We don't need to consider the audience to discuss this issue. But the problems are real. Here are some questions:
What numerous skills might be appropriate today to identify the artist? While it is true enough I think to say that one cannot be a recognized, professional physicist without having been trained in that discipline through the PhD level, and similarly so in a variety of other fields, it is true that one can be a recognized, professional artist without any actual art training. Or one may be a Nobel winning author without ever having completed one writing course. Art training is a very big business nowadays but it cannot guarantee that even the best student will ever be a recognized artist by any standard at all. There is no causal relationship between training, skills, knowledge in some fields (like art but maybe all the Humanities) and identity or achievement in them. But, again, there is a causal relationship between training and skills in some fields, not always the hard sciences, and any identity or success in them. Without that causality, no specific training skills and knowledge can assure success in art (and Humanities) over any other training, skills, knowledge. That's especially true now because the practice of art has extended far beyond the usual (art historical) modes and materials since the Bauhaus days when all options were considered legitimate. It might be that art training can never provide the plethora of skills that might be appropriate to all part practices. If not then what limits ought to be recognized and by what criteria? Why should an aspiring artist seek art training when it's not always true that there's a causal connection between training in art and being an artist? Is it true that training in any field at all might be appropriate for becoming an artist even though a specific field may limit what sort of artist is possible? Or, is there any field or training that would clearly block one from being an artist? If art training is valid for becoming some sort of artist, what is the most fundamental art skill, knowledge or concept to be learned? wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, March 12, 2010 6:52:09 PM Subject: Re: Physician, heal thyself William wrote > This is probably a "conservative" position since the trend seems to be that the genealogy of art is irrelevant to art practices that now engage the broadest array of disciplines and endeavors from anthropology to engineering, from economics to physics. This reminds me of entropy and dispersed or decentralized authority. There was a time when artists were trained in many skills before they offered their works to the public. It's the guild system, basically, a long apprenticeship of learning and then passing a test. Now, after the changes you ascribe to the effect of Bauhausian Modernism, the line between the artist's skills and the public's viewing, which previously was drawn when the artist passed the test with a masterpiece, has moved over to the viewer's domain. Teachers used to administer the skills and rigors of art, and the products were given pretty much fully-formed to the audiences. The entropy of decentralized canons and non-hierarchical knowledge has shifted the locus of ordering much closer to the viewer. Art, more than any other kind of means of (re)presenting, turns itself inside out so that its own techniques are far more visible *and* offered on a par with whatever the "content" of the work is. Other forms of (re)presenting subsume their techniques to the service of the "content" to a far greater extent than art does, and the means of the delivery and whatever is delivered are hard to distinguish--to order--by the audience. This is another example of what I mean by the effect of "entropy" in the constructing of art. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
