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

Borrowing from Art: Aesthetic Cultures of Science

uardian art critic Jonathan Jones's short article 'Across the Universe. Is science now more beautiful than contemporary art?'[1] is surely designed to provoke; and it barely recognises the important questions it raises.

In 1930 Sigmund Freud wrote:
The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions under which the beautiful is apprehended; it has not been able to clarify the nature and origin of beauty; as commonly happens, the absence of results is shrouded in a wealth of high-sounding, empty verbiage. Unfortunately psychoanalysis too has scarcely anything to say about beauty.[2]

Freud admitted elsewhere that psychoanalysis might be only an early phase of a coming science of mind. Many today would say that the human mind is "brain in action", and that it's via this action that the brain makes what a human subject calls experience. Every brain has plasticity, and so the patterns of its action can be reinforced or altered by the circumstances of a person's life, over time.

Even within such a materialist account of mind, a subjective experience of beauty probably relates to aesthetic qualities for which a subject has what we could call an "affinity". Affinities may be partly inherited, or the result of conditioning; I don't think the balance of probabiliies here is settled. What seems more certain is that some of us follow a course in life impelled by affinities expressed early on, and that those affinities are then socially channelled. This is especially noticeable with selectivist disciplines, where what's called talent or aptitude is augmented by knowledge acquired through training, and further reinforced through working and becoming socialised within a particular socio-professional grouping. It's well known that the coherence of some professional fields is reinforced like a circle of belief, through the disavowal of other ways of knowing and being in the world.

Notwithstanding all this, there are bound to be similarities in the experiences we can categorise as viscerally pleasurable or painful (for example) if all derive from organs, chemicals and circumstances which are generically similar. In a society of differently selective fields we will therefore find mathematically-fluent physicists for whom formulae are beautiful, and connoisseurs of art who will say the same of nineteeth-century paintings. But a similarity of response at this level tells us nothing about the more intricate contents of physics or art.

Jonathan Jones asks us to consider the relative merits of artists' images and images produced by scientists and their instruments, in terms of how beautiful they are. Unsurprisingly, many online responses draw on the subjective (personal) experience of beauty, about which there can be no more absolute consensus than in Freud's time. Further, many will vigorously defend anything perceived as an attack on the reliability (the "rightness") of what their own experience seems to tell them, bringing much heat into this kind of discussion.

Jones is playing a game, ritually breaking the rule of his own field by declaring an interest in another. This is meant to be all the more shocking because the other (science) has co-opted what is supposed to be one of the definitive qualities of art: beauty. As readers of Jones will know, even he does not believe that the production of beauty is art's sole purpose. He did not seem to think so in 2007, for instance, when he declared Damien Hirst's stunt with a diamond-encrusted skull to be "the birth of 21st century art".[3]

But the situation Jones has broached now is more complex and interesting. Not only is beauty not the sole purpose of art, but the converse is also true: no disciplinary field has a proprietary claim over beauty. Beauty is a potential residing in a variety of things, contingent on the subjective response and judgment of individuals apprehending those things. But subjective experience isn't everything, even in art, and especially in what I would call a culture. This brings us to the most interesting omission in Jones's article: the emergence of aesthetic cultures of science.

The question I would ask about the images to which Jones refers is not whether or not they are beautiful, but whether or not they are scientific. In my view they are, first and foremost, scientistic. They bear the aura of scientific inquiry, but offer little in terms of scientific knowledge. They are the kind of image often favoured as the cultural proxies of scientific disciplines, because of their strongly aesthetic powers of affect. (We know that Jones has previously found such scientistic images beguiling: in the 2007 article cited above he praises Hirst works which rely almost entirely upon them.)

Obviously, the creators of aesthetic cultures of science have noticed that the social world can be addressed as an audience, and that it can be expected to respond positively when it finds beauty in something. They have noticed, too, that the techniques for eliciting the "beauty response" are not too hard to acquire: they can be tracked down via a long history of pictorialism channelled through the art of recent centuries. It's no accident that those Hubble telescope images look more like paintings than raw data-sets (the kind of result probably required in the scientific disciplines using the Space Telescope).

Aesthetic cultures of science provide the opportunity of responding to the scientific without necessarily understanding any science. Although inaugurated in the name of scientific "literacy" it can be argued that their purpose is also to maintain a comfort zone - through of aesthetic enjoyment - around hard-to-understand and potentially troubling scientific work.

The question of beauty in an image can never be settled, and this may not matter very much. Beauty is just one of the qualities found in the things both arts and sciences put into the public domain, of which we might also ask: is this important; is it worth attending to; is it real?

For me, Jones's article raises (but doesn't address) these two questions:
'Should artists be concerned solely with beauty?' and:
'What do we want from our sciences: beautiful things or knowledges whose utility we can evaluate?'

[1] Jonathan Jones, 'Across the Universe. Is Science Now More Beautiful Than Contemporary Art?', Guardian section G2, 23 September 2012, p.18. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/sep/19/science-more-beautiful-than-art?
[2] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2004) (first published 1930), p. 25.
[3] Jonathan Jones, 'Is This the Birth of 21St Century Art?', Guardian section G2, 5 June 2007, pp. 23-26.

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