There's a grain or many grains of truth in Hickey's statement. But not enough to spoil the artsoup. The MFA degree was intended as a pragmatic professional degree that enabled recipients to to teach at the college level. It served that purpose and still does. Yet the 'push' for a PhD in studio practice is not going away and I'm quite sure it will take hold in America as it has elsewhere in Europe and Australia. The MFA degree was always more about theory than practice but until the 70s nobody know what theory really was in relation to studio art. Then came the theory crowd with conceptualism and minimalist art, situational art, the resurrection of Duchamp, the apotheosis of pop culture, irony, the French philosophers, deconstruction, the division of the art subject into a broad range of cultural and social sub-topics and the consequent confusion about standards and finally the rejection of any free-standing standards at all, as with postmodernism. Leading professors of art at Cal-Arts, arguably the most influential art school in the world, say that they 'teach only to the wrist' a witty way of saying that skills and craft are not their interest. They teach ideas and maybe not even that. It's easy to idealize a more stable and hegemonic past in art when quality, skill and theory (mainly art history gossip with a few rules for color, composition, materials) seemed to be well established and supported a transparent meritocracy in art. A close look, however, reveals a lack of coherence in whatever standards were presumed to be in place, except a generally across the board high regard for studio skills, especially when they were willfully ignored. And the meritocracy never extended to any of the arts. Networking always rules in the non-performing arts simply because there are no objective markers for achievement (except the Institutional Theory....a basement level pragmatism masquerading as theory.
If we look at the whole spectrum of art study and practice I think it's safe to say that the level of creativity and quality are surely as high now as ever in the modernist tradition (exemplified by a switch from the 'art of nature' to the nature of art'). If you want to groan and moan about the loss of high art you will find much to support your view. You can pretend to be a time traveler and go back to any point in history and you will find the same moaning and groaning about the loss of standards. If you want to find new high achievements in art you will find those, too, if you look with an eye on adventure and new revelations of the human spirit. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, July 6, 2012 7:42:34 PM Subject: "The critic Dave Hickey nailed it when he said it all kind of went wrong in the b70s when they started pushing grad degrees in art." http://honoluluweekly.com/qanda/2012/07/the-life-in-the-line/
