An early life drawing, the likes of which I have not done in a few blue moons

Aliza Shvarts's ludicrous (and possibly fictional) abortion art is already beginning to fade into the compost heap of yesterday's scandal. Shvarts's work came nowhere near "sparking conversation and debate" on the relationship between the body and art as the artist claims to have hoped for. Instead predictable outrage was followed by predictable character assassinations followed by predictable questioning of Yale's undergraduate art curriculum.

In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Michael J. Lewis launches a restrained, but heartfelt plea for retuning to a focus on craft in general, and on life drawing skills in particular. He says:

A traditional program in studio art typically begins with a course in drawing, where students are introduced to the basics of line, form and tone. Life drawing is fundamental to this process, not only because of the complexity of the human form (that limber scaffolding of struts and masses) but because it is the object for which we have the most familiarity -- and sympathy. Students invariably bristle at the drawing requirement, wishing to vault ahead to the stage where they make "real art," but in my experience, students who skip the drawing stages do not have the same visual acuity, and the ability to see where a good idea might be made better.

So we're back at that old question--the one that had Ingres throwing mud at Delacroix 200 years ago--is drawing the basis of all art or not?

Here's what drawing gave me:

Learning to draw taught me how to see the world, internalize it and render it in a way that engages all the senses. Nicolaides will tell you that drawing is not only about sight--in fact it's not even mainly about sight, but about touch and feeling. These skills translate into everything else, whether as an artist you end up drawing, making videos, or doing installations with the fuselage of a 747. Drawing taught me how clunky the hand can be and how tentatively a work can hang between the sublime and the disastrous based on tiny, tiny manipulations of space, form, and content.

I'm not sure that drawing is the only way into that sensitivity of sight, but for my money it's the fastest.