What Do Artists Know?

7. The BFA Degree

1. In Australia the standard degree is three years plus an additional year, Honours, reserved for the top 25 percent or so of students, who complete an original research project and submit a small thesis. [—D.P.] 2. James Elkins, “Histories,” “Conversations ,” and “Theories,” chaps. 1–3 of Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 3. In addition to those cited below, Raphael Rubinstein, “Art Schools: A Group Crit,” with contributions by Howard Singerman, Leslie KingHammond , Larry Rinder, Laurie Fendrich, Bruce Ferguson, Suzanne Anker, Thomas Lawson, Saul Ostrow, Dave Hickey, Archie Rand, Judith Kirchner , Jim Elkins, and Robert Storr, Art in America (May 2007): 99–113. 4. Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught. The conversation here continued the discussion of the first year into a general discussion of the three-year BA or the four-year BFA. (The former is common in Europe; the latter in North America.)1 For this seminar the group read parts of Why Art Cannot Be Taught2 and other texts.3 James Elkins: Perhaps we can begin where we left off. Is the problem of the place of art history in studio instruction solved by providing electives later in the BA or BFA? Saul Ostrow: We actually do the history backwards where I teach in Cleveland. History classes are electives in the BFA. Marta Edling: In Swedish institutions, the students have an entire smorgasbord of choices. But the whole ideological knot is that the students choose. William Marotti: I think about this question from the point of view of the argument in Why Art Cannot Be Taught.4 The claim there is that if you change the way that art is taught, you change the concept of art. There is a relationship between what is taught in art schools and what art is. That’s another level of self-reflexivity to think about, beyond the individual level. James Elkins: When the curricular issues get this complex, there’s a pressing question of how to fix them. There is one answer that seems to be in play at all levels of art instruction: you could increase the self-reflexivity of the students, make them aware of the teaching they’re receiving. This comes up in discussions of first-year programs: for example, you could raise some of the issues about the survey and how it is taught in different places. But a higher level of art instruction, selfreflexivity becomes the principal, foundational strategy of instruction. We will return to it when we talk about the MFA and PhD: actually I think the principal pedagogic goal of the PhD has to be that an increase in self-awareness, reflexivity, can make the practice more interesting. At the level of the BFA, it is a practical problem: how do you give a student self-reflexivity about a subject while they are only just learning the subject? How 7. THE BFA DEGREE 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 77 9/14/12 1:17 PM what do artists know? 78 5. The example is from Oskar Bätchmann, Einfuhrung in die kunstgeschichtliche Hermeneutik : Die Auslegung von Bildern (Die Kunstwissenschaft ), third edition (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988). do you tell them art history is a history of nationalist narratives, when they’re only just memorizing the dates and names that were generated by those nationalist narratives? At a deeper level, the idea of increasing self-reflexivity begs the question of whether self-reflexivity solves the issues we’ve been discussing, or just makes them more complicated, more intellectually engaging. For example, imagine you have an art history lecturer talking about Hans Holbein, and then in comes another art historian talking about how patriotic German art history produced narratives about Holbein in the early twentieth century that propelled him to a place in the canon.5 Has that unseated Holbein? What exactly has it done? And, as a final question: what other strategies are there for mending these curricular problems, other than increasing the students’ reflexivity? Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Is there really an alternative to the Holbein evaluated through historical development? And if you bind the artistic phenomenon to the social and historical context, don’t you necessarily produce reflexivity? In our school, art is always debated in relation to globalized market, politics, exploitation. Most of academies I know market themselves by saying: we teach critical capacity. Hilde Van Gelder: May I ask which languages you assign at the Vienna Academy? Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Mostly German...