January 10, 2007
The Future of (Art) School
A friend found this in his faculty inbox and passed it along to me.
How lucky!
It's a poster for a soul searching symposium about art school sponsored by USC. Evidently, Lane Reylea showered some sparks over there in a recent visit and the faculty are taking on the topic in a big talk fest.
My hopes are high... and I hope I'm not merely stoned on optimism.
A symposium meant to offer artists, students and educators a forum to seriously consider...
Yes, of course, seriously. Maybe this is a precaution against excessive irony?
Strange, isn't it? By becoming masters of irony (sipping non lethal quantities over time), we seek to control its coil and turns.
That's called hubris.
...what we want our schools to be, what we want them to do;
That's kind of tricky, "what we want them to do". Most artists deep down just want art school to deliver success and not much else. Intellectual ideals are hamstrung by a stultifying dialog/ideology, an incredibly narrow discourse and intellectual terrain. We are victims of our own success, a story as old as mankind. Any effort to take down the fences in this territory will be met with a withering defensive counterattack.
...here's an opportunity to freely imagine what should be done,
There it is, the tacit admission that our discourse isn't naturally free. Maybe it's because freedom is not greeted with pleasure in our artworld?
...unhindered by administrative worries...
Astounding. An admission that the administrative cohort in the academy is a controlling force?
Bureaucracy is a natural enemy of art.
...about what can't possibly be done.
A lot of convulsive truth telling going on here, people. Evidently, we live in a world where possibilities are denied... is this the artworld we've created together?
A roundtable discussion in 3 parts: the meaning and value of degrees...
In a major where the terminal degree is a Master (meaning that there is no PhD program for the fine arts, the term fine denoting final), the academic certificate is lesser in meaning than the subsequent artwork it is meant to inform/inspire. I guess this is true for every degree program, but the distinction is arched for the fine arts where the advanced studies is supposed to occur in the artist studios after school. Interesting, that the academic world isolates and distances itself from art production. Maybe it's because artwork exists on a level that is the subject of research and contemplation?
/ between the market & the academy...
There's not even a sliver of light in the space between the marketplace and the academy. It's seamless. Do I need to cite evidence? In the way dealers roam the hallways of grad art school studio programs? With students selling work in the four to five figures? With the instrumentalization of critical theory as a sales tool? In the way art school has taken on a vocational school agenda? With our eyes blind to the wild west nature of the art world, the conflicts of interest, the defacto insider trading, the compicity with recurrent tulip mania speculation?
Don't get me wrong here. I defend the marketplace, our modernity, our capitalism that has fed so many more people than ever before, that has raised the standard of living worldwide so much so that more artists than ever can reasonably expect to be able to make art and try to pay their bills to make more art. It's just that we have lost sight of the role of intellectual reflective contemplation, aka the academy. The agenda of this symposium is evidence enough of this. I think the main culprit is an overripe postmodernity and our unwillingness or incapacity to overhaul it with a vigorous shakedown critique of the past fifty plus years of recent art history.
We were taught to question authority but now that we have become the authority, we became authoritarians, preventing ourselves from questioning ourselves. ?Que pena! ?Que lastima! But we can yet turn things around, can't we?
...can't we?
/ towards a critical faculty.
I guess "critical" is a postive appellation meaning independent, serious, rigorous, intellectual, thoughtful... is this an admission that we aren't there yet? "Oh, where's the criticality? Over there? Are we there yet?" If the faculty of our art schools have not been critical thus far, what have they been?
I google:
Mai Abu Eldahab
Jan Verwoert
Howard Singerman
Lane Relyea
and Robert Linsley
Moderated by:
Frances Stark
Stuart Bailey
and students
A Related Publication "primer" is available to buy (cheap) as a book or download as PDFs from www.lulu.com.
I tried to find this publication, to no avail. I have an email in to the school to get the name of it, more to you all later when I know more...
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