Art and Education by Donald Brook (review)

artists asan audience, several of the issues will become important future centers of discourse. Given limited space, I can only list them: the media-independence of formal systems; theemergence of meaning in semantics; the challenge of extending expert systems beyond restricted microworlds ; machine recognition of visual and sound images; and the simulation of human consciousness, self-reflection, imagination and feelings. Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus’s book Mind Over Machine continues the clearly sceptical analysis begun in Hubert Dreyfus’s earlier book, What Computers Can’tDo. Dreyfus, now oneof the leading sceptics, claimsthat the fundamental goal of A1 is ill-conceived. Human understanding is synthetic and global in a way that cannot be formalized and embedded in a program. Human understanding arises out of the years of experience we have with our bodies, our environment and our contacts with other humans. Common-sense understanding in machines is not just a technical problem but rather an impossibility. Mind Over Machine follows this line of reasoning to analyze expert systems. The authors note that advanced human expertsdo not solve problems by applying a list of internal rules. Rather, they use more global pattern recognition to assess a particular situation and to compare it with others in their experience. The authors offer a detailed theory of human expertise and proclaim as doomed attempts in A1research to developexpert systems that can duplicate or exceed human experts in many fields. The book applies this point of view to attempts to develop expert systems in several areas, including the military, factory management, education and business management. Readers will find this book a provocative challenge to often-unquestioned A1 claims. Readers probably should start with WhatComputers Can’tDo and then move on to the current book. These books are valuable resources for people in the arts who are interested in AI. Our next need is for books on this topic that are specifically aimed at art issues. ART AND EDUCATION by Donald Brook. Experimental Art Foundation, South Australia, 1985. 51 pp. Paper. ISBN: 0-849536-1 1-7. Reviewed by Vic Gray, 137 Westbury Road, Bristol BS9 3AN, U.K. Art is a very complex and subtle game calling for enterprise, imagination and sensitivity. It’s run by people with a lot of knowledge and experiencewho can’t be easily taken. It is by far the best game in town. This quotation from a collection of articles and addresses by Donald Brook, Dept. of Visual Arts, Flinders University, provides a premise for reconceiving the art school. Any writing on ‘What is art? or ‘Whatis art education?’ is bound to be contentious, and these essays, arranged to show developing thought in the formulation of a theory of art education, will widen the argument and stimulate positive discussion. The main thesis is that art cannot be taught and that the problem, if not the crisis, in art is the ‘high-falutin’ concept of creativity and the claim of the art academies to be sole catalysts for its manifestation in the individual. In a further elaboration, institutional art, or art as the world understands it, is not appropriate for children; real art is unteachable, but, more important, the fourth R (representation ) should be taught in schools. Art academies should teach technical skills (photography, printing, etc.), promote practical endeavour to make works of art, and provide academic and critical instruction for personal development . Brook sees representation as a more fundamental subject than art as taught in schools at present. He envisions properly trained teachers developing the subject along lines governed by a defensible and purposeful rationale. “The subject might be structured in a number of ways. For example one might begin by making a distinction between verbal representations (paradigmatically with proper names) and non-verbal representations, and with a resolution to concentrate attention on the latter because the former receive so much explicit and implicit notice in other subjects-notably languageand literature subjects.Non-verbal representations could then be divided in one way in relation to the main human sensory modes as visual, audible, tactile, etc. They could be divided in another, categorically distinct, way as matching representations (things that are in a nominated respect literally indistinguishable from their subjects), as stimulating...