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One day while teaching, Josh was asked, ”Teacher, is it time to admit that the idea of the death of manufacturing as the core of the economy is itself a dead idea?”
Josh spoke thus:
An art club was having a meeting to compose its manifesto.
“We will not paint,” the president of the art club said, “Painting is dead.”
The president of the art club did not wait for a response from other members of the art club.
“In a digital age, canvas is passé, brush strokes are baroque, debates of oil versus water color are archaic,” the president of the art club said.
The president of the art club did not make eye contact with other members of the art club.
“What is the purpose of cluttering a wall with a frame?” the president of the art club asked.
The question was rhetorical, and the president of the art club did not signal for an art club member to speak.
“What would a statue do but block transit through a usable space?” the president of the art club asked. Again the question was rhetorical. Again no art club member moved to share an opinion.
“This will be our credo,” the president of the art club said, “All art is in the Cloud. There is no longer concrete art. Art has achieved absolute abstraction.”
“Does the accountant keep musty leather bound ledgers?” the president of the art club asked.
“The accountant has abandoned the ledger,” the president of the art club replied to the president of the art club’s own question.
“The engineer,” the president of the art club said, “Where are the engineer’s rulers? Where are the engineer’s compasses? Where are the engineers pencils, the soft number two, the ubiquitous number four, the diamond-hard number six that doesn’t so much mark the page as engrave upon it? What paper does the engineer now use?”
Into the silence, the president said, “CAD! CAD is the engineer’s medium now. Three-dimensional worlds constructed on two-dimensional screens by binary switches. On and off. Off and on. Pure abstraction structured into code, code which resides in the ether, in the mind, in the concept, in the abstract.”
“Even the engineer,” the president of the art club continued, “Even the engineer, that most applied of applied scientists, the most concretizing conceptualizer, creates in absolute abstraction.”
The president of the art club knew the point had been made.
“What rationalization can an artist have for fashioning concrete objects in a world that is no longer concrete?” the president of the art club asked, “What point is there in creating concrete objects in an abstract word?”
“But isn’t that the point of an art object?” a voice asked, “Isn’t the creation of an art object the rationalization for its creation? Doesn’t pure art eschew practicality?”
The president of the art club was astonished. The president of the art club was astonished to be in complete agreement with the contradiction of the president of the art club’s own argument. The president of the art club was astonished to know who had spoken.
The president of the art club looked at the speaker in the president of the art club’s mirror. The speaker was the president of the art club.
The president of the art club said to the president of the art club in the mirror, “That’s why nobody joins this club. You can’t even agree on a simple manifesto.”
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