What Happened to Art Schools? An accidental manifesto.
What Happened to Art Schools? An accidental manifesto.
In his blog post "A sick landscape and black holes"[1] Steve Dutton
worries about the purpose of art schools today. He's a contemporary of
mine. We remember art schools when they were different.
Dutton relates a conversation with a student who has been censured for
stating that landscape can be 'sick'. The student has presented for
discussion the following quotation from Jean Baudrillard's 'Between
Difference and Singularity':
We can oppose this paradigm of the totality of globalisation, where
all differences must be integrated, but as differences, not
singularities... you must create your own underground, because now
there's no more underground, no more avant-garde, no more marginality.
You can create your personal underground, your own black hole, your own
singularity.
I once enjoyed Baudrillard, but I now find that the only way to take
statements like this one is as a kind of language mash-up, for in what
knowledge field can a 'singularities' and 'black holes' (from
astrophysics) be close to a 'personal underground'? If these terms are
here meant as metaphors, then they cannot be strong ones if the author
ignores or misappropriates the ideas that gave them legitimacy in the
first place.
Obviously, I've become more concerned with the sense of such writing
than with its power of affect. I'm struggling to understand how creating
something akin to a singularity or a black hole (in which all matter is
torn apart) can counter the homogenisation of society hinted at by
Baudrillard.
Are we to take Baudrillard's "marginality" and "underground-ness" to
imply the enjoyment of a high degree of personal sovereignty? I
sympathise with his tone of disenchantment when I remember that, today,
extremes of personal sovereignty are tolerated especially when their
outcomes can be monetised. It sometimes seems that we're driving towards
a point where this, alone, legitimates artistic (and academic)
pursuits.
But now I'm one move short of thinking that Baudrillard's invocation to
'create your personal underground' is not particularly courageous;
because in places where the sharing of supposedly radical ideas brings
no social or economic benefit (for example, away from the well-defended
academic centres), the corollary of residing in a personal underground
is alienation and poverty...
It feels as if the question "what happened to art schools?" has become
"what has happened to me?" Is my scepticism around Baudrillard a sign
that I have changed in ways which align me with today's economic
orthodoxy?
The art school I remember was a micro-society in which quite extreme
forms of personal sovereignty could be enjoyed without alienation, and
without the necessity for economic success. Can I defend the art school
of my youth, and the public funding of students' time there? To the last
question I can say "yes". I'll go further:
Art school should be compulsory for everyone, because a period of
exaggerated personal sovereignty in a self-regulating micro-society is a
good thing. Everyone should go to art school for one year at state
expense. Further to that, agents of the private art world should fund
the continuing education of those they wish to prepare for commercial
success.
This, I think, would rebalance in a widely acceptable way the costs and
benefits of art in public and private realms, including allowing
everyone to have a taste of their own personal underground.
[1] http://duttsville.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/sick-landscape-and-black-holes.html
