Artists and the Academy
Is There a Doctor in the House
By: Charles Giuliano - 08/29/2010
One day the majority of cab drivers and waiters in Manhattan will have MFA degrees.
Start now earning that Studio Art Doctor degree. Illustration by Harry Bartnick,
The academic year is about to begin. Talented young high school students will head to art schools, colleges, and universities with fine arts and studio programs. Over the past couple of decades educating generations of artists has become an industry.
These institutions have also come to realize the values of broadening the scope and requisites for degrees. Traditionally, students who attended art school emerged with a set of skills and a certificate. Today, there is little or no agreement on just what skills comprise an adequate art education. The notion in the past was that a student would progress from art school to studios. There to apply skills and find their way to galleries, collectors, and museums.
As a safety net an increment of these art students would in turn become teachers. In the academic world of degree granting institutions, or even elementary and high schools, that meant earning at least a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. That combined with education classes qualified artists to teach at the secondary level. For colleges and universities one needed a Master of Fine Arts degree.
With the exponential expansion of the education industry the base line has inched ever higher. There is such intense competition for teaching positions that earning an MFA is no guarantee of finding a job. The number of applicants for every position is staggering. The more so at prestigious colleges and universities or even institutions in attractive geographic locations. One has a better chance of finding that entry level position in the provinces at a small college, or state university, light years from the main stream of the art world.
But the curse of that strategy is that advancement in the academic world is earned through portfolios and exhibitions. An enormous number of professors, who manage to find positions and achieve tenure, basically quit on making their way in the art world. Their work becomes ever more self absorbed, a kind of hobby, while they lead groups of students on summer tours of Tuscany, there to create alfresco water colors.
As the careers of tenured professors languish so do their skills. What they convey to students for the next several decades is increasingly less relevant. Of course at the major art schools, colleges, and universities there are more rigid standards and one must exhibit or perish. That is why there is such competition to matriculate or find a faculty position in the top tier of institutions.
In the process of raising standards at the highest level there has been an expansion from the traditional skills of life drawing, mastering perspective, learning to use traditional materials from paint to marble. Rather ideas, theory, philosophy have become the bread and butter of the academy. It has resulted in generations schooled in art speak. The ultimate trophy of this entropy is now a Doctorate of Fine Arts. It is the only guarantee of catapulting over the level playing field and stasis of having a mere MFA. How long will it be before the MFA does not secure a tenure track position?
Consider the deans and administrators of the major art schools and academic programs. Mostly they are not studio artists but rather individuals with advanced degrees, Ph. D's, in other fields, MBA’s. Perhaps they are very famous artists and architects, who have a “sensitivity” to the arts. For a time, for example, the renowned opera singer, Beverly Sills, presided over the School of Fine Arts at Boston University.
Too often in the academic pecking order of colleges and universities with thriving art programs artists with their MFA’s fail to have status and equal footing with other tenured faculty with Ph. D’s. Rarely do artists with MFA’s get elevated to positions as deans or yield power in the Faculty Senate.
So what is the result of this evolution?
Take a trip to Chelsea or any major arts center and contemporary art museum. Get out and about on the Biennial circuit. Suck in the contemporary art world and what will you find? Well, a lot of very smart art that more and more entails an advanced degree in theory and philosophy to understand. We have progressed far beyond the point where one might look at a work of art and just feel or get it.
This has created a world of haves and have nots. Entry into the club of sharing in this global glut of cutting edge creation has become ever more rarified. The fact that this plethora of theory driven work has moved far adrift of the core values, that have driven artists for centuries, is hardly the point.
In the past few months the exhibitions that have knocked my socks off have been Otto Dix which I saw in New York and is now in Montreal. And the Picasso Looks at Degas exhibition which is soon leaving the Clark in Williamstown and moving to Barcelona.
By today’s standards Dix, Picasso and Degas were not very bright. They never learned Photoshop, Autocad, or video production. They never created installations or performance pieces. How primitive. They just made paintings and sculptures. How boring. Yet looking at their work caused blizzards in the eyes and earthquakes in your guts. It signified why I decided to dedicate myself to a life in the arts.
Actually, art students in a university setting work very hard. A lot more so than their classmates. For studio assignments it takes a lot of time. It’s not like reading the Cliff Notes, downloading a paper from Wikipedia, then pulling an all nighter before the exam.
Teaching at the university level I found that art students were more of a pleasure to work with than most undergraduates. Where most students take a year or two to find a major art students often decide on their career goals from the first day of classes. With the exception of fine arts students who continue to cling to bohemia. But a student majoring in graphic design, interior design, and architecture has no time to fool around. They were mostly smart, dedicated, eager to learn, and challening to teach.
Often there is enormous stress for arts students in the academy. There has been a blurring of the notion of the conservatory. In addition to the skills of a discipline in music or theatre, for example, students pursuing BFA or MFA degrees have other academic requirements. They are doing five and ten times more work than their non arts classmates.
A case in point was my Avant-garde seminar at Boston University. It was always a delight to have fine arts students and by word of mouth I had a following among theatre students. They were terrific. There was wonderful energy and drama they brought to classroom debates. By comparison, the fine arts students were resistive even reactionary. BU has a notoriously conservative fine arts program.
The theatre students were fabulous. When they came to class, often late, or if at all. Not that they were slacking. It was more about their insane rehearsal schedules and demands of their faculty. There was no respect for releasing students from classes in time to get to other classes. They were routinely late because professor so and so kept them or because they were pulling a weekend of tech rehearsals. There were melt downs and tearful sessions trying to convince a hysterical student to just stay the course and get through the semester. The enormous pressures also made them doubt their talent and ability to keep up with a career in theatre. Yes, they had a valid point there.
Perhaps you find me reactionary in railing against smart art. I am not being honest. Yes, I went off the cliff with that screed about Picasso, Degas and Dix, but I failed to add how utterly bored I am, cursed by Duchamp’s anathema about “retinal art.” One can drown in a sea of “nice work.” I have little or no patience for painters discovering the fauve or making bucolic landscapes and pretty still life paintings. Or nude bronzes.
Unless those works are absolutely terrific. There is always room for traditional values if they are done with savage intensity. But here the bar is set very high. Don’t bore me with the ordinary. Who gives a fig about your arrangement of apples, oranges, and donuts? Unless the work is just heart pumpingly awesome.
Consider the absurdity today. Try to imagine Dr. Michelangelo or Matisse with an MFA degree? How utterly stupid. Or Picasso teaching Photoshop.
Which brings us to the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, Yale, and perhaps RISD. There is that historical notion, now and then, of the academy as Parnassus. A gathering of titans of creativity who share skills and insights with the next generation of artists. Just imagine learning color and design from Klee and Kandinsky, architecture from Gropius and Mies? Or building your own dormitory and raising chickens while studying with Albers, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage. Robert Rauschenberg emerged from that education. Jackson Pollock studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League.
Yes, it is possible to educate the next generation of artists. It is just so difficult to decide on what to teach. Often the assignments of my colleagues seemed utterly stupid. What could they possibly have to do with learning to think and feel as an artist?
Looking back at my own education I conclude that it started a life long process. The art history has remained with me and continues to be valid. What I learned in the studio, the actual skills, have little to do with me. Today, my work is rooted in digital photography. As an undergraduate fine arts major at Brandeis there were no classes in photography. Far as I know that is still true. It wasn’t considered to be important.
Brandeis had an interesting mandate to combine studio and art history. One majored in one and minored in the other. So art historians had to draw and painters studied the Renaissance. It informed who I am today constantly morphing and exploring from one to the other. Beyond a fine arts major I was embedded in a radical university intent on churning out revolutionaries. Of course that is no longer true as Brandeis today is just another second rate university on a level with, say, Tufts. Just look at the mess they made of the Rose Art Museum. Photography is something I learned on my own.
Today, the contemporary fine arts field is such a muddle that I am getting my fix in other ways. In the past few years, particularly here in the Berkshires, we have become immersed in theatre, music, and the performing arts. The learning curve is steep and challenging. There have been opportunities to have dialogues with actors and directors. This is much like years ago when I wrote about jazz and rock with access to musicians. I was tutored by them. You asked questions and listened.
The creativity comes from pursuing a muse. Like writing, something I do every day. Can it be taught? That’s another discussion. About the sad state of academic writing programs which may be even more of a mess than art schools.
What would I say to a student or young person today? When I told my uncle Freedy, as a teenager, that I wanted to be an artist, he didn’t say no. He responded, learn a trade, so you can support yourself. When I consulted with my professor, Creighton Eddy Gilbert, he said “If you want to be an artist study art history.” At the time, I didn’t understand his advice. Now I believe, at least for me, he was absolutely right.
Do art schools serve a purpose? Hard to say. If you want to be an actor or play the violin the conservatory is where to be. There are well defined skills. You have to be taught how to play an instrument or act. But nobody today can agree on what art is.
The best way to become an artist is to make art. The shelf life of an MFA is at most a decade. The skills and theories acquired are up to speed with that moment in the pulse of the art world. They fade quickly. After that, you’re on your own.
What’s wrong with that?