The creative process is destroyed by rigid Ideas in teaching taste, rather than letting art find it's own temporary time under the sun, diversity, diversity & more diversity, is the answer. Learning the use of the tools for one's profession well, and having the guts & tenacity to stay with it into your next life is the only thing that counts. The essence is only there for us to manipulate and play with to our heart's content. mando
On Jun 8, 2008, at 8:40 AM, William Conger wrote:
Indeed I have seen how art schools and programs have changed. For 40 years I was in the thick of it, not only through teaching but also as an administrator and as one deeply involved in art curricula, art faculty appointments and tenure reviews for several leading schools, review of art programs, on committees at the College Art Association, etc. I was punch drunk from being in the ring for so much time and still keeping up with my work, a career, etc. I was a strong advocate of pluralism in art programs, I mean championing the co-existence of many traditions and appraches to art. I was a stong advocate of getting top artists to teach by trusting that they would inspire students if they were genuinely interested in those students and not simply looking to a shelter job. You can believe that 98% of artists disqualified themselves within minutes of the first interveiw by saying they thought it most important that the job would leave them time for their own work. That means they weren't interested in a job but only in the security it offers. If one is an artist, the time will be found no matter what the job requires...and every job involving the education of others requires a selfless commitment. I hired and kept exceptional, internationally known artists who are exceptional educators. But....there has been a coup in art programs. The business artists have taken over the academy and by that I mean the business of self-sustaining art theory before practice, career theory trumping and devaluing practice (the post studio, deskilling revolution that puts talk above all. Many of today's "top M.F.A. programs are dominated by that approach and the more pluralistic studio centered, media centered artists are being pushed aside as they age (ageism is a very big fashion in art programs). Painter, printmakers, sculptors, drawers, are out, ridiculed and marginalized. I lament the situation. The interests of my generation in pluralistic art has proven to be naive. Now I believe, without intentionally being extremist, the the new M.F.A. grad is almost completely uneducated and unprepared and unexamined and unqualified by anything except equally poor teachers and artworldy people who have nothing but business in mind. NO other graduate level program of study has so little in the way of evaluation or basic standards as the M.F.A. By the ordinary standards of other grad fields, advanced art study is a bogus field of study. It is a worthless degree except it IS the passport to the artworld. People who can't draw a square box are teaching undergraduate drawing ; people who don't paint at all, teach undergraduate painting; people who are uneducated in art history teach art criticism; people who look to cultural theory for "new ideas" assume that the corpse of culture will birth new life. The student victims are encouraged by people who can't do and don't know but easily dazzle. Authoritative talk by a commercially successful person can do that. That's why dealers and collectors are "visiting critics" at art schools. That's why the art fairs have replaced the exhibition hall, the studio, the quiet gallery. I've been close to many graduate programs in all fields and I can say with confidence that ALL of them excepting the art M.F.A. have rigorous standards requiring basic knowledge in their respective and allied fields. Empty artists make empty art and both are easily manipulated by those who prefer art not to have content that might provoke serious thinking. An empty container can hold any poison. The very few art programs that still require some performative evidence of knowledge and skills are generally those that are stuck in narrow aesthetic views, pandering to rigid, anti-creative outlooks. They are at the opposite end of the more plentiful M.F.A. programs and nearly as bad in not educating creative artists. I believe the ugliness of today's M.F.A. programs is most evident in their unity with the degrading totalitarian-type material culture ethos that has enabled nearly anarchistic global-corporate exploitation, answerable to no government or national interest, an insane flip of truly democratic capitalism (see author Anita Klein). See who buys that art...the moguls of anarchistic free-market exploitation and the economic repression of the majority of people. The reidentification of art as the commonplace, glorified by the context of high art, the "white cube" and its select curatorial Papal Guard simply facilitates and glorifies the aims of this new economy: lawless, totalitarian, inhumane, anti spiritual and deadly to art. It prefers a shallow, fun-centered art, something to distract people from the evils that are being heaped on them. Great art is not about fun and games as such but is a transparent expression of the human struggle for individual and spiritual freedom. It can be scary and exhilarating at the same time: sublime. What serious artist would want less? For a far better analysis of the situation see D. Kuspit (The End of Art or his new book, The Critical History of 20C Art, published as Vol. 23, no. 1 and 2 of the Journal, Art Criticism, also published on www.artnet.com So go read the experts. I am deeply committed to this modernist view of the autonomous artist-creator. I don't accept the notion of the artist as a pawn of culture (of visual culture) except superficially (all people exist in a time and its symbols). Kandinsky was among my first artist-heros, and still is. I do think the spiritual context of high art exists on the margins, and is more and more the interest of young, independent, truly creative artists. It may stay there, safely, for the sake of the future. That's the central reason, beyond arguing with you and others as brain-play, I'm here. Aesthetics is alive. It does point to something crucial in our human identity. It does need to be reinvented generation by generation. It is a spiritual endeavor. WC \
