what's wrong with art schools
to the editors:
to the editors:
i found your piece on the state of arts schools (aia, may '07) interesting and relevant, albeit one-sided. as a third-year undergraduate art student at ucla, however, i am fairly accustomed to one-sideness. though charles ray, an artist who teaches at my school, is quoted as saying 'the reason the kids here are getting all this early success is because they're not art students, they're young artists', i feel like is hardly the case. if i am a young artist and not an art student, why am i receiving grades, >>>or paying so much tuition money? why do i have so little control over the system that is governing my career decision, or so little voice in a discussion that is taking place about it?<<<
while accomplished professors can tout the maturity of their students by calling them 'young artists', they ignore the fact that >>>we still have to fit into an age-old bureaucratic paradigm that is nearly impossible to circumvent<<<. if anything, that is the biggest problem with art school today - >>>there are no clear alternatives to it. it is a given; it is understood to be 'just the way it is'<<<. even mike kelley and alex bag, your two examples of artists whose work supposedly functioned as art school 'institutional critique', >>>still operate within an existing framework<<<. >>>they satirize it or draw attention to it, but they do not demand or suggest alternatives to it<<<.
not only was this nearly left out of the discussion, but so was another frustrating issue: >>>the epidemic of student complicity<<<. the reason why art students are not young artists is because, >>>for the most part, they are indifferent to the way they are educated<<<. this last quarter, a few friends and i tried to start a club where we would get together and address what we felt wasn't working at ucla, and why and how we might change it. at the end of the quarter, interest in these issues seemed to have dwindled considerably. this might have something to do with the fact that >>>when we tried to organize a department-wide community event, we were shot down because of lack of proper paperwork. we are students because we are complicit because it prevents us from being any other way<<<. archie rand touched on this in his piece: 'mfa programs have become 'ideal monopolies'. they are the only game in town if a young artist needs credibility or a network. this is as dangerous as it is inescapable'.
oddly enough this no-alternative 'idea monopoly' relates to robert storr's apt point about the ubiquity of postmodern rhetoric at art school. he states, 'if you're anxious about the rise of authoritarianism - and who isn't - then buck it... >>>
it's time for post-modern generations to make up vocabularies and metaphors of their own - and teach them to their elders.'<<<>>>
it is already bad enough that most of my peers seem content with the system as it is - but moreover, negation of the system would seem symptomatic of an avant-garde and of 'grand narratives' that postmodernism had declared out of date<<<. the postmodern argument is still very much alive at art school - for example, at ucla there was recently an entire class devoted to the theme of 'reproduction, remakes and covers.'storr's call to replace the dated jargon of postmodernism contradicts bruce ferguson's argument that there has been an 'almost complete break between art history and the practice or art-making'. i often wonder, is my goal to make art, or is my goal to contribute the next step in art-historical discourse? whatever the answer is, it is clear that we have a lot of work to do. yet sometimes >>>i am scared that art school is not equipping me well enough to do it<<<.jaymee martinlos angeles.
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