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8. The MFA Degree
- Penn State University Press
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1. This is available on the College Art Association website, http://www.collegeart .org/guidelines/mfa.html, with a footnote on the PhD (accessed October 3, 2009). That text is compared in the seminar with “Standards for the MFA Degree (Visual Arts),” College Art Association pamphlet, 1977: this rare document, reprinted from the CAA Newsletter, is the first official definition of the MFA. (Thanks to Holly Dankert, Flaxman Library, SAIC.) 2. Howard Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” chap. 7 of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 187–213 and notes. 3. See the sources cited below, and also Harold Rosenberg, “Educating Artists,” in New Ideas in Art Education, edited by Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 91–102; originally published in the New Yorker, May 17, 1969. See also Clémentine Deliss, “Is it Possible to Map?,” Jan Verwoert, “Posing Singularity,” and Simon Sheikh, “Room for Thought,” in “A Certain MA-ness,” special issue of MaHKUzine, no. 5 (Summer 2008): 14–22, 23–27, and 28–32, respectively; College Art Association of America, MFA Programs in the Visual Arts: A Directory, published by the Association beginning in 1976 (the MFA was enabled by the GI Bill, but it was not defined until 1977); Karin Stempel, “Zum Stand der Dinge,” in Reality Check: Who Is Afraid of Master of Arts?, edited by Annette Hollywood and Barbara Wille (Berlin: Internationale Gesellschaft für bildenden Künste, 2006), 23–32; Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, “Lernen für die Kunst von Heute: Meisterpläne und Realitäten in Wien,” in Hollywood and Wille, Reality Check, 85–93; and Louis Menand, “Show and Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?,” New Yorker, June 8, 2009. 4. Katalin Herzog, Show Me The Moves: Opstellen voor de MFA Schilderkunst van het Frank Mohr Instituut, Academie Minerva (Groningen: Frank Mohr Instituut, 2005); Herzog is a retired lecturer in modern art at the State University of Groningen, the Netherlands. This seminar was partly devoted to a close reading of several texts, which should be read before this chapter is read: the current guidelines for the MFA, published by the College Art Association;1 and the chapter “Toward a Theory of the MFA” in Howard Singerman’s book Art Subjects.2 In addition we read several dozen other texts.3 A further text on the MFA, by Katalin Herzog, arrived after the event was over.4 James Elkins: It really matters that the MFA has no definition. Even if we only want to say the MFA is a professional degree—so that it doesn’t need a definition other than one to do with professionalization—still, the PhD is conceptually dependent on the MFA, so it will not be possible to build a coherent PhD program without a sense of what the MFA is. To me, it’s just an outrageous fact that the MFA has effectively no definition. I would like to approach the MFA from three directions: as a development of the first-year program and the BFA, as an administrative or institutional entity (as it is currently defined), and as something that can be positively defined (as we might want to reconceive it). 1. The MFA as a development of the first-year program and the BFA. Earlier this week, we talked about how the historical sources of current BFA programs are mutually incommensurate, including elements from the Baroque academies (life drawing, the emphasis on drawing), from Romantic academies (the emphasis on subjectivity and inspiration), from the Bauhaus and other Modernist academies 8. THE MFA DEGREE 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 83 9/14/12 1:17 PM what do artists know? 84 (the tabula rasa, visual sensitivity training, the 2D-to-4D sequence), and from postwar art schools (the idea that art should act in society, the emphasis on politics and practice over aesthetics, deskilling). Other elements of the first-year program are seldom directly discussed. (They are proscribed.) They include the rudiments (color, space, form, composition, motion) and the theories (the essential writers, concepts, and methodologies). The theories and rudiments are not enumerated or debated because they are considered parts of older pedagogies, reflecting older purposes and ideals, and because they are considered as “solved” because they are folded into apparently new conceptual schemata. Together the incompatible elements and those that are not directly debated produce an extremely difficult situation, and that is enough to account for the fact that the first year and the BFA are...