Navelgazers Anonymous

I like to keep family matters and my blog separate, but a recent road trip my parents just returned from had me thinking about the nature of things.

My parents went to visit some college in the mountains of North Carolina so that my dad could see if said college would be a good place for him to teach at in the future. He was looking to teach actuarial science or business.

I assume that if he would teach a class, any class really, that he would include a concise history of whatever objective he was teaching- when did it first start, who has applied it, who has built upon it, etc.,

This is the complete and total opposite of my former discipline, art history, which as far as I can tell looks so far back it practically looks forward. One of the reasons I quit art history is because it never seemed to look forward, it was always pre-occupied with what had happened in the past. Sometimes in the ancient past, like BC or BCE, depending on how politically correct you want to be, past!

In all fairness sometimes art history bothers to stop staring at its own navel long enough to see what is going on in the current world, but usually the only thing it comes up with is some painfully self-conscious exercise in narcissism. Although I must say that Bruno aka Sacha Baron Cohen is one THE best performance art pieces since ever and definitely better than any piece that is deliberate performance art. See Matthew Barney (partner of Bjork), Chris Burden, etc., for examples.

My new discipline, urban planning, looks, or should look both to the past and to the future. If anything it really needs to be a student of the past to see what has worked and what definitely did not work to avoid literally expensive mistakes. But at the same time it is concerned about the present and working for the future, for a better future.

Again, unlike art, planning fails when it caters to elitism- hello Lewis Mumford! Catering only to a specific demographic only brings about downfall. Yet one more thing to get me psyched about planning!