What Do Artists Know?

Introduction

1. These are cited throughout the text: the following footnotes are only the readings that were not cited by the participants in the Seminars. 2. Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (London: Berg, 2007). 3. György Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago : P. Theobald, 1944); Nigel Cross, Designerly Ways of Knowing (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007); Alain Findeli, “Rethinking Design Education for the 21st Century: Theoretical, Methodological, and Ethical Discussion,” Design Issues 17, no. 1 (2001): 5–17; Jorge Frascara, “Hiding Lack of Knowledge: Bad Words in Design Education,” Design Issues 23, no. 4 (2007): 62–68; Clive Dilnot, “The State of Design History,” pt. 1 and pt. 2, Design Issues 1, no. 1 (1984): 4–23, and 1 no. 2 (1984): 3–20; these were all suggested by Michael Golec. 4. A position paper on art education was written especially for the event: CVAE Club, Chicago, “The Condition of Art Education: Defining the Field and Its Distinct Territories,” unpublished position paper, 2009, available on request from Keith Brown or John Ploof, Art Education, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 5. These include Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production, edited by Joan Livingstone and John Ploof (Chicago: SAIC; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Claire Bishop, Participation, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Marion Milner (pseudonym Joanna Field), On Not Being Able to Paint, with an introduction by Anna Freud (New York: International Universities Press, 1957); the background reading included Bild und Bildung: Ikonologische Interpretationen vormoderner Dokumente von Erziehung und Bildung, edited by Christian Rittelmeyer and Erhard Wiersing (Wiesbaden: Ottto Harrassowitz, 1991), an anthology of texts on Bildung, paideia, and related concepts from antiquity to the seventeenth century; Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy, edited by Brad This introduction is adapted from the opening roundtable, September 21, 2009. Welcome, everyone. This opening discussion is meant to be very informal: we’re just going to talk about some of the questions we hope to raise during the week of seminars. After today’s three-hour panel discussion, there will be twenty-seven hours of closed seminars, and then on Saturday the week will end with another public panel discussion. That one will be five hours long—yes, I know, five hours—but in the past it has been a great way to wrap up the week. We have an outstanding Faculty here, and an equally amazing group of fifteen Fellows, from the United States, Austria, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Greece, Mexico, Hong Kong, Australia, Sweden, and Canada. Some are art historians who study the history of art instruction; some are philosophers ; and others are experts in college-level art instruction, right up to the PhD. (And I wanted to record that we were going to have a Fellow from Iran, but the U.S. immigration people found out that she didn’t have a large bank account, and they decided that could only mean she was intending to settle here permanently .) We have all spent the last month reading. The Faculty assigned about fifteen hundred pages of texts,1 not including optional background reading on craft,2 design,3 and art education.4 There were also optional texts on related subjects such as contemporary art practices outside of academies.5 INTRODUCTION James Elkins 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 1 9/14/12 1:17 PM introduction 2 So we are hoping to make some headway on some of the more difficult issues about how artists are taught, and what they know. This is an enormous field—actually, no one knows how big it is. The website artschools.com lists 2,055 art schools and departments in the United States, so there must be at least five times that number in the whole world.6 Another site, gradschools.com, lists 486 MFA programs in the United States and Canada. Every year there are too many conferences, symposia, and lectures on this subject for anyone to attend. But at the same time, some of the most fundamental issues are completely unresolved . I was amazed, really amazed, when I discovered that there is basically no definition of the MFA. It is not an exaggeration to say no one knows what an MFA is, except in the trivial sense that it involves professional-level competence in visual art and that for the moment it’s still the terminal...