Yeah, this is one of the ongoing debates re art schools and education for the artist. It's rather odd that Hockney is now complaining about schools' ignoring skills when he's the guy who made a big deal of the camera lucida and how it enables past artists to trace projected images instead of rendering by eyeball and hand. But it's true that art schools have pretty much abandoned skill-oriented teaching in favor of talking the students to death with theory and "poetry". I sometimes think this is due to the panic of silence and the need for art teachers to 'say' something, to 'teach'. After all, developing skills in drawing, etc., takes a lot of solitude and quiet concentration. When I was in art school on the 50s in life drawing, almost nothing was ever said, by anyone. We drew from the model 4 hours a day. Ditto for painting. You painted and if you had any ability whatsoever, you knew what you were good and bad at and you knew that time, time, and more time, is what it takes. I don't mean that totally passive teaching is always right or even helpful but in some cases, practice, practice, practice, with a model of excellence as a guide is the right path. It's the path defined by old academy system.
Trouble is, today there are so many competing art standards and values and it's impossible to say what skills are crucial, if any. Some schools choose no skills and no studio practice. They talk happily of deskilling and post-studio. Look around at the contemporary art scene and you'll find that the hottest artists right now are just those, the deskilled and the post-studio. They 'arrange' situations, appropriate environments, hire assistants, study sociology or anthropology, go to law school. some artists ain't artists in the old sense. Some are. It's an open field, unstructured. So the 'art' structure comes from the outside, from outside the artworld. Art is now an instrument of other disciplines. Pick your discipline and you'll find its art form presented in the traditional contexts (museums, galleries). That's how a little exercise in exposing social inequality, for example, with statistics, photos, and some hand-wringing, can fetch high art prices at a NYC gallery but is otherwise found only, maybe, in an obscure, unpaid Journal. Proving that anything can be art is not hard or interesting anymore. What's interesting and hard is proving that anything can be sold as art. For big prices. Art as capitalism! wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, January 6, 2012 4:51:00 AM Subject: "...[He} lamented at how art schools exclusively btry to teach the poetry and not the craft.'" http://www.artlyst.com/articles/david-hockney-lashes-out-at-damien-hirst
