I've been visiting the many blogs I've written over the past decade and a half. I've found ideas that began in 1984 and grew in parallel with the developing digital immersion and deeper understandings of the value of the visual arts over the following 3 decades. However, having just retired, I look back and see that the past 10 years have been a slide back to pre-1970s conservatism in the Arts. I cannot help but see the alignment with political shifts over that time, and despair at the coming wave of even more dangerous trends. 

Advocacy and the maintenance of rigour are all we have to support claims that what we do as visual artists and educators, is powerful differentiation around unique ways of knowing and communicating. 

May the will sustain us in hard-won ground.