The STEM-ification of Art (What Happened to Art Schools (2))

n 2013 Jose Ferreira, founder of Knewton, 'the world's leading adaptive learning company', posted a piece entitled 'Don't defund the humanities: they're crucial to the economy too'. The post draws on analysis of funding trends in U.S. education which, at that time, favoured STEM subjects (science technology, engineering, mathematics).[1]

Ferreira urges caution in relation to the STEM-ification of humanities subjects, arguing that the humanities should not be devalued just because they produce individuals with relatively hard to measure skills, such as 'communications skills, critical thinking skills, and multicultural proficiency'.

Ferreira at least attempts to explain what makes the humanities operationally valuable in society, but he also writes from a position in which certain power relations between corporations and citizens are taken as given. His post draws comment suggesting some enthusiasm for a status quo in which the majority of citizens are constrained by the self-serving machinations of powerful commercial and financial players; a status quo in which an ambitious student would necessarily expect their education to help them to a share in such power.

In his analysis, Ferreira cites a U.S. factoid: 'over 65% of [U.S.] elementary school students will end up in jobs that don't yet exist'. To extrapolate, conversely: student choices everywhere, at many levels, must be influenced by jobs markets that are bound to fluctuate between enrolment day and graduation day. Such fundamental uncertainty is problematic for any highly instrumental education policy.

Real-world uncertainty can also be convenient for advocates of humanities disciplines not focused on specfic vocational outcomes, but on endowing students with quailites deemed generally advantageous. It's often easier to show that humanities graduates can be broadly sucessful 'in many walks of life' than to show what their success has to do, specifically, with the discipline they studied at university: what is it about 'Shakespeare' that makes a 'good' civil servant? How does a Fine Art degree make a good lecturer?

Humanities graduates might succeed as much by learning to navigate the selectivist social fields around their disciplines as by the mastery of a specialist disciplinary knowledge ("knowledge" for the humanities being more varied in form and function than the scientific or technical knowledges associated with STEM subjects). Some advocates of the humanities are happy enough with this kind of settlement, especially, perhaps, if they achieved success themselves via a fuzzily-defined socio-disciplinary route.

But what if, today, societies are at a juncture where a greater number of STEM-trained people really are required to administer essential functions? Should we still defend the generalist humanities against encroaching STEM-ification?


I remain attached to the ideal of education for education's sake; or for the sake of increasing the number of educated people in society, whatever their socio-economic roles. Whatever the predictions for future social needs, changes in art education disturb me. This is partly for personal reasons, including a nostalgia for a time when art schools epitomised what today might be seen as a luxurious liberalism. I've commented on this personal/political overlap elsewhere in this blog.[2]

Notwithstanding the limitations of my own perspective, let's imagine that U.K. art education is altered in order to incentivise course applications in the present STEM-friendly culture, perhaps by universities marketing educational packages that appeal to current student choices (however these may be informed). In a decade or two, we could have a U.K. art education no longer loosely aligned with multiple purposes - as it has been for decades - but targetted at students seeking predefined roles in various artistically-inflected industries (music, film, television, games design, advertising) many of which, in their own ways, encourage the STEM-ification of art.

I note that this is a possible outcome; I speculate about whether or not it's to be desired.


In 2014, the U.K. government launched an initiative to encourage enrolment in STEM subjects in UK universities. Secretary of State for Education Nicky Morgan described the kinds of education required for Britain 'to succeed in the global economy' and for 'the British workforce of tomorrow [...] to have the skills and knowledge to compete [in the future]'. In her speech, Morgan presented the interests of the country as concurrent with those of the generation entering higher education in 2014 and beyond, arguing that STEM subjects would maximise their chances of finding rewarding roles in future society.[3][4][5]

Some of the comment following Morgan's speech exposed a tendency for advocates of the humanities to squeal in non-specific anguish at any hint of an instrumentalist education policy. However, the ability to counter such instrumentalism with a strong argument for the humanities seems almost as out of reach for some, today, as it was for literary critic F.R. Leavis in 1963.

Leavis was famously outraged by C.P. Snow's 1958 lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, in which Snow states (amongst other things) that the lives of the poor might be more radically improved by science and engineering than by modernist literature.[6] Leavis was condemned and mocked by the ascendant liberal left for his over-personalised response to Snow: Two Cultures: the Significance of C.P. Snow.[7] Having studied that text in detail, I find Leavis's attacks on Snow, with their incidental account of an emerging 'publicity created culture' around the arts, more coherent than his advocacy of literature.

I believe there remains today a tendency for advocates of the humanities to band together according to fellow-feeling, rather than strong argument, and thus to perpetuate the impression that those who find a social role in relation to artistic practices are a tribe apart, bound on terms that they cannot readily explain to the outsider or the sceptic.[8]


Often it seems that the science/humanities debate takes place in terms that are either so narrow as to be of little interest in wider society, or so obvious as to not matter very much. In the case of Nicky Morgan's arguments, it is obvious that many selectively-trained, computer-literate people will be required in order to carry out many of the tasks that future societies will depend upon: around energy supply, medical services, various aspects of infrastructure, and so on.

There remains, however, the important political question of the context in which such highly specialised work will be done. For instance, will future engineers and scientists serve in a realm which is largely privatised, or state-regulated? Will they be able to apprehend the common good and exercise judgement in its interests, or will they have to serve the interests of corporate masters whose ethics are vaguely yet unquestioningly bound up with the supposed natural morality of markets?

While ever debates around contemporary art are pursued within narrowly defined social fields, art will have difficulty in credibly claiming that its virtues, values and gains are aligned with the common good. Here art begins from an especially weak position. The outcome of artistic debates is less important, in an immediate material sense, than is the playing out of specialist knowledges in, say, a genetics laboratory, a large hospital, or a nuclear power plant. And society at large might justifiably have little interest in the intellectual culture around art if it is primarily dedicated to authenticating and legitimating art practices that few pursue and even fewer can make a living from.


I drafted this post in 2013, in response to a flurry of debate about independent (and perhaps temporary) art schools not affiliated with universities.[9] Here, it was suggested that the massive hike in U.K. student tuition fees in 2010 had focused minds on what art education, especially, is for. Fees of £9K and above do seem particularly onerous in return for any kind of course that a student might want to take up for its own sake, rather than for a job in an established (supposedly creative) industry.

STEM-ification may serve as a survival strategy for fine art in U.K. universities, especially those at a greater geographical and social distance from the metropolitan art world. STEM-ification is also about fitting in with a state-supported system which government has recently sought to change, in order to 'create a level playing field that will enable private providers to compete on equal terms with public universities'. (One government-sanctioned alternative to public universities in the U.K. is the mega university run by private equity firms[10]). In this context, enrolling on a short, unaccredited course in a private or temporary art school, to engage for a short time with artists and academics who are unconstrained by institutional dictat, might seem like a good idea to a free-thinker.

Whatever the arguments for the STEM-ification of art, it seems possible that fine art in universities has become stranded between some long-established disciplinary territories. Personally, I fear that the unique interplay of the aesthetic and the intellectual in art is too easy to downplay in the name of skimming fine art for aesthetic strategies, tactics and skills for use in other disciplines.

Meanwhile, aesthetic tactics are routinely used in the affirmative culture around neoliberal capitalism. This returns us to art's weak political position in the wider world, for the art market is part of the neoliberal game in which capital flows are bound to be privileged over the sharing of artistic culture. The art market has for decades imposed an anti-progressive orthodoxy on artistic practice, artists being encouraged to repeat themselves (to downplay their intelligence) for however long a signature artistic gesture holds its market value. Public institutions, including academies, are drawn in, protocols of evaluation becoming skewed as repetitious artists are actively authenticated for the canon: a quasi-intellectual process which, under scrutiny, seems antithetical to the idea of progressive knowledge gain definitive of an academic discipline.

In terms of upholding ideals, no-one but the broker comes out of such arrangements looking good.

It has long been routine, then, for artistic work to be resituated in contexts very different to those experienced by the young artist engaging with their discipline at art school. STEM-ification threatens resituating effects within the art school, but is, nevertheless, one aspect only of a longstanding political problematic that can be encapsulated in the following questions: Who says what art is for? How are artistic work and its outcomes to be capitalised, and by whom? And: Which ideals should guide us in addressing such questions?


I acknowledge that the social fields around many artistic practices are problematically exclusive. But I also hope that art education can introduce people to practices that constitute a thinking space for individuals in society; a space that is not sustained merely via its favourable relations with the most powerful economic and institutional forces. I believe that living among citizens who are able to think critically about such forces is almost as important to my quality of life as living among skilled clinicians, data processors, or engineers.


[1] Jose Fereira, 'Don’t Defund Humanities: They’re Crucial to the Economy, Too' http://www.knewton.com/blog/ceo-jose-ferreira/stem-vs-humanities/
[2] What Happened to Art Schools? An Accidental Manifesto. This blog:
http://thismoaning.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/what-happened-to-art-schools-accidental.html
[3] 'Nicky Morgan speaks at launch of Your Life campaign'
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/nicky-morgan-speaks-at-launch-of-your-life-campaign
[4] 'Education Secretary Nicky Morgan tells teenagers: Want to keep your options open? Then do science' http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/education-secretary-nicky-morgan-tells-teenagers-if-you-want-a-job-drop-humanities-9852316.html
[5] 'Last week's poll: STEM vs humanities, and what education's for', The Engineer, 11 November 2014
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/poll/last-weeks-poll-stem-vs-humanities-and-what-educations-for/1019472.article
[6] C. P. Snow, Stefan Collini, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). (first publ. main text first given as the 1959 Rede Lecture, Cambridge 1959)
[7] F. R. Leavis, 'Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow: Being the Richmond Lecture, 1962 By F. R. Leavis', in Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962.), pp. 27-50.
[8] Paul Smith - Move over, Stem: why the world needs humanities graduates http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/mar/19/humanities-universities-global-stem
[9] David Batty, 'Alternative art schools: a threat to universities?'
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/21/alternative-art-schools-threaten-universities
[10] Stefan Collini, 'Sold Out'. Review of: Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education, by Roger Brown, with Helen Carasso and The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education, by Andrew McGettigan. London Review of Books 35.20 (2013): 3-12. 24 Oct. 2013 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n20/stefan-collini/sold-out

You, Me, Contemporary Art, Yeah! (Tribal Artspeak vs. the Language of Research)

ames Elkins has used a statement from the 2012 Documenta(13) exhibition in Kassel to raise the question: 'does art research make sense?'[1] Elkins means art "as" research; as something that can be evaluated as a knowledge pursuit in the academy (I'll use 'art-as-research' here). I am not sure the Documenta(13) statement is typical of writing associated with art-as-research, although it might be. Here I respond to Elkins's question by considering the likely purpose of the Documenta(13) statement, and what it might show about the place of one kind of art writing, in particular, among all writing that aspires to 'make sense'.


I'm generally a fan of the Documenta approach to art and its uses, so the statement cited by Elkins is a test of my faith. In form, it hovers ambiguously between research brief, public relations script, and tribal credo. It reads as though it might have been written by a committee (or a cult) over a well-lubricated dinner. I speculate that at least two stages of translation are involved: from the disciplinary language of a particular part of the art world into "public" language, and from one or more national languages into English. Sense could be a casualty at any of these junctures.

Elkins asks why some find it necessary to write in the manner of the Documenta statement. I suggest that it's an example of "authenticatory" writing. It declares allegiance with a set of ambiguously-defined commitments or beliefs (e.g. about art) in the expectation that others will signal agreement. The text functions as a kind of intellectual "high five" gesture; or an opportunity for the mutual authentication of both writer and reader. Its sense content to those outside a particular circle of belief is of secondary importance.

This is different from saying that such "artspeak" is used simply to show off, or to browbeat those who don't understand what's being said. Alix Rule and David Levine have made a thorough study of 'International Art English'.[2] One of its characteristics, they say, is that it 'demand[s] to be recognized'. I'm saying that such language is one part of an ongoing performance around art; a device via which some protagonists recognise each other.


One contributor to the Elkins thread, Andrei Molotiu, argues that authenticatory writing is quite new, and should be critiqued. Were this to be done, it might be interesting to consider how a broad spectrum of writings have been used on behalf of art. I mean 'used' operationally, around art in its various realms of reception: for example, when leveraging art's conceptual value in an "educated" art market, or legitimating art in a wider public realm. I think we would find an emerging mutuality between the art world and certain kinds of philosopher or intellectual (whose ideas find mobility through attachment to suitably ambiguous objects or practices in the world).

Under the terms of this mutuality, artists can "get on with practice", placing coolly ambiguous objects into their close realm of reception whilst passing questions about the intellectual aspect of art to agreed mediators. The arrangement plays out in the form of an intellectual culture of art, in which we find a variety of more or less literary products which are not art itself, but are deemed supportive or affirmative of art. The contents of this culture are selectively taken to heart or dismissed by artists, perhaps depending on levels of confidence in what art can be with or without its intellectual culture.

There is, however, a widespread acceptance that art can be written about in terms of ideas which impinge on it tangentially, strengthening the license under which artists need not be explicit about ideas or thinking in their work.

Not only is this license not universally adopted, but settlements under it are a matter of degree. There are conceptual artists who don't want formularised aesthetics; curators and critics who want historical groundings but not current theory; Marxians who need to explain why they don't want spectacle; artists who want academic theory but don't want history to show that their latest idea was already worked through in the 1960s. A particularly striking contrast exists between makers of strongly aesthetic art with market potential, and artists (like me) who have barely ever sold an art object. The latter probably work in parts of the art world where something other than self-justifying capital legitimates their practice.

(The ascription of tasks to different agents in the art world is not quite as straightforward as I have implied. Artists also adopt the role of intellectual mediator, although in doing so they often try to adapt bodies of theory and types of language less familiar to them than the art-making part of their practice. Conversely, some theorists, tired of 'writing after art' are attempting to frame their writing as artistic practice.[3])


When artists cede to others the task of locating, teasing out, or mediating truth claims or knowledge gains present in art, they also cede a degree of power to speak of their own practice. Higher degrees in art (such as doctorates) might present an opportunity to challenge this distribution of power. However, another question now presents itself: given the opportunistic use of various kinds of thinking (logical, scientific) in response to operational contingencies around art practice, how far can the intellectual currency the art world be trusted as a body of knowledge? Is it the task of art in the academy to rebuild its intellectual frameworks? Where might it seek models for this work?

In a multidisciplinary academy, where arts and sciences are subject to common administrative scrutiny, there's an implicit requirement for art to be able to account for itself as a discipline (one of its legitimatory trump cards in the social world - the financial success of art in the art market - cannot, generally, be played[4]). In this context, higher degrees in art, and art-as-research, bring out some general, foundational questions about art, especially around the balance of its intellectual and aesthetic aspects.

Further operational contingencies are in play, too. These include a lack of time, and limited training in framing ideas in writing. Most of all, though, there is an overriding necessity to facilitate what, for many art students, is a strongly practical, aesthetic activity, associated with an exceptional period of personal growth. In an environment where all these conditions prevail, rewards are few for questioning the terms on which bodies of academic theory are habitually co-opted on behalf of art.

I wonder if artspeak has become supercharged with extra complexity via the academy, where art has been beset by the tangle of contingencies sketched above. Some of them are to do with changes in the relationship between art and society; others are just to do with maintaining art as the intellectual equal of other disciplines in a latterday, intricately managed academy.


Arts and sciences all seek institutional assurances in a competitive academy, and cultural heft in a contested social world. Scientific disciplines have an ideal - the objectivisation of the laws of nature - at their very origins, and this both guides scientific practice and serves as a source of legitimation. Artistic disciplines have no equivalent ideal.

Art's uneven relationship with intellectuality is partly to do with its constant search, in the present, for ways of saying what it might be about (in addition to aesthetic affect). These explicatory turns are offered as sources of legitimation for as long as any marriage of convenience between art and theory remains strong. However, given the intractable nature of some art writing it is arguable that legitimacy is the last thing it brings to art.

The main thing I notice about the Documenta(13) text is that it struggles to infer a certain depth or multiplicity of ideas in art, without reference to too many specifics. Of course, if its primary purpose is the kind of mutual authentication described above, then it's not surprising that it demonstrates a weird set of standards for making sense. In the public context in which the statement is exposed, though, this is a gift to critics intolerant of any kind of rationality that is not conventionally scientific, and it reinforces perceptions of pretentiousness in and around art.

I find myself now resisting two temptations: to embrace an anti-intellectual notion of what art is (revel in the practice, follow the aesthetic, etc.), or to adopt any fashionable meta-logic of the moment (even if I can't quite figure out what its gains are).

The comments thread following Elkins's post points to a lecture text by Simon Critchley.[5] Crtichley says that 'we should never underestimate the vanity of artists or their desperate need for legitimation from philosophers and theorists', but also that 'art needs a theory that needs art'. Well, the presumption of artists' vanity may be a little one-sided, for surely philosophers and theorists can also be vain. Critchley's second remark, though, elegantly sums up the difficulties facing artists driven by a mixture of affinity and desire, aesthetic sensibility, and intellectual reflexivity.

[1] http://d13.documenta.de/
[2] Alix Rule & David Levine 'International Art English. On the rise—and the space—of the art-world press release'
http://canopycanopycanopy.com/16/international_art_english
[3] Irit Rogoff, 'What is a Theorist?', in On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, ed. by Maria Hlavajova, Jill Winder and Binna Choi (Utrecht: BAK, c2008.), pp. 132-158.
[4] Art schools whose ex-students do well in the art market can play the "market" card. It's often done by sleight of hand, via lists of alumni who, as all insiders know, have enjoyed commercial as well as other kinds of success.
[5] Simon Critchley 'The Infinite Demand of Art'
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v3n2/critchley.php

Why Claire Bishop's 'Digital Divide' is a Storm in a Teacup

response to Claire Bishop's Artforum article, which asks why mainstream contemporary artists have, in general, ignored the impact of the digital in contemporary life.[1]

I also address the annoying habit in journalism of titling an article 'Why...' and then not answering the question anywhere in the article. Here, I'll say nothing at all that's not a direct response to the question in my title, making the bulk of my article a matter of inference:

- Because Bishop never unambiguously states her own position in relation to the proper - or authentic - concerns of art, making it hard to understand her central point;
- Because it's harder for Bishop to say what "the mainstream" is than what "the digital" is;
- and that's weird;
- Because if Bishop's mainstream is the art world legitimised through trade, then it is obvious that it is no more capable of assimilating (capitalising) the digital than are the music, film or publishing industries;
- so there's no mystery;
- Because, if mainstream contemporary artists are those interested in selling objects, then... (see previous two points);
- Because artistic practitioners of many kinds have acknowledged and worked with the digital ever since the emergence of the digital;
- Because the social world has already assimilated the digital in more complex terms than those that would inform any mainstream artist's perspective on it.

[1] Digital Divide: Claire Bishop on contemporary art and new media http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&id=31944

The Pub Scientist and the Landlords of Knowledge

hysicist and educator Richard Feynman once said that whilst mathematics was vital for an understanding of the world according to modern physics, there were many delightful things for which mathematics was unnecessary.[1]

Advocates of science today, in their media-pomp, can lose sight of the subtleties hinted at in Feynman's remark. Most issues in human affairs have multiple aspects: personal and emotional, intellectual and philosophical, social and economic. We may concentrate on any of these aspects to the exclusion of others, and various kinds of specialism - or selectivism - encourage this.

In a 2012 episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Infinite Monkey Cage entitled 'Art v Science' scientist-presenter Brian Cox scoffs a little too eagerly at the contributions of those brought in to represent "the arts".[2] Comedian Al Murray's suggestion that anyone can engage instructively with the natural world by 'taking a walk' is hooted at as though Murray is proposing an equivalence between 'a walk' and the intellectual edifice of the sciences. He isn't. He's only suggesting that an engagement with the natural world can yield insights, without them having to be authenticated as science. In another aside, Cox implies that art is definitively less useful than science because it is not 'based on reality'. It escapes him, apparently, that art must spring from the same reality as science, even if its outcomes are codified differently, or have different powers of affect.

Further implications of this kind of selectivism came to light for me recently in a discussion about what the definition of "art research" might be. I wonder if the very idea of seeking a definition for art research is a response to there seeming to be a clear definition of research in the sciences, where the qualitative nature of disciplinary advances can easily be taken for granted. Relatively few discussions are staged about how many outcomes of scientific research really are qualitative advances, as opposed, for instance, to increases in the data existing around a given phenomenon or problem (that is, quantitative advances which "bulk up" a particular discipline).

Artists and scientists subsist within what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the social fields of art and science. Many such fields overlap in the wider social world. A scientist may be comfortable - and perhaps become a little smug - arguing for the kind of knowledge practice authenticated within his or her own social field: for example, a practice aimed at rendering the natural world as facts and information. But such an argument does not meet all the challenges of a social world constituted around emotional, economic and political relations, in which science must be legitimated. Perhaps advocates of science are impatient with this particular reality. It would partly explain the over-vigorous (and slightly mindless) way in which they can put down non-scientific engagements with wider reality.

On the other hand, whilst it can almost always be shown in an academic context that an artistic practitioner has employed the processes said to define research, demonstrating that insights have been gained, and made consensible is harder. The mythos of art incorporates the idea that subjective facts can be transformed into something of special value via the agency of an artist. But the question of whether or not this transformed thing constitutes an insight, or an element of a knowledge, is not settled. In artistic fields the gains related to core practices often remain ambiguous, to be contested, critiqued, authenticated, etc. by agents other than artists (and by other artists). The intricacies of these processes can seem mysterious or ridiculous in the wider social world.

Legitimating arguments made in public for selectivist practices (for instance, by citing their deeper connection with reaity or their efficacy as research) do not necessarily show us why certain territories are desired, competed for, and guarded. For artists and scientists, the continuance of their disciplines can be as important as the utility of anything they produce. Artists and scientists are seeking to live a certain kind of life, and this affects what they will or won't argue for, and the tactics they will deploy in advocating it.

[1] Richard P Feynman, Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (Cambridge, Mass: Perseus Books, 1999), p. 15.
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/timc/all
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/timc/timc_20120723-1700b.mp3

What Happened to Art Schools? An Accidental Manifesto.

n 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

An addiction that is the life-feeling of being an artist

his post is drawn from an online discussion with James Elkins and others, via his blog [1] and Facebook page. At time of writing Elkins is seeking views in relation to a revision of his book Artists With PhDs. At one extreme, the views emerging show a readiness to accomodate explicit intellectuality; at another, they attest to a desire to keep it out of art altogether.

Elkins makes some very interesting points about the reflexivity he associates with undertaking a PhD, and whether or not it hinders certain kinds of artistic production. The examples he cites are interesting, too.

I like his inclusion of 'cartoons and post-pop', because I think that to address our situation today we do need to consider broad fields of artistic production. I wonder, for instance, whether the kind of emotional drive Elkins attributes to early German expressionists would today be most productively invested in painting. I mean, who would notice if it was? Were those early expressionists addressing their art world, or society at large? If the latter, then we might ask: what, today, is the relation of painting to society at large? What is expected of painting, by whom, and why?

I would say that film and music (especially combined) have shown that the visceral and seemingly intuitive can coexist with the intellectual in an artistic work. Of course, a lot of thought, planning and a high degree of craft are required to balance these aspects, and there must be as many of examples of banality and crudity in film and music as in painting (or any other art form). What I'm really wondering about here is the basis for objecting to explicit intellectuality in and around particular art forms. Are certain forms regarded as the ground for an especially precious kind of intersubjectivity; or are they associated with a kind of practice that some artists are especially attached to, or guarded about?

It's fine for artists to make art for themselves and their circle, even producing and sharing among themselves what Clémentine Deliss has called an 'initiate knowledge'.[2] Saying this, though, invites questions about the wider social legitimacy of art. That, to my mind, is something that artists could reflect continuously on, whether or not they keep explicit intellectuality out of their studios.

Elkins's thoughts on what Cézanne's writings do or do not reveal about his painting processes make me think about what intuition might actually be, especially as invoked by artists describing their working practices. In this context, intuition could just be thought which leads so quickly to action that it is not apprehended before the action creates its own feedback. That feedback - in the form of a higher-than-usual demand to coordinate sense inputs and motor responses - possibly inhibits more reflexive thought. Among some of Elkins's respondents there seems to be a perception that the converse of this - interrupting the cycle of sensory input and motor response, to reflect - will hobble the act of creation.

I know as an artist that sustaining a state of action just at the edge of the rational can feel thrilling. It's very like playing music or (as another of Elkins's correspondents suggests) dancing. Mind and body feel fully engaged, to the exclusion of anything extrinsic. I believe this can be indulged in quite knowingly, again and again, as long as certain preconditions are maintained (here, "the studio" is both axiomatic and talismanistic).

None of this is unproblematic. What I've just described can also be like an addiction that, for some, defines the life-feeling of being an artist. In such a case, being an artist would primarily be about attaining a particular mode of being. And perhaps this would not run counter to a tendency to inflate the inherent value of certain kinds of artistic outcome (mark, effect, or art form); I mean if that inflation helps maintain a legitimating argument for a deeply desired way of life.

[1] http://jimandmargaret.wordpress.com/
[2] Clémentine Deliss, 'Privacy + Dialect = Capital', in On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, ed. by Maria Hlavajova, Jill Winder and Binna Choi (Utrecht: BAK, c2008.), pp. 50-66.