academia, but to save science from blind technocracy. In the same year, Jorn published, with credits for Guy Debord, a collaged subjectivist map of Copenhagen, "Fin de Copenhague" [^19]. Within the Situationist International, his program merged into the group's "unitary urbanism", a concept of mapping cities through subjective experience rather than top-down functionalist city planning. This attracted Constant Nieuwenhuys to become a member of the group from 1959 to 1960. In contrast to American Fluxus, Jorn's Imaginist Bauhaus and the Situationist unitary urbanism continue aspects of European romanticism: from the idea of artists as humanist ambassadors - which Debord rejected and ultimately made him expel all artists from the group - to the trope of the urban drift taken over from the Surrealists and the romanticist flaneur[^20]. On the other hand, Situationist unitary urbanism is a direct precursor of contemporary service design: thinking of a built or designed environment not as a structure, but as customer experience. Even the methodologies of Situationist and service design mapping closely resemble each other, as service and interaction designers Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne and Elena Pacenti point out in their much-cited 1999 paper "Cultural Probes": "For instance, our maps are related to the psychogeographical maps of the Situationists, which capture the emotional ambience of different locations."[^21] # After 1970 # In the above examples of 20th century art and design, we find the following characteristics: * Differentiations of "art", "design" and "research" become meaningless except as traditions or points of reference; * Innovation occurs in cross-overs: in Fluxus, design thinking is adopted by an art movement; in Situationism, artistic experiment in research and social intervention; in service design, artistic research in product/service development; * Art is no longer autonomous, design is no longer (purely) functionalist, research is no longer (purely) academic. * Even cross-over concepts can suffer from disciplinary limitations scuh as the Bauhaus curriculum with its sole focus on materials. The standard vocabulary of art/design history and theory is often inadequate for analysis of these tendencies. Art theory is restrained to analytical categories of 19th century philosophical aesthetics where it operates with such idealist terms as "conceptual", "dematerialization" and even "hybridization". In these and the following examples, artists/designers investigate new relations between visual culture, social intervention, globalization and new economies, and experimental forms of research and education. ## Art as social intervention: _Food_ and _RAAF_ ## _Food_ was a restaurant run in 1971 by a group of artists - visual and performance artists, filmmakers, musicians and poets - around Gordon Matta-Clark and Caroline Goodden in New York's SoHo district. The restaurant was, first of all, a neighborhood enterprise, secondly the most significant precursor to what curator Nicolas Bourriaud called the "relational" art of the 1990s. In his letter "A MATTA'S PROPOSAL" (alluding to Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" that satirically advocated cannibalism to solve the Irish famine), Matta-Clark calls it his "mission […] to restore the art of eating with love instead of fear". _Food_ differs from happenings, Fluxus and other earlier performative arts in its lack of any symbolic framing. The restaurant simply _was_ and obtained its meaning purely in its social and economic function: sharing food, creating an artists' community space, financing artists' projects. Unlike restaurant jobs that artists might have worked in before, this was not seen as an alienated job different from artists' actual work but as an art project (or social installation) itself. This way, it elevated cooking from the "artes mechanicae" to contemporary art. At the same time, it destroyed the notion of art as something different from crafts or social activism. As a space of enabling processes, social dynamics and experience, it could be seen as an early example of social design. _Food_ became the prototype of all economically self-supporting artist-run social spaces that typically include catering. In Rotterdam, the small venue RAAF ("Rotterdam Art Adventure & Food") is a perfect contemporary example of _Food's_ concept. RAAF was founded in 2009, then under the name "Kunstplatform de Kapsalon" ("art platform the barber shop") in a vacant former barber shop in South Rotterdam, by students of the Willem de Kooning Academy. Running the venue, with a pronounced combination of art and globalisation-critical political activism, became their graduation project for the Bachelor Fine Art program [^22]. Relocating the space within South Rotterdam and transforming it into RAAF entailed change of its programming and economics, since the makers wanted it to sustain itself without public art subsidies. It is now a multi-purpose space with a stronger emphasis on its café and restaurant. Next to hosting small exhibitions from Rotterdam artists and people in the Rotterdam South neighborhood, it hosts music concerts and open mike poetry readings, attracts a steady audience and serves as a young artists' community hub for the neighborhood. Kapsalon/RAAF is everything but untypical for today's post-graduation projects and careers of artists. Although it did not entail visual work in a traditional sense, the Willem de Kooning Academy's Fine Art Bachelor program was progressive enough to accept and positively assess it as a fine art project. However, these students had no curriculum that supported and professionalized them for their endeavor: no electives or minors that trained them in interdisciplinary project organization, no curricular options for systematically studying art as social intervention, no curricular options for obtaining the business administration skills one needs for running a self-organized project or venue. So far, students who choose to work as social designers, community artists and nontraditional educationalists needed "natural" project organization talent or additional training to mature into professionals in this field. ## Art as radical autonomy: Atelier van Lieshout ## Joep van Lieshout is likely the most prominent living artist who graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academy[^23]. Operating with his studio workers under the corporate moniker Atelier van Lieshout (AvL), he describes his work as "objects that balance on the boundary between art, architecture and design"[^24]. They are often monumental sculptural installations that embody dystopian factories of social disciplining: hospitals, restaurants, living spaces, brothels where humans become anonymous wheels in machineries that recycle their own waste into their own food chains. AvL builds these as sculptures and as architectures and designs to be really used by people; for example, the office spaces of the media-experimental arts venue WORM in Rotterdam. Seemingly extreme opposites characterize AvL's work. While humans are depicted in it as small pieces in machineries they do not control, AvL declared its studios in the Rotterdam harbor a free state in 2001, with its own currency, legislation and national flag. Throughout that year, Atelier van Lieshout's artists were busy throughout one year with practical experiments for obtaining economic and ecological self-sufficiency. In that respect, AvL took the Western notion of autonomous art to its logical extreme; a notion founded in Kant's Critique of Judgement and made government policy in late 19th century Netherlands by the liberal politician Johan Rudolph Thorbecke. On the other hand, AvL undermines the established autonomy values of fine art by giving up the artists' individual name and signature for a corporate identity, and by disregarding - just like constructivism, Fluxus and Situationism in the 1920s and 1960s - all differentiations between art, design and architecture. Autonomy, in this sense, is an issue of intellectual freedom. It has nothing to do with the tag given to a particular artistic practice. AvL's works reflect this freedom dialectically, with disciplinary machineries as the price one has to pay for self-sufficiency [^25]. Autonomous practices are hence no longer the automatic tag - or privilege - of fine art programs. Van Doesburg's _Nieuwe Beelding_ already implied that a century ago. For art schools, this means that "autonomy" of arts firstly needs to be questioned in its limitations, and secondly regarded as a challenge for creative practitioners of any discipline, regardless whether it traditionally being called "art" or "design". In the disciplinary structure of the Willem de Kooning Academy prior to the curricular reform of 2013, the Bachelor programme Fine Art ("Autonoom Beeldende Kunst") served as a refuge for students who found themselves not at home in the school's design programs where most of WdKA's students are enrolled. (Fine Art students only amount to about 2% of the student population.) Often, they would switch from a design program to "Autonoom" in later study years. This is another indicator that "autonoom" is not a creative discipline by itself, but a radically experimentalist, sometimes political attitude no matter in which discipline. As AvL's work shows, every creative practice that explores and insists on autonomy, is a social practice by definition. However, unlike the practices of community artists and social designers, its sociality is not necessarily constructive. It can as well be anti-social. This is no advocacy for the romanticist (and bourgeois) cliché of the artist as psychopath genius. Fluxus street actions and Situationist psychogeographics drifts, for example, were anti-bourgeois provocations in their time. Nevertheless, community artists and service designers later discovered their usefulness for socially and commercially oriented creative practices. Conversely, radically autonomous practices like those of AvL have a strong commercial aspect. Not only is AvL one of the largest creative industries operations in Rotterdam next to Rem Koolhaas' architecture bureau OMA and Marlies Dekkers' fashion label. If "autonomy" means for an artist project (such as RAAF) not to depend on public subsidies, a business strategy becomes all the more crucial. ## Commercial practices: Piet Zwart, Kurt Schwitters, Fabrique ## In 1923, German collage artist and poet Kurt Schwitters toured through eight Dutch cities performing Dadaist sound poetry with Theo and Nelly van Doesburg. Rioting audiences turned these events into spectacles. Schwitters lived from the fees for his performances and collage paintings he cheaply sold out of a suitcase that he always carried along. Through van Doesburg, he made the acquaintance with Piet Zwart. Zwart had been trained as an architect and studied in a time when Arts and Crafts dominated Dutch design culture. In the year of Schwitters' tour, he had his breakthrough as a graphic designer with his constructivist advertising campaign for Nederlandsche Kabelfabriek (NKF) Delft. Zwart and Schwitters became close friends. Schwitters visited Zwart every summer from 1925 to 1928 and a last time, before his emigration to Norway and England, in 1936. Piet Zwart inspired Schwitters to work a commercial graphic designer and start his own advertising company, "Merz-Werbe" in 1924. Influenced by Zwart and van Doesburg, Schwitters switched to constructivist design and painting in the same year. In 1927, Schwitters founded _ring neuer werbegestalter_ ("circle of new advertising designers") of which Zwart, Jan Tschichold and Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy became members. Tschichold's seminal 1928 book "Die Neue Typographie" ("The New Typography") contains work examples both by Zwart and Schwitters. Several details of this history defy common assumptions about commercial artistic practices: Zwart and Schwitters were not specialists, but multidisciplinary practitioners. Exposure to new commercial work fields did, in the case of Schwitters, not result in less radical artistic work. On the contrary, they helped to renew it and place it into the latest visual culture avant-garde of its time [^27]. Through engaging with everyday visual culture in its own media and renewing it, artists like Schwitters were conversely able to broaden the cultural impact of their work. Commercial application of the "new typography" urged artists to confront new technologies of their time. For the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen - the school that now is called Willem de Kooning Academy -, Piet Zwart demanded in 1928 that the "department of painting needs to be closed in its entirety if people still understand it as the primitive method of putting some color mass on a canvas using a brush of pig hair bound to a stick. Instead, there needs to be emphasis on synthetic and visual drawing, advertising, modern reproduction technologies, typography, photography and its visual possibilities; film, color in architecture and in the urban space" [^28]. Piet Zwart lost his employment over this controversy five years later. In 2013, his demands have been met. But as Aldje van Meer, head of the Willem de Kooning Academy CrossLab, showed in a recent empirical study, the new digital communication technologies that dominate today's every day life, meet just the same resistance in Dutch art education [^29]. In 1994, Fabrique likely was the first Dutch design bureau to receive a web design commission. Yet its founder and director Jeroen van Erp calls it a "hyperdisciplinary" company since it offers interaction design, brand communication, graphic design, interior and retail design and product design - not as different services, but holistically integrated so that their "traditional boundaries […] have sometimes become completely unrecognizable" [^30]. Fabrique's approach is to design total experiences for the customer, with product/service ecosystems where there is a synergy of product and brand [^31]. This design practice is, in van Erp's words, research-driven and based on the assumption that the digital revolution is as profound as the industrial revolution in changing customer's interaction with products and service. Like Gaver's, Dunne's and Pacenti's 1999 paper on "Cultural Probes", van Erp's design philosophy corresponds with situationist experience strategies and earlier romanticist aesthetics that privileged aesthetic experience (aisthesis) over production (poeisis). Van Erp consequently thinks of the designer not as a maker, but as a strategist [^32]. Fabrique nowadays employs 100 people, has opened branches in Amsterdam and Rotterdam where it is one of the few growing design bureaus in the current economic climate. Dutch polytechnical education, of which art schools are a part, by default conceives of monodisciplinary vocational training as apt job training. Fabrique is a striking example of a contemporary employer that on the contrary expects radical multidisciplinary thinking from designers. Traditional monodisciplinary art and design education no longer prepares students for this contemporary work field. This means that cross-disciplinary project- and theme-oriented creative work no longer is a niche for experimental or activist art, but has become a mainstream skill requirement for the commercial market. Cultural changes caused by new information technology now push this development into comparatively conservative work domains such as product, retail and fashion design [^33]. ## Conclusion ## This paper identified Platonism and Art and Crafts as two opposite poles which traditionally defined Western arts practice and art education. Examining cutting edge 20th and 21st century creative practices that foreground social intervention, autonomous experiment or, respectively, commercial orientation, we observe: * that they render the division between "art" and "design" either arbitrary or obsolete; * that smaller disciplinary divisions (such as: graphic design, media design, interior design etc.) have become problematic as well. As study disciplines, they no longer correspond to work disciplines; * that cross-disciplinary categories such as social intervention, autonomous experiment and commercial orientation are helpful to grasp cross-disciplinary creative practice, but in real life, any practice in one of three fields will involve the other two. The initial question of this paper was whether art/design students nowadays face a choice between either "creative industries" or "artistic research", with one just being a new word for design and the other one just being a new word for fine art. The opportunity in the word "creative" as a replacement for "art" and "design" is that it encompasses both meanings and thus obsoletes the old dichotomy. Conversely, as the example of Fabrique showed, research has become just as much a requirement in the commercial domain as in activist and autonomous practices. The fact that the term "artistic research" has been worn out from overuse lately [^34] doesn't change this reality. The Willem de Kooning Academy will be the first art school in the Netherlands, likely one of the first in the world, to implement a new curriculum that structurally addresses the issues and challenges described in this paper. The school's reform is radical. But, to conclude with a subjective assessment: if its students are supposed to find their place in the types of artistic practices described in this paper - and not in other creative niches -, then this radical cut is simply necessary. [^1]: Plato, Republic, book X, 602 [^2]: Plato, Republic, book III, 403 [^3]: Henry Flynt, Essay Concept Art, 1961, in: Jackson Mac Low, La Monte Young (editors), An Anthology, 1962. [^4]: Lucy Lippard, Six Years, The Dematerialization of the Art Object, University of California Press, 1973 [^5]: Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 10 [^6]: Observation based on the author's tutoring Bachelor and Master students of the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam. [^7]: Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Perseus Book Group, 2002 [^8]: Hegel's Aesthetics, ibid. [^9]: The contemporary philosophical movement of Speculative Realism seeks to reconcile these two; Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Open Court, 2002. In Rotterdam, Speculative Realism inspired the recent exhibition "Blowup: Speculative Realities" organized by V2_ at Roodkapje, 8th Dec. 2012-11th January 2013. [^10]: Martin Heidegger, On the Origin of the Work of Art, in: Heidegger, Basic Writings, New York: HarperCollins, 2008, pp. 143-212 [^11]: Elizabeth Cumming, The Arts and Crafts Movement, London: Thames & Hudson, 1991, p. 166. [^12]: Theo van Doesburg, Ter inleiding, in: De Stijl, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1-2 [^13]: George Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto, 1963, reprinted in: Hans Sohm, Harald Szeemann (eds.), Happening & Fluxus, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1970 [^14]: Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1958, pp. 37-38 [^15]: Astrid Schmidt-Burckhardt, Maciunas' Learning Machines, 2nd revised edition, Wien / New York: Springer, 2011, p. 190 [^16]: Asger Jorn, Notes on the Formation of an Imaginist Bauhaus, in: Asger Jorn, Against Functionalism, 1957, [^17]: ibid. [^18]: ibid. [^19]: Asger Jorn, Fin de Copenhague, Édité par le Bauhus Imaginiste, 1957 [^20]: Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, London: Verso, 1983 [^21]: Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne, Elena Pacenti, Cultural Probes and the Value of Uncertainty, in: Interactions, January/February 1999, pp. 21-29 [^22]: Referring to their project "The Mobile Kapsalon", the group writes: "During the trip the economic crisis will also develop itself. Not only in the Netherlands, but in the whole of Europe the governments are trying to reduce government debt by letting the innocent civilians pay. Therefore demonstrations, manifestations and other solidarity actions are on the program as well." Ashley Nijland et.al., KUNSTPLATFORM DE KAPSALON, Rotterdam (self-published book), 2009 [^23]: Joep van Lieshout is currently listed by artfacts.net in the top 300 of world contemporary artists. [^24]: Source: (accessed on April 19th, 2013) [^25]: It is exactly what Adorno and Horkheimer describe as the "Dialectics of Enlightenment", with Sade's literature, fascism and Western consumer society as main examples. [^26]: Friedhelm Lach, Der Merzkünstler Kurt Schwitters, Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1971, p. 56 [^27]: Before 1923, Schwitters' visual language was still very much influenced by cubism, and the Berlin Dadaist had shunned him in 1919 as an "abstract Spitzweg". [^28]: Piet Zwart, Nederlandsche ambachts en nijverheids kunst, in: Het Vaderland, 31 mei 1928: "Feitelijk zal de schilderkunstafdeling geheel moeten vervallen, indien men daaronder wenst te verstaan de primitieve methode waarbij met een bosje varkensharen, die aan een stokje gebonden zijn, kleurige materiën op linnen worden uitgeborsteld. Daarvoor in de plaats zou veel aandacht besteed moeten worden aan synthetisch en beeldend tekenen, reclame, moderne reproductiemethoden, typografie, fotografie en haar beeldingsmogelijkheden; film, kleurgeving in de architectuur en in het stadsbeeld". [^29]: Aldje van Meer, I would rather design a poster than a website, 2012-2013, [^30]: "En dat bij voorkeur dwars door de design disciplines heen waarbij de traditionele grenzen tussen grafisch ontwerpen, industrieel ontwerpen, ruimtelijk ontwerpen en interactieve media soms nauwelijks nog herkenbaar zijn", [^31]: Van Erp names Nespresso as such a brand; Jeroen van Erp, lecture at CrossLab evening Dynamic Design, De Unie, Rotterdam, March 27th, 2012, published in the e-book . [^32]: Ibid. [^33]: Van Erp cites the example of South Korean subway window shops where customers order goods for home delivery by scanning them with their mobile phones. [^34]: This at least is the unanimous response of the course directors of different Fine Art Master programs in the Netherlands in the article "Dutch Masters", Metropolis M, 2/2013.