What Do Artists Know?

A Review

The Fellows examined all sides of the question, What Do Artists Know? Their overall aim was to imagine an underlying theory for an art curriculum of necessary integrated skills and knowledge for artists from the undergraduate foundation level through the MFA and emerging PhD in studio practice. As distinguished artists, critics, and theorists, the Fellows are well acquainted with the greatly expanded nature of art practice and artists’ identities in recent decades. They know that a curriculum centered on traditional art-making skills, formalist principles, and art history no longer suffices in an art world being re-formed by theory that melds aesthetics with mass culture, societal critique, and transdisciplinary art practice. They know that art practice itself has no excluded media or skills. They know that the identity of both artist and art cannot be predicted beforehand. They recognize that the paradox of any art curriculum is its promise of expertise in a domain that has no certain dimension or contents. My brief comments respond to the Fellows’ discussion of the emerging PhD in studio practice (already established outside America). I also comment on the MFA and how I think it can be improved (or repaired) by moving some of its topics to the PhD level and replacing them with increased allied field study and studio practice. Finally, I suggest that a new topdown revision of the art curriculum could also improve the BFA. The Artist’s PhD Despite being in place outside America, the studio-based PhD is fraught with problems, mostly centered on the definition of research in or as studio practice. It is one thing to imagine an artist’s PhD as studio practice accompanied by research, a sort of dual activity, but it is more problematic when the practice is also the research and the dissertation is an exhibition of the artist’s subjective practice, as with a body of paintings. So far, the relation between practice and research has not been clarified. After all, what can an exhibition explain or prove in the traditional sense of research? How can it rise above illustrating or explicating a recipe for “art” when everyone knows that art cannot be predetermined? I don’t have uncomplicated answers to those questions, but since the MFA claims to do precisely what the new PhD purports to do—fuse practice with research or skill with theory—but in a much lesser way, it seems reasonable to use the MFA as a skeletal model for the PhD. What this means is that a supervised mix of independent studio practice (or poststudio practice) and research resulting in A REVIEW William Conger 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 135 9/14/12 1:17 PM what do artists know? 136 some formal original presentation would be the substance of evidence for the PhD. This matches the templates for PhDs in other disciplines. Hindering the introduction of a PhD in America are of course practical and academic turf objections from teaching MFA artists who don’t want a new layer of credentials devaluing their hard-won positions. Other academics also have difficulty understanding how “applied studio skills” can be construed as research and how theories peculiar to other disciplines like philosophy, sociology, or cognitive science, for example, can become the defining theories of art practice. I think these practical and turf issues can be resolved because the history of academe is the history of “applied” practices becoming transformed into disciplines by theory. Furthermore, all disciplines build their own theories by inhabiting neighboring disciplines and ultimately making themselves necessary neighbors. There’s one ambiguous issue I want to mention. The artist’s PhD is open to criticism and even derision as the symbol of academic and stultified art practice, withdrawn from the marketplace and the raw give-and-take of everyday experience long proven as the sources of Modernist creativity. Obviously the risk exists, and the lessons of the past are always in mind. As we know, today’s art is fully immersed in a marketplace that has become the arbiter of art definition just as the former academy once was. It’s an inversion. Art academe, now far more contentious , self-critical, and independent than ever, has become a haven for experimental art practice and theory, whereas, ironically, the marketplace redefines art practices as monetized aesthetic values. A formal strengthening of art academe with the artist’s PhD can restore a healthy dialectic between the pursuit of art for its own sake and its functions in the wider...