Seventy years after
the first degrees in art appeared, schools are wondering how to fit
it all in: new technology, theory, marketing savvy, and a growing
list of emerging forms
S earching for relevance in an
increasingly pluralistic art scene, art faculties are pushing their
students to think large these days, to get out of the ivory tower,
away from the easel, and out into the world. One student at New
York’s School of Visual Arts (SVA) took this creative license to an
extreme last term and ended up hobbling the city’s subway system and
landing in jail on a charge of reckless endangerment.
"What an idiotic project," seethed
New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman when freshman
Clinton Boisvert’s "fear" project was revealed to have been a
sculpture assignment rather than a terrorist attack. "As the saying
goes, art this bad ought to be a crime," he added. Apparently
inspired by Keith Haring, the 25-year-old had placed three dozen
black boxes in a highly trafficked subway station, each with the word
"Fear" scrawled across it. His attempt to make that emotion tangible
succeeded, though not exactly in the way he had anticipated.
Gone is the time when a foundation
sculpture class would have seen Boisvert and his classmates modeling
the figure or making plaster casts. Instead, video, installation,
site-specific, earth, conceptual, and performance art have been
grafted onto the sculpture syllabi of some of the most prestigious
art programs in the nation. A number of schools have even eradicated
departmental divisions—an acknowledgment of the increasingly
heterogeneous, fluid career paths of many visual artists. (Is Matthew
Barney a performance artist, for instance, or a sculptor, an
installation artist, a video artist?)
It’s not easy sorting out how best
to use the short time allotted to arts degrees; an undergraduate
fine-arts major often spends only one of his four years in art
classes—hardly enough time to learn the traditional skills of
drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography, let alone today’s
laundry list of new forms. Even a two-year master of fine arts
(M.F.A.) program doesn’t provide much time for training, compared
with the decades-long master-apprentice system of earlier centuries.
Countless other challenges have
art-school faculties reexamining their missions and values. The
proliferation of programs and students; the embrace of diverse art
forms and content; the professionalization of art practice; the rise
of cultural theory; whether (and how) to teach the new technologies
that have sprouted in the last decade; whether (and how) to teach
specific artisanal skills; and even the very definition of art have
inspired many a debate in art-school conference rooms around the
nation. "Art has always been volatile and changeable," says Richard
Benson, dean of Yale’s School of Art. "A good faculty is always
considering that."
The last half-century has seen a
revolution in the way art is taught in this country. The first
Bachelor’s in Fine Arts (B.F.A.) degrees weren’t offered until the
1930s, and most were in art history rather than studio practice.
Artists were trained in trade schools, private studios, or nondegree
institutions such as the Art Students League or the National Academy
of Design School of Fine Arts. But enough university programs were in
place by 1948 that an advocacy group, the National Association of
Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), was founded, with 22 members.
NASAD’s current institutional membership is 239, and those
institutions enroll approximately 100,000 art majors and 8,000
graduate students each year. The College Art Association (CAA) claims
2,000 university art and art-history departments, museums, and
libraries as members, in addition to 13,000 artists, art historians,
scholars, curators, and educators. And U.S. News & World Report
now includes in its rankings art programs as well as those in math,
economics, and English literature. (In the most recent ranking of
M.F.A. programs, compiled in 1997, the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago led the list, followed closely by Yale Art School and the
Rhode Island School of Design, known as RISD.)
All those programs, schools, and
departments have created an appetite for M.F.A.-trained professors,
and newly minted art graduates understand that they need the degree
to teach in colleges or universities—the "day job" desired by so many
artists seeking security and collegiality in an otherwise financially
precarious, hermetic profession. As Chris Waterman, acting dean of
UCLA’s School of Art and Architecture, wryly notes, "Even artists
need dental insurance."
The earliest M.F.A.s were
encouraged to use the programs as laboratories where they could
experiment with new ideas before graduating to day jobs doing house
painting or magazine pasteup art. Today’s students—who are younger
than ever, according to graduate administrators—expect (and need)
their degree "investments" to pay off with successful careers in the
fine arts or related fields. An M.F.A. at a top school now can cost
more than $50,000 for tuition alone, and the balance on sizable
student loans awaits most graduates. Students increasingly see their
M.F.A. programs as "finishing schools," in the words of one faculty
member, where they can "get their act together in a slick enough way
that they’re launched." The schools advertise themselves with long
lists of art stars who are their graduates, and dealers regularly
visit the most prestigious schools. In the top programs, students no
longer compete for grade-point averages but for the privilege of
being signed by a Chelsea or Santa Monica gallery before graduation.
Painter Dana Schutz, for example, exhibited in a two-person show at
New York’s LFL Gallery while still in Columbia’s M.F.A. program and
had her first solo exhibition there immediately after getting her
degree.
But student work is by nature
experimental, heavily influenced by the myriad new ideas introduced
in the academy, and it is likely to change again and again. "When
that work is accepted by a very hungry art world, it can cause
problems for young artists," says Yale Art School painting professor
Rochelle Feinstein. "Artists and their work need time to develop."
Corcoran Gallery director David Levy, who was executive dean of
Parsons for 20 years, agrees. "The gallery world is relatively
irresponsible. They’ll exploit anything they can get their hands on."
Jamie Bennett, chair of the art
department at the State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz,
identifies another problem stemming from the encroachment of market
forces into academia. "The distance between the academy and art
practice is much, much closer than it used to be," he says. "The
laboratory is in the classroom—it’s not in Greenwich Village." The
closing of that distance, Bennett notes, puts a new kind of pressure
on art-school faculties, as the ideas they instill in students can
have an immediate impact in the art market. Or as RISD academic
affairs provost Joe Dale puts it, "An art school shouldn’t assume the
responsibility of creating new art. Our mission is an educational
mission. You can’t predict the cutting edge."
Developing the conceptual skill
set of would-be artists is another newish concern of art schools;
today’s graduates have to be able to talk the talk, to relate their
work to the contemporary world and the historical canon. "Artists
today require so much more world knowledge, cultural knowledge than
we’ve ever seen before," says Tony Jones, dean of the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago and chair of the American Institute of
Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD). "That becomes a greater and
greater challenge." In many schools over the past decade, art history
has been dropped as a requirement and been replaced by courses in
cultural theory or in other departments, such as history or
anthropology. "Kids are reading the same books in art schools as they
are in other disciplines. There is more experimentation
intellectually," says the School of the Art Institute’s vice
president for academic affairs, Carol Becker. Faculties spend more
time today helping students explain their work and place it in a
contemporary context. At Connecticut College, for instance, seniors
now are required to submit artist’s statements about the work they
each produce that year. Most M.F.A. programs require at least one
writing course for graduation, and all provide frequent opportunities
for cross-disciplinary critique.
The skies are crisscrossed
thousands of times each year by cultural theorists and
artists-in-residence who are flown in by art schools to bring the
latest ideas and practices to their students. At SUNY New Paltz, for
instance, last September’s "Arts Now" conference introduced students
to lecturers on "Art, Artists and Conflict in Northern Ireland,"
"Performativity and Violence," and "Bosnian Rape Camps and Serb
Cultural Memory." "They have to be aware of the world and what the
art they’re making relates to," says John Terry, dean of fine arts at
RISD. Ella King Torrey, who headed the San Francisco Art Institute
until last year, believes that the very definition of "artist" has
changed in the past few decades, away from stereotypes of an esthete
in "the ivory tower" and "the marginalized, crazed, hard-drinking
brute" to being a full participant in contemporary culture.
Other educators worry, though,
that this new inclusiveness in art education can have unforeseen
consequences. One is the proliferation of "artspeak," the particular
language of critical theory that has become pervasive in academia, as
papers delivered at a recent College Art Association convention
suggest. Among the titles were "The Spectacle of the Mediatization:
Experiencing Events Otherwise" or "The Effort of Imagination: Empathy
in Postminimalism." "We’re finally going to kill art," says one
professor at a state university in the South. "We’re going to talk it
to death." Notes Yale’s Benson: "We’re a studio school. But over the
years, courses have crept in that are about the thinking and talking
about art, not the making of it." Finding an approach that allows
graduates to participate in the "contemporary conversation," as one
teacher described it, while at the same time equipping them with
hands-on training, appears to be on every educator’s mind today.
The use of new media—as a means of
creating art and as a medium itself—presents another critical
challenge for art faculties. Artists now employ the latest
technological innovations in thousands of ways—from editing photos
and video footage, to weaving, glass blowing, three-dimensional
design, and music composition. At the frontier of the deployment of
technology in the visual arts are those for whom it is the message,
such as Eduardo Kac, who used altered genetic material from a
jellyfish to come up with a glow-in-the-dark rabbit. "There is hardly
any area of the school that technology hasn’t reached," says RISD’s
Terry.
Terry and his counterparts worry
about how to select and pay for staff, how to maintain the right
equipment, and how to educate older, tenured professors to use tools
new to them but familiar to their young students. Even finding enough
teachers is a problem. "Art schools aren’t turning out enough people
to provide faculty," says Bryan Rogers, chair of the University of
Michigan’s School of Art and Design. Technology envy is another real
problem at many schools. As "new technology" centers are established
on campus after campus, professors of more traditional disciplines
worry that they may one day become the underfunded stepchildren of
the new order. "People always see a new department as competition for
scarce resources," Terry notes.
RISD, Connecticut College, and
many other schools have adopted an interdepartmental strategy for
staffing their new centers for that very reason. By populating the
new departments with faculty from other disciplines, they are able
not only to defuse such concerns but to feed technology back into
established departments. At UCLA, for instance, experimental
technology artist Victoria Vesna chairs the design/media arts
department, where art majors or graduate students can take classes in
"Creative Use of the Internet" or "Design for Interactive Media"
taught by artists, architects, and film theorists alike. And then
there is the question of what technologies, exactly, to teach. "You
pick some; you cannot deploy them all," says Rogers. So many new
software and imaging techniques arrive each year, only to be updated
or outdated the next, that a school could devise curricula around
them alone—and some do, such as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s
Electronic Arts M.F.A. For the moment, though, no one is throwing the
baby out with the stop bath; they’re retaining traditional processes
such as chemical photo development or bronze castings. "We’d be mad
to close our darkrooms down," Chicago’s Jones says. "You’ve got to be
able to offer the historic range of expression as well as the
technology." But some concede that they foresee a time when darkroom
technique is taught as a special course rather than a foundation
requirement.
At the heart of this kind of
change lies a debate about whether visual-art curricula should reach
deep or spread wide. Like many schools, Michigan recently knocked
down the walls among its 13 "concentrations" and replaced them with
"core studio modules" that introduce all students to a wide variety
of materials and processes, tools, the digital media, and
contemporary concepts. Students at UCLA’s School of Art can take
courses in three separate art departments—visual arts, world arts and
cultures, and design/media arts—in their search for
cross-disciplinary creative fodder. "We ask, what is art, what do
people use to accomplish it, and how does the world get shaped by
what people do?" explains UCLA’s Waterman. "A lot of this stuff
doesn’t fit very neatly into the traditional categories."
Yet many schools fervently defend
their departmental divisions. "We believe that if a student engages
deeply in one medium, something different happens," maintains Yale’s
Benson. "Our school is conservative; we still have departments! We
believe in departments!" RISD’s Dale seconds the emphasis on
departmental boundaries. Within a single discipline, he says, "what
they learn is really how to learn. Studying a discipline doesn’t mean
they’re necessarily channeled into that discipline." And as Vassar
College visual-arts professor Harry Roseman notes, teaching skills
doesn’t need to be separate from teaching ideas. "I try to promote a
dialectic between the idea and the process . . . to get that thinking
process going from the beginning. It’s not like doing scales for four
years."
While lecturing at art departments
across the country, New York painter John Alexander has noticed a new
appetite for technical learning. "Art is the only profession I know
where you don’t seem to need even the basic, rudimentary skills to be
involved. It would be absolutely bizarre to give someone a saxophone
and then say, ’Forget everything that’s ever been done in music—the
chords, the notes, the tones. Just go in there and start blowing
it.’" In a recent presentation to a group of graduate students,
Alexander mentioned "some of the most rudimentary things about making
something look three-dimensional. These kids had no knowledge of
that—and they were so excited to learn it." Nondegree schools such as
the National Academy of Design fine-arts school report an increase in
"remedial" students, who have graduated from art programs but who
want to refine their painting or drawing skills. "There are a fair
number of students who feel they haven’t gotten as much as they could
out of other art schools," says director Nancy Little.
And at the ultratraditional New
York Academy of Figurative Art, where painting and sculpture are
taught much as they would have been in Renaissance Europe, director
Steven Farthing reports a corollary problem: the difficulty of
finding faculty with traditional skills. He often resorts to hiring
his own graduates as professors, "though a geneticist would tell you
that’s not desirable for the gene pool." Another artist and teacher
observes, "There are professors all over the country who are one page
ahead of their students in the drawing textbook." The Corcoran’s Levy
attributes this paucity of technical skills to the generation of
artist-teachers taught by the Abstract Expressionists. "The original
generation of Abstract Expressionists were among the best-trained
artists in the world. They always had the resources to do whatever
they chose to do." Their successors, however, "had a vested interest
in convincing everyone around them that skill wasn’t important."
Nayland Blake, who is charged with
creating the International Center of Photography’s (ICP) new joint
M.F.A. with Bard College, cites a double bind inherent in art
education: that it is expected to function much as a trade school but
often offers little of the actual training that would allow a student
to practice his trade. An installation artist himself, Blake is
reviving the centuries-old master-apprentice model for his new
program. This fall’s first class of ten students will work as a group
with visiting artists on particular projects. And they’ll each be
required to participate in a 15-hour-a-week internship each
semester—one year with a professional photographer, the next at an
institution. It’s an approach that wins Levy’s approval. "I think
that the 19th-century atelier experience is critical," he comments.
"Things happen in that environment that will never happen on their
own."
In the end, art school is as much
about that community as about anything else. "Everybody talks and
thinks about art all the time," says Chicago’s Becker. "What they
learn is how to be a creative person and how to really believe in
that." The widely celebrated (and decried) Young British Artists
(YBAs) met at Goldsmith’s, the trendiest art academy of their day. Or
think of the Yale M.F.A. classes of the early 1960s that sent Richard
Serra, Robert Mangold, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, and Brice Marden
(with Sylvia Plimack Mangold receiving her B.F.A. in 1961) out into
the art scene. Their collective influence on art in the early 1970s
was echoed a generation later by the young photography M.F.A.s
emerging from Yale in the late 1990s, such as Anna Gaskell, Dana
Hoey, Justine Kurland, and Katy Grannan. At Columbia University,
M.F.A. students are selected as much for their fit in an "intimate"
class of 24 as for technical abilities, according to visual-art
professor Gregory Amenoff. "We put a lot of value on the contact
among the students," he says. In an art market where who you know can
help win introductions to dealers, collectors, and museums, these
friendships can prove critical to a career.
Still, many art-school alumni end
up earning a living as illustrators or gallery assistants—or leave
the fine arts altogether for jobs with regular paychecks and
benefits. David Shirey, who founded SVA’s M.F.A. program 20 years
ago, likes to provoke newly enrolled graduate students with the
question "Why do you want to get a degree that will perpetuate your
poverty?"
But in spite of the price tag,
students continue to flock to the academy to help them launch a life
of making art. "I’m always amazed—and somewhat bewildered—at the
sacrifices they’ve made," Shirey says. "And I’m astounded that so
many of them continue to pursue it when they get out."