Moral Decisions and Material Cultures: The Art School as Consumer Sublime

This paper investigates the nexus of technological capacity for innovative teaching methodologies and technology as barrier to authentic experience. As the requirement for cross-campus, cross-institutional and wildly interdisciplinary approaches to teaching increase, the barriers to authentic learning remain the same, and many seem drastically unready, unprepared and unwilling to engage.Acting as speculative educational-dystopian mouthpiece the paper investigates 'The Art School' in an era of an increasing commoditization of higher-education and the resulting manifest disneyfication of the academy environment. This contemporary commodity-centric attitude validates a student as consumer mentality that divorces students' from moral decision making paradigms and removes self-actualization and replaces it with a culture of expectation and audit. As artists and designers whose principal aptitude is to generate new and exciting capacities for social/cultural/economic/political sustainment and reciprocity calls for return to traditional studio based lecturer/student engagements have been met with a marked and noticeable silence (or at worst hostility) across the management sector. The 'art schools' historic pedigree in the challenging of the status quo has been replaced in an unhappy marriage with a homogenisation of course offerings based around a false premise of technology-as-saviour heralding in a new-century of contemporary creative-industries I argue as a clear shift towards a planned educational obsolescence and repeat patronage where education is based upon housing a radical disinterest in the rational order of work and a penchant towards the irrational disorder of play. The contemporary consumer landscape has shifted to noticeably shorter cycles of product-obsolescence with user control determined not by ones capacity for meaning making inside a techno-centric curricula but technology-for-technologies sake. Here the wider implications of the rese