old curriculum structures, fiercely protected by entrenched bureaucracies to the point of paralysis- making change slow and even close to impossible, discouraging many young faculty members who are ready and clamoring for it.
studnes should receive training in hte basic tools of Conceptualism, such as scholarly research and literary writing, as applied to traditional painting, sculpture, printmaking, glass, cermaics, and photographic process, making muscled and poetic gestures more conscious and articulate and balancing craft with thought, while also gazing selectively at other disciplines.
Studends should have to develop fully thought-out written proposals before, during, and after painting and sculpting. I don't mean that they wshould do this simply to defend an image or object during individual and group critiques, as students have always done, but to learn how to justify that creation intellectually, beyond the subjective, in our visually dense and materially cluttered world. If they don't wantto od this, they have no business being professional contemporary artists...not everyone is a cultural producer. Our art schools' counseling departments should be sharper in vocational counseling.
it is time to call for new flexibility in curriculum development, implementation and evaluation, followed by even more change.
flexible modle may not be friendly to notions of tenure and may have to commit to temporary or part-time faculty.
generate public intellectuals
generate visual scholars
generate artist citizens
generate active cultural workers who participate in global society
Conceptually based, multidisciplinary studios are hybrid learning environments.
instructors need access to:
messy studios & clean studios
wired classroom spaces
assign research and writing about students work and review it
we need artists teaching artists. working on education as well as outside projects.
we don't need art world celebs who don't take teaching seriously.
we don't need vanity participation giving limited time to students.
stop hiring 'faculty artists' who have no field experience-artists who have jumped from their BFA to their MFA without blinking and have very little to offer students other than textbook ideas and textbook art. This sort of oxygetn-lacking wheel is killing contemporary American art in and out of academia. (we need field experience!)
We are currently perpetuating mediocrity
According to College Art Association statistics, although we are graduating more MFAs than ever before, they are leaving school in such financial debt that they cannot afford to go into communities and take chances as artist-citizens. Perhaps this is a uniquely American problem, and European countries that support their artists face other challenges. In the United States we are not graduating artists; we are graduating teachers right and left, and we should finally admit it. We are generating institutionalized artists and institutional art, and this runs the risk of collapsing over the next few decades, whether multidisciplinary or not. We need more fellowships for our students, and schools need to stop their grandiose expansion plans, consider their appropriate scale, and charge less for the education they provide as a civil act of cultural disobedience.
what can we do to protect socially powerful art practice from this all-too-quick commoditization? (protect from being institutionalized)
art schools should be the conscience of the art world.
educate young artists about shop and business ethics; counsel them about the challenges of early success, in terms of the rigid branding expectations that are publicly set; dare to address those art dealers and collectors who walk through their MFA shows; and host more than ever before the experimental and political art that has not yet found exhibition venues. Otherwise their alumni are going to be vulnerable toboth art market pressures and conservative political climates.
the amount of "information" revealed by a work of art is the measure of howm uch power an artist gives to an audience.
we cannot be perscriptive
lets look at geography, context, social class, economic status etc..
If American art schools are in the business of mirroring culture, they need to stop dismissing religion as an anti-intellectual subject and conversation. Walking through art schools right now, it is hard to tell that we are a country at war...Art Schools need to embrace the narratives of their international professors and students, or they will betray them by colonizing them once again through whiteness.
Schools should enter into long-term partnerships with communities whose leaders and members are willing to participate in the education of artists, they way they might tkae on the education of doctors by allowing the establishmen of a public clinic. In addition there is a need to improve the mental health services that art schools offer to students who are facing dyslexia, attention deficit and compulsive disorders, addiction, and depression. Art schools need to help students through these personal challenges before giving them the responsibility to work with communities.
what is the measure of success?
Nevertheless, in the short term, art schools are successful if they guide young artists into the right artistic production process for them: this match between talent (creative intelligence and skills) and old and new mediums is what gradually helps them to achieve their unique voice. This match also inserts the young artist into visual history, into the right ancestral inheritance line through which to locate, understand, and articulate their work both to the art world and that receives them and in the greater social context.
In the long term, I believe artistic success should be defined as the ability to sustain art making for a lifetime, whether within the profit or non-profit sectors, remaining part of the conversation about the destiny of the contry, the culture and global citizenship. Artistic success should be about continuing to grow and produce, constructively critiquing and regenerating, because no one should be blindly tied to tools that become obsolete, to mediums that cease to be relevant to peoples lives, to theories that no longer explain who we have become as a people, both mirroring the culture and providing alternatives for the culture.
help provide society with critical thinking tools that help to uphold a creative demorcacy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment