...that's just how I think of my students. Not!
But some folks think of your ambition that way, and in case you missed it, here's a link to Carol Vogel's April 15th story in the New York Times about MFA students thinking about careers.
There's a story like this in the Times just about every spring (who knew the graduating-from-art-school beat was so good?) though none have ever touched Deborah Solomon's Times' Magazine story of a few years ago. The subtext in all of them remains the same - there's something desperately wrong with art students these days. Or rather, with art schools who are leading the geniuses of tomorrow down the wrong path with professional practices courses, classes in theory and criticism, and open studios that invite collectors' and dealers' participation in the discourse of contemporary practice. This is a path that can only lead to ruin (hilarious ruin if the film is one half as insightfully wicked as the comic, and afterall, if we can't laugh at ourselves, what good are we? But ruin nonetheless...)
Are we really failing y'all with this stuff? Would it be better for western civilization as a whole to return to the French Academy model, or some other utopian memory of what art school is supposed to be like? Or - as this post from the Gotham Gazette suggests, are young artists frankly unrealistic about what a career in the arts might mean relative to other, more stable professions?
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2 comments:
It seems like we should draw a distinction between education and training. Training provides career skills, education is "useless" in a
non-pejorative sense (to create thoughtful, self-reflective people for instance). Some programs educate, some train, a few do both, and many do neither.
Perhaps it's easier to assess the success of programs when we sort out what one wants from them and what each program claims to do. The necessity of clear institutional self-definition is something I touched on in response to another post of yours. Basically many students don't know what they're doing enrolled in an art program and the school fails to communicate what is trying to prepare them for.
Another major problem I've encountered is that institutions don't do enough to establish high standards for their students.
A good deal of MFA students/graduates I've dealt with wouldn't be able to pass any other grad program other than education programs which are notorious for their poor students. Accepting marginal students IS a failure of art schools to manage the expectations of its students by giving them a false endorsement of their "potential."
Although it’s valuable to draw a distinction between education and training, little effort at separating those functions takes place in the current educational climate on either the student or institutional side of the table and we’ve inherited a profoundly blurred distinction between the two. As much as I regard the notion that education is an intentionally impractical endeavor as admirable, artists and teachers are part of an economy that regards education as a form of “betterment”, one that necessarily implies improved economic standing and security.
In my experience, students choose to obtain graduate degrees for a variety of reasons, each perhaps “bettering” in its own way. Some will immediately earn salary increases by obtaining new credentials; others want to participate in the global art market as producers. One aspiration is boring, the other impractical (you decide which is which…) but I don’t think the agency that provides a service has an exclusive right to determine how its services will be used or valued.
My four year-old son thinks McDonald’s is a toy store where you get free food with the purchase of a toy. The meal and the toy are inseparable, but one is clearly exerting gravitational pull on him. He’s not that different from the average art student, who thinks he or she is buying one thing when, in fact, another thing is really being offered. To clarify the question that appears in the post, should those of us who are teaching or guiding graduate studio art programs buck up and face the fact that we only think we’re selling education (or some modestly nutritional sustenance to stay with the McDonald’s example…) when in fact we’re really toy merchants?
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