What Do Artists Know?

Spook Country: Training for Conflicts of Interest

Art school can be memorable. Art schools can also make art history. Without going back too far, think of Nova Scotia and CalArts during the 1970s. Think of the buzz around Los Angeles’s art schools and London’s Goldsmiths during the 1990s. What stood out was their participation in the creation of what we now call contemporary art. Otherwise, thinking about art schools dates as quickly as my memory of the last faculty graduate committee meeting minutes. It’s not the why, how, or what about artists’ training and thinking, but who, where, and when that we remember. This is one half of the relevant history of studio art education that James Elkins called for in his introduction: the story of how art schools connected with contemporary art. The other story is how art schools connected with the higher education sector. The gulf between the two histories is the moral of the Seminars, just as its implications are elided in the recent crop of books and articles on art schools, which are by contrast very partial self-portraits. But a General Theory of Everything about what artists know, it turns out, isn’t very exciting. Art schools’ pedagogical foundations could obviously be more profound . On the ground, however, these have little effect compared with the two parts of the picture mentioned above. The first of these stories, then, revolves around the type and intensity of each art school’s connection to the complex art worlds within which it is embedded . Is a particular art school a backwater, ignored and its academics in turn detached from contemporary art, from artist-run initiatives, from dealer galleries and biennales? Or is art school the circuit into wider, global networks of contemporary art? And does the memorable art school make this link through publishing, residencies, university art museums (which are as often as not cordoned off from the art school and even from the art history department), and cycles of symposia? Is each art school a player, an enabler, even an innovator in the art world, of which there are many (we’ll come back to the geopolitics of that shortly)? James Elkins wanted to distinguish between two themes: one was how art students receive the discipline of art history; the other was how to reformulate the discipline. However, the professionals—art critics, art historians, curators, artists themselves—do not generate art history’s judgments anymore, and so a training that assumes they do is already on the wrong track. What do I mean? One of my best students quoted a clever phrase, “The knowledge field of contemporary art is mapped by price tags.” Even after the global financial crisis, the SPOOK COUNTRY TRAINING FOR CONFLICTS OF INTEREST Charles Green 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 181 9/14/12 1:18 PM what do artists know? 182 art market is the place in which public reputations and artistic achievements are determined, though not the place in which most art is made, with the exception of Versailles School theorists like Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami. As Hilde Van Gelder observed, there is no longer a single, unified art practice. My student saw the implications: she was arguing that the concept of “art history” does still occupy a very significant place in contemporary art. In particular, “art history ” is still used as a lens within which a narrative of the contemporary artistic period is formulated. But she understood that the composition of this narrative by the disinterested art historian has no place, even after July 2008, in an art world governed by money and the market. My experience as an art critic, an art historian, and an artist means I can commend the Seminar’s provocative and insightful discussions about the relationship of the haughty discipline of art history to the ingenuously willful art school’s disinclination to think such systems through. What my student meant was that the vast growth of collecting and of contemporary art sponsorship has resulted in a narration of our artistic period other than by the art historian. Induction into our period, I would add, is now not by the art school. The disguised disappearance of the gatekeeper role has affected the operation of studio art schools, increasing the friction in a twospeed economy in which the priorities of the world of contemporary art mesh badly with the priorities of the art school. We started with two narratives. The second was institutional and revolved around the degree to which an art school...