What Do Artists Know?

Back Cover

The STone ArT Theory InSTITuTeS The PennSylvAnIA STATe unIverSITy PreSS unIverSITy PArk, PennSylvAnIA www.PSuPreSS.org Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series, and the seminars on which they are based, brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This third volume in the series, What Do Artists Know?, is about the education of artists. The MFA degree is notoriously poorly conceptualized, and now it is giving way to the PhD in art practice. Meanwhile, conversations on freshman courses in studio art continue to be bogged down by conflicting agendas. This book is about the theories that underwrite art education at all levels, the pertinent history of art education, and the most promising current conceptualizations. Glenn Adamson, Rina Arya, Louisa Avgita, Jan Baetens, Su Baker, Jeroen Boomgaard, Brad Buckley, William Conger, John Conomos, Anders Dahlgren, Laurie Fendrich, Michael Fotiadis, Christopher Frayling, Charles Green, Vanalyne Green, Tom McGuirk, Robert Nelson, Håkan Nilsson, Peter Plagens, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Howard Singerman, Henk Slager, George Smith, Martin Søberg, Roy Sorensen, Bert Taken, Janneke Wesseling, Frances Whitehead, Gary Willis, and Yeung Yang. James Elkins is E. C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He coedited the previous volumes in the series, Art and Globalization (Penn State, 2010) and What Is an Image? (Penn State, 2011). cover illustration: Courtesy of the Milwaukee-Downer College collection at the Lawrence University Archives. “This book asks one of the most important questions in contemporary art, and James Elkins’s way of asking it is idiosyncratic, original, and inclusive. Anyone who is interested in the intelligence of art, or in the idea of art as a process of enquiry, will find this book informative and engrossing. What Do Artists Know? is a must for graduate art students, emerging artists, and those faculty who currently think they know all they need to know.” —Timothy Emlyn Jones, Dean of the Burren College of Art, Ireland ...