Fiasco: Formalism, Communication, and Aesthetic Education

A forty-thousand-year-old history of profound and unprecedented verisimilitude in the visual arts ended in a fiasco of visual communication in the twentieth century. And the fiasco continues into the twenty-first century, thanks to tenured formalists in art schools and exorbitant prices in auction houses and galleries, with incomprehensible art fetching incomprehensible prices. After all, the cost of the new art’s victory over illustration was visual communication, a cost many have come to think too dear. That cost need not be paid in full, however, if art education and the finer optic of ultrathin observation redirect formalism onto productively observational pathways, weaving back into formalism features for sharing information that were untimely ripped from it by a century of overzealous and poorly informed interests in advancing visual communication in the arts.