I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine in which he remarked, "Anyone can learn to use Illustrator or Photoshop. I need something more." This seems like a good way to introduce some questions I have about the current relationship between art education, computer technology and Corporate America™. While I will mainly concentrate on digital imaging technologies and ideologies as examples of the current crisis facing both artists and art educators at the close of the 20th century, I will attempt to raise questions that can be used to spark debate amongst artists, engineers and theorists concerning the situation that the current digital consciousness is pressing us into.
     The current arrangement between art education programs and software companies places the next generation of artists at the mercy of Silicon Valley Corporations. Students are being taught loyalty to the benevolent software companies so that their tools can be constantly upgraded (for a fee, of course). While postmodernism has given us a new perspective on the influence of corporate culture to our world culture, with an indoctrination of corporate loyalty and philosophy embodied in today's "cutting-edge" graphics tools, students will find it nearly impossible to "think outside of the box."
     Adobe, Apple, Macromedia and Microsoft have an alarming degree of prominence in today's arts programs. For example, the teaching of digital imaging right now amounts to these few steps:

1. Learn the Apple Macintosh Operating System (MacOS) or Microsoft Windows. This process involves acquiring a visual vocabulary consisting of Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers (or WIMP, as it is affectionately known to computer scientists). Religious fervor aside, the differences between the Apple and Microsoft graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is slight - only a few pixels, actually. This process is very similar to the behavioral experiments of Pavlov and his dogs. Push the button here and this happens. The OS is a simple behavioral conditioning that is given to students before they are able to roll up their sleeves and delve into the next step.
2. Pick a graphics application. Photographers use Adobe Photoshop. Multimedia people use Macromedia Director. Illustrators use Adobe Illustrator and layout artists use Quark XPress. These pieces of software perform the same sort of conditioning upon the student/artist as the OS. To color correct images, a series of menu items and mouse clicks is memorized. There is a huge conceptual leap made from from the hand of an artist mixing colors on a palette to a series of clicks as a replacement for craft. For those artists using commercial software exclusively, the creation of the work has become not a personal decision, but has been determined by a remote group of programmers working to satisfy shareholders as much as users.
3. Accept the limitations of the software - then pretend they don't exist. As good as Photoshop is, it will only be good at making static 2D images. Similar limitations apply to every piece of software.

     While there are only 3 steps here, the effects are potentially devastating. This seemingly benign process turns students and artists into perpetual consumers and advertisers for the software companies. The particulars of those few menu clicks amount to ideology and one that is taken for granted by most educators, administrators and artists. By accepting the conditions of a corporate software product, the artist is robbed of the possibilities of digital art making. The skills necessary to become an artist cannot be bought off the shelf-they are being constantly redefined. The artist is allowing himself to be locked out of the crux of digital art making: programming.
     The immediate effect of art education's reliance on corporate software is that the work being generated seems to be merely accelerating traditional media instead of concerning itself with the digital consciousness that theorists have been postulating about since McLuhan. The idea that the artists are in control of their tools has been replaced with a passive consumer stance and highly dangerous belief that computers are too complex or out of reach to be able to use except as pre-configured products. Visual artists have accepted the efforts of a handful of companies as the extent of the possibilities for digital art making. It is this belief that is hindering the use of computers in the arts as the new medium that it may become.
The software corporations are not doing anything out of their capitalist nature and art schools are doing something with computers, which is a start. Where things stop is where the problems lie. The acceleration of traditional media has helped to bring about everything from hip-hop to ambient music, the wide open publishing opportunities of the Internet and a collage revival not rivaled since the dadaists wreaked havoc on the 1920s and 1930s. These are good things, but they are backwards-looking. While we continue to focus on the art methods of the past, we miss the opportunities to make an art of our own age. By teaching corporate loyalty, art educators are effectively blinding the next group of artists and replacing their vision with the efforts of a handful of programmers who have to answer to the corporate shareholders, not to history, not to art and not to society for their efforts.
     So it seems that the teaching of digital technology is putting our future artists in a very sticky situation. Nicholas Negroponte said in his last regular column for Wired Magazine, "The Digital Revolution is over." (December, 1998) Arts programs across the country have missed this and are falsely assuming that Adobe and Macromedia are keeping them on the cutting edge. While software is not really the problem, the control of art making by a small set of expensive software products is. The solution that is needed is for artists and educators to realize that the most important piece of knowledge about a computer is its flexibility. Computers do nothing they are not told to do (yet). Artists are now being trained to think that computers can only do what Apple and Microsoft and Adobe tell them they can do. By learning the lingua franca of the digital age, programming, artists will begin to free themselves from the shackles of their education as artists and consumers.