It's fine to have set up defenses against the barbarian invasion, but what now? Do we live with the vacuum? Do we develop a European barbarism to fill the gap? Or do we seriously try to create another media "landscape" that advances culture and civilization instead of destroying it, one that may even help the Americans climb out of their hole?

Capitalism, having "won" the cold war, is proving to be as narrow in its definition of humanity as any marxist formulation, defining everything and everyone as commerce, a uni-dimensional expression of man as an economic entity. Every human endeavor is reduced to a state of brute competition, survival through selling, the only legitimate activity underlying and justifying all others. The mindless materialism resulting from this reductionist behavior is a signpost of our era. It is the "democratic and free-market" societies that are producing the worst forms of media barbarism today, accelerating a decline in values and standards while mobilizing populations politically and economically. The violence around us is partially due to a general brutalization of the spirit resulting from a systematic elimination of higher values whoes expression is considered irrelevant or too expensive. When other societies around the world reject western values, our own media give them powerful arguments to throw out the good with the bad.

Is it surprizing that the number of guns showing up in American schools is reaching epidemic proportions? What models have kids had for the last 30 years? Exposed bicepes with a 357 magmum attached. Media, with a continuous diet of mayhem, promote savagery as a legitimate model of human comportment, violence as a form of problem solving. The schools, having given up years ago on any kind of moral content, any education in civic responsibility, any form of cultural training, any discussion of values, have become nothing more than adolescent baby-sitters, keeping down unemployment statistics, and providing meeting places for the exchange of unhealthy ideas garnered from the media. America has been there for many years and is paying the price. Europe is rushing headlong into the same, heedless of what has happened in the States, with profit as its clarion call.

The banalization of violence has become the norm. The vulgarity, the gladitorial atmosphere, is accepted as part of the visual environment, the on-going parade of society's role models. In "Art of the Third Reich" by Peter Adams, Nazi art is described as "the art of seduction, aimed at synchronizing (and thus eliminating) taste. The iconography was clear, the painting accessible and banal: art that asked no questions and gave all the answers. Its effect was immense." The entertainment industry has picked up the standard but, of course, only for fun and profit.

Parallel to the decline in programing quality, we have experienced an enormous expansion in broadcast technologies; satellite, cable, the omnipresent cassette recorders, videodisks...., and more to come. In my own field, networking, we have been experimenting with interactive visual tele-communications. The "in" word today is "cyber", interactive on-line exchange of text, sound and image, virtual reality, a potentially enormous market moving out onto the information highway. The means of moving images and the amount we can move are growing rapidly. Again, who is going to produce the material to be shown on all these systems? Who is going to make the programs for all these new channels? Who is going to develop the software to operate the information highway? Who is going to digitalize and organize the hundreds of thousands of pages of information and images to be consulted, exchanged...? Who is going to build this new virtual world and why?

Will Europe reverse the decline in the quality of our visual environment so evident to any intelligent person who takes the time to look? All these questions have been asked before and the fact that we are in a culturally critical situation seems to be the accepted wisdom in most of Europe. At the same time there is some kind of lock, administratively or psychologically, that keeps everyone and everything in step toward more technical development and expansion while original and creative programing declines. Television fare internationally is being reduced to a limited number of simplistic formulas, infantial behavior promoting a mass culture based on consumption. Televised sports have become the opium of the people. Is this market inevitability, cultural imperialism, governmental failure, scholastic bankruptcy, social indifference, political cynicism....?

Whatever the answer to those questions, the problem is too serious to be left alone to grope toward some finality. We have seen what that has done to the US where the entire visual environment was left to be dictated uniquely by commercial concerns. That we are moving toward a form of world culture may be inevitable. That that culture be based exclusively on commercialism of the crassest kind is unacceptable. We need a general mobilization of resources to begin producing a new environment, one that reflects cultural diversity, intellectual depth, real information as well as entertainment. What appears on screens, large and small, cannot be designed uniquely for how much money can be rung from audiences. While few people deny the need for a market presence in the visual media, domination is quite another thing. Sooner or later we will have to wake up to the fact that the visual environment, the most powerful cultural influence for the majority, is more than a commercial issue. If not, the consequences can be very serious. There is more to culture than distraction, more to a meal than the "amuse-gueules".

The new wave after wave of technological innovation, particularly in the field of communictions, has created an ambiguous situation for the art world as artists have begun to recuperate the technologies of the media for their experimentation, creating new works which do not fit any previous defintion of an "objet d'art". It is hard to market a video tape or a computer screen image. The work of artists in these areas not only questions the media and what they are doing to us, but it questions the art world itself and the relation, as it exists today, between art and culture.

Part of the art world has begun retreating in the face of the proliferation of possibilities, calling for a return to the classics, which unfortunately often means a return to canvas or stone, a seige mentality in an ivory tower, turning a blind eye to what is really happening to culture today. Others are calling for a closer association with industry, particularly the media industry, in order to train practitionners and provide the necessary workers for a quick expansion into the new technological areas with an up-dated rerun of the same old media content, meaning, of course, commerce not culture.

Webster's Dictionary defines culture as; 1. the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief and behavior that depends upon man's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations, 2. the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group. Our social group seems to have divorced the second from the first and allowed a situation to develop where the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits have nothing to do with knowledge and learning, let alone art.

Contemporary culture emerges from a visual sea where very little of what is seen by the public is a product of the arts and it is probable that it will become even less so. It is no wonder that images from publicity have become part of everyman's wardrobe, or that even high fashion items are covered with corporate logos. Publicity has for so long been a part of our visual environment that its images have become part of the way people dress and think.

A good part of the cultural mobilization necessary to change the situation has to be in the field of art education where supposedly the people who will create our culture are trained. The continent's art schools should be the most natural laboratory for experimentation in the new media, where at least part of Europe's new visual environment can be researched. Not "media schools" who's objective is to train people for the profession with little questioning of content and it's social role, where training is technical and the acceptance of the quality and content of the industry total. This seems to be the model that the EU report is to propose for all art schools as a way of increasing their cost effectiveness and redefine their social role. The traditional role of art has been to renew the visual environment, to redefine it for each new age, and through doing so, provide society with models of action. What McLuhan and many others have called the education of perception by the artist. Simply put, art is a form of questioning and the interface between public and art is culture.

The new technologies of the emerging visual environment present a particular challenge to the artist; to adapt these tools to the process of artistic expression, to define their content, to develop the visual language which will be their principal means of expression. These evolving technologies are offering us a new communications space that will be virtual, international and interactive. It is the role of the artist to help define that space, to make it livable and a part of contemporary culture. This is equally true of television which has only marginally been tested by the artistic process. While video art exists, with its 30-year history, its recognized practitioners and its presence in a growing number of art schools and museums, its influence is minimal given the enormity of the medium and its impact on society today. Let us not make the same mistake with the network.

Too often art schools and institutions have continued to function in a reactionary manner ignoring those areas of social activity providing the cultural models that people accept. Television, in its early stages, was consciously ignored or even rejected by the art world as something for the masses, unworthy of art. What was happening in society was given other names like "popular" culture, the media, the entertainment industry, words that, in fact, have become walls barring the questioning of art, reserving those spaces for commerce. It is essential to recognize the new world being created around us and recuperate and redirect the tools of communication to make it a better expression of the best of our culture. That is what I would hope the study on the future of art schools in Europe would recognize as a proper goal. That it will not just push schools into the lap of industry with the short-term objective of making them more commercially viable and less of a state burden. If Europe is to ever improve the media environment it seems to deplore, encouraging the art schools to address the problem could be part of a very big step in that direction. It is the work of a generation, and we have already put it off for too long.