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

Seeking Life in the Mediated World: an accidental TV and newspaper review.

ne weekend, I watch Freeview TV and read a broadsheet...

Is TV today actually targetted at connoisseurs of formats, ads and idents? More radically, is it an exercise in contentless form; a way to keep tele-forms alive, in their shimmering, ersatz state, until the arrival of the saviour entities who will reinvest them with purpose?

Even in Britain, where TV "isn't as bad as in America", the conceptual integrity of any TV programme is more and more limited to fitting in with a given format. Viewers are faced with a palette of variations in which producers push and pull, mildly, at the limits of whatever format they've banked on to get some sort of project past gatekeeper executives. I presume.

To the average programme maker, I am a demographically awkward, unrewarding viewer: a fifty-something, financially non-viable middle-class male, living in The North. I'm not interested in buying, selling or altering my home; building a dream-home; elaborate meals; or anything that requires middle-class amounts of money. But because I have a smattering of middle-class education I'm not interested in the top-feeder approach to ideas, either. I'm a snob, with no spending power, and, to make matters worse, an artist.

To me, TV reflects a popular culture that has become even more exclusionary than it already was, even more fiercely limited to orthodoxies, especially around corporatised entertainment, and a self-serving media/celebrity culture: the stock in trade of all the formats in which TV and entertainment people talk among themselves. Released from the sofas, the same actors and personalities fan out in squads across TV-land, emoting for talent shows; scowling, weeping and wailing for overwrought soaps and crime tales, huffing and puffing through nostalgic costume dramas: many of these being formats with interchangeable narratives and roles.

I might be interested in not seeing the invisible reality programme 'I'm a Celebrity: Please Ignore Me from Now On' (copyright © me, 2015). For this, a very large number of celebrities are taken to a rudimentary camp in, say, the Gobi Desert, under false pretences. They're left there without any camera crews, satellite or Internet connections, never to be seen or heard from again (especially if they make it back home: this to be a clause in the contract that the celebs cannot be allowed to see, in order to ensure their participation). 

The Freeview experience is maddening. On the one hand, programme makers seem terrified that the viewer might not be able to follow a train of thought for more than two minutes. On the other, the viewer's interest is constantly frustrated by repetitious advertising and padding. Inside, I'm screaming: I can remember what happened in this oversimplified narrative, and what the consequences were, because, you know, the programme itself explained those very things not ten minutes ago.

The experience is made worse by the tendency of non-commercial programming to imitate the breathless flow of commercial channels. The noisiness of commercial broadcasting makes sense as a sensory fog intended to induce a dream-like state in which viewers might spend more money. In the non-commercial realm the viewer is constantly nudged and prodded for no other reason than the channel declaring its own presence, its qualities, etc., ever more explicitly, even though the viewer, by definition, has already elected to watch the channel.


Of course, it's possible to find thoughtful programmes about politics and economics, arts and sciences (albeit with a strong metropolitan bias), and even one or two films that don't involve Steven Seagal. That is, as long as the BBC manages to maintain its autonomy as a nest of lefty-liberals, or right-wing reactionaries, depending on your analysis of the BBC. [1] And as long as Channel 4 isn't totally consumed by brain-eating controversialitis.

As guest editor-curator of  BBC's Artsnight, Maxine Peake affects to arrive in Salford in a White Van, all bleached-out like a white knight, or the saviour who will reinvest the arts magazine format with new purpose. I enjoy the sections on women in television and on Shelagh Delaney. And I think I know what Peake means when, in another item, she says that the post-punk post-hip-hop duo Sleaford Mods have come to 'save us' (from conventionalised pop music). But I don't like the Mods that much, musically, and I don't know what Peake means by 'the working class'. [2]

The White Van is no doubt returned to Media City, Salford; and Peake to London.

I do appreciate Adam Curtis's film Bitter Lake (BBC iPlayer only). It's about Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, and the playing out of Saudi and British interests throughout the Middle East, as far as Afghanistan. The film is much too complex to synopsise here, which is a reflection of the fact that it does not oversimplify its subject matter. There is some ambiguity about the "voice" behind the film, and the purpose of certain sequences in it, but I prefer coping with that to fighting the sense that I'm wasting my time, and being patronised for it. [3]

I also like The Great European Disaster Movie, by Annalisa Piras (apart from the acted bits featuring Angus Deayton as a future "archaeologist" of old Europe, on board a repeatedly re-routed airliner). I find a German woman talking about her forbears particularly moving. Whenever I see German people engaging critically with their past I despair of the idiocies of self-satisfied Britishness. The film features few exemplars of that quality, too. [4]

I find a programme about owls. I like to think that this and my enjoyment of it are exemplary of an altogether different kind of Britishness. [5]


After a struggle with TV, I need to reconnect with my roots in free-thinking, radical contemporary art.

It's International Women's Day, and the editors of the Observer newspaper have put contemporary art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist on the cover of their arts section, under the heading 'Is this Britain's Most Original Thinker?' [6]

Predictably, the bait question on the cover is not addressed in the article. Coincidentally, though, Obrist is shown in a position analogous to that of Deayton's character in the Piras film. We're told in detail of his long-standing obsession with travelling the world, engaging with artists (a back-story that will be familiar to anyone who knows a little bit about Obrist, or looks him up online). As far as the curator's thinking goes, it seems to be that of the classic aggregator; here gleaning ideas piecemeal from the artists he meets, formalising them, post hoc, into something which acquires quasi-philosophical, academic or historical merit.

Neither Obrist nor his interlocutor, Rachel Cooke, choose to discuss how much this perceived merit has to do with the dedication, energy and original thought of the curator, and how much to do with his acquired power in a relatively exclusive art world. Nor do they connect non-artworld issues with what art could or should be doing today. In terms of addressing the vitality of contemporary art, these are significant omissions, made more noticeable when Obrist's global reach is invoked as if it were a professional qualification. Lacking much interrogative drive, the article reinforces the familiar impression that important art and its curators are defined primarily by their ineffable metropolitan-ness: a quality of being, rather than a quality of thought.


...overall, the weekend is educative, informative, slightly entertaining, and a little depressing.

T'wit, t'woo.


[1] "One of the most bizarre myths about the corporation, recycled ceaselessly in the conservative press, is that the BBC has a left wing bias [but] the opposite is the case. From the coverage of wars to economics, it has a pro-government, elite and corporate anchor. The BBC is full of Conservatives and former New Labour apparatchiks with almost identical views about politics, business and the world. Executives have stuffed their pockets with public money. And far from programme outsourcing increasing independent creativity, it has simply turned some former employees into wealthy “entrepreneurs”, while enforcing a safety-first editorial regime."
Seamus Milne: 'Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation 1974-1987 by Jean Seaton review'
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/01/pinkoes-and-traitors-bbc-and-nation-1974-1987-jean-seaton-review

[2] Artsnight., BBC Two: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0551jtq

[3] Adam Curtis: Bitter Lake (2015)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4393514/

[4] The Great European Disaster Movie (2015, Dir. Annalisa Piras)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4288614/

[5]  Natural Word: Super Powered Owls.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b054fn09/natural-world-20152016-2-super-powered-owls

[6] Rachel Cooke, 'Hans Ulrich Obrist: "Everything I do is somehow connected to velocity"'
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/08/hans-ulrich-obrist-everything-i-do-connected-velocity-interview

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

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

A Modest Proposal (For Preventing the Contemporary Art of Britain from Being a Burden to the Country, and for Making it Beneficial to the Public). [1]

he proposal needs further research, but here are some foundational elements:

1) Levy a tax on any artwork sold in the London art market that has been produced by an ex-student of a publicly-funded UK art school. The tax could start at 50% of sale price and reduce by 5% per year, calculated from the date the artist in question left art school; a kind of social "droit de suite".
2) Sell Anthony D'Offay's art back to him. Suggest that he reaffirm the preeminence of his collector's nous by saving his collection from the (now impoverished) state, paying back what he took in cash (£26 million) and tax relief (£14 million).[2] This may not be much in the face of the national deficit, but would be an important symbol of the private art world's solidarity with the country in time of difficulty.
3) Don't pay for the upkeep of Charles Saatchi's art collection. Do ask him to pay the state an annual fee for this service, should it be rendered.[3]
3a) Don't forget that there might be a hidden agenda behind Saatchi's rhetorical sorties.[4]
4) Each year, offer unsold artworks from the Frieze Art Fair free to people on Jobseeker's Allowance (or equivalent) in Greater London, Merseyside, Tyneside, Strathclyde, etc,* as tokens of the British art world's solidarity with the people of Britain.
5) Put any money gleaned by these means into an endowment for public-sector art venues and events.
*Other regions may apply.

[1] http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
[2] Tim Adams, 'Anthony D'Offay. Portrait of the Perfect Dealer', Observer,2 March 2008,p.47. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/mar/02/artnews.anthonydoffay
[3] Adrian Searle, 'Saatchi Gallery: Nice gift Charles, but what now?', Guardian 1 July 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jul/01/saatchi-gallery-museum-contemporary-art
[4] Saatchi: 'You have to build the national collection around art that is by definition validated – and more expensive. [We are left with] an inadequate national collection of our great artists – not enough prime Hockney, Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, not a good collection of British Kitchen Sink painters, or British Pop Art pioneers, like Hamilton, and a weak group of works by the YBA generation.' [Just pop in that last one, then.] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/14/turner-legacy-charles-saatchi

The Rewards of Art

response to the article: New Data Reveals Artists Aren’t Gettin’ Paid by Alexis Clements.[1] The article address the economic condition of contemporary artists, but behind that lies a lot of complexity involving history, tradition, sociality and economics. It is tricky to pick apart the relationships between the agents in any so-called art world (especially their more closely-guarded mutualities), but making a few key distinctions can help.

One important distinction is between primary artistic producers and those who create intellectual cultures and publicity-created cultures around artistic production. Another is between public and private art worlds. Making such distinctions can help clarify what passes back and forth through the semi-permeable divisions of a sectorised art world. It's different, of course, at different junctures in the many kinds of transaction around artistic practices and products. There are multiple currencies, suited to different contingencies, including: aesthetic pleasure; real or symbolic knowledge of the world at large; knowledge of and about art; money; payment-in-kind; social status; etc.

As one responder to Clements's article suggests, what is often casually referred to as an art world is usually a diverse field with disciplinary, academic, social, and economic aspects (at least). Artists, especially today, can occupy multiple roles in such a field, and so be implicated in perpetuating as well as resisting its economic inequities. However, it does seem that artists are often disadvantaged primary producers in their own fields. For any advancement they must to appeal to the often contradictory values of a variety of other art-world agents. What unites these - curators, dealers, academics, etc. - is a reliance on the primary products of the artist; and the fact that, as aggregators and mediators of that product, they end up occupying positions more economically or socially assured than that of the typical artist. 

[1]  http://hyperallergic.com/50226/new-data-reveals-artists-arent-gettin-paid