Art Education?
Art education is a key issue for many Art Monthly readers and as such it is covered in some depth. In the April issue (AM315) we published a letter by the artist Graham Crowley in which he voiced his concerns, with enviable clarity and succinctness, about the present state of art education in London. This letter set the magazine's pages ablaze with heated discussion and in October 2008 a special issue was published.
What is the Future of Art Education?
The idea of this special education issue arose in response to the volume of correspondence Art Monthly has received on the topic.Read the editor, Patricia Bickers', introduction to the debate
Read Seth Seigelaub and Pavel Buchler's dialogue
Read Michael Corris's response
Read Liam Gillick's response
Read John Reardon's response
Read Jaki Irvine's response
Read Terry Smith's response
Read Gareth Jone's response
Read Maria Walsh's response
Read Paul Wood's response
From earlier issues of the magazine
1968 and all thatWill the 40th anniversary of the 1968 protests inspire today's students to demand radical improvements in art education? Students at the London College of Communication have had enough and have officially registered their dissatisfaction by demanding the return of their fees in protest at staff shortages and the lack of organisation. Staff, for their part, are over-burdened by bureaucracy, rising student numbers, low pay and low self-esteem. Vice chancellors, meanwhile, are focused on corporate-style branding and the commissioning of gleaming new buildings. The legacies of St Martins School of Art in the 60s, or Goldsmiths in the 80s, should serve as reminders that it is not buildings that make for a dynamic teaching environment but people.
Read the April editorial.
Mayday Mayday
The sad truth about art education today is that New Labour has finished what Thatcher started.
Ironically, Thatcher's plans for factory-style education were only to be truly achieved under New Labour. It was the setting-up of the dreaded inquisition, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), by the first New Labour government in 1998, barely one year after the election, which made the institutionalisation of what Stephen Lee in his letter aptly describes as 'educational Taylorism' possible. The QAA, and its spawn, the Teaching Quality Assurance (TQA), became the means by which the product, broken down into bite-sized pieces as a result of the imposition of American-style modularisation, could be tested. Since the government had already begun to refer to the arts as the 'creative industries', a term first coined when Labour was still in opposition, this must have seemed like a perfect fit between the so-called 'aims' and 'outcomes' of an art education.
Read the May editorial.
Acronymophobia
Art departments brace themselves for the TQAs
Art departments, like all departments in universities and colleges around the country, are bracing themselves for the next round of TQAs (Teaching Quality Assessments), poring over the latest directives from the QAA (Quality Assurance Agency) in order to try to fit their own practices into the approved criteria. A perfect score of 24 for artistic impression in the QAA, allied to a maximum score of five for technique in the RAE (with required elements including a triple toe-loop, double lutz and back flip), boosts recruitment and guarantees the department concerned all the perks of funding, resources, research time and institutional status that accrue - to the detriment of low-scoring departments within the same institution. Unsurprisingly, art departments in regional and less high-profile institutions find it difficult to compete with, for example, Goldsmiths, which scored highly in the last TQA round.
Read the editorial.
FROM THE ART MONTHLY LETTERS PAGES
'Can't Get No Satisfaction'Anyone considering studying fine art (at undergraduate level) in England and Wales should google the National Student Satisfaction Survey, particularly the Results By Institution. Six of the bottom ten are or were art schools. Bottom of the survey, that is to say the 'least satisfactory', is the University of the Arts London. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has studied or taught there recently.
Read Graham Crowley's letter from the April issue.
Read Colin Maughan's letter from the May issue.
Read Peter Suchin's letter from the May issue.
Read Michael Crowther's letter from the May issue.
Read Stephen Lee's letter from the May issue.
Read William Gaver's letter from the June issue.
Read Sophie Baker's letter from the June issue.
Read Rob Gawthrop's letter from the July/August issue.
Read Andrew J Stooke's letter from the July/August issue.
Read Vaughan Gryll's letter from the September issue.
Read Maurice Carlin's letter from the September issue.
Read Ruth Saunders' letter from the September issue.
Read Colin Maughan's letter from the October issue.
Read Christopher Hudson and Nathaniel Pitt's letter from the November issue.
FROM THE NEWS PAGES
Report about the Dartington/Falmouth merger.Will Maidstone be another merger victim?
Dartington memorials
Sheffield art department moves to city centre
All change at Goldsmiths
FROM OTHER SECTIONS IN THE MAGAZINE
The Hornsey Sit-inDavid Briers reviews Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution by Lisa Tickner:
Usually cited as a contrast with the perceived or supposed passivity of today's fee-paying art students, the Hornsey sit-in has become one of the cultural myths of the 60s. With the LSE sit-in the year before as a model, in May 1968 Hornsey students ousted the principal from his office and took over direct control of the college for two months ... Localised grievances interacted with equivocation about countrywide structural changes in higher education to provoke a demand for an 'analysis of art education nationally and the relations between artists, designers, and society', and thus 'opened onto political territory'.
Read Briers's article
Polemic
JJ Charlesworth on art education, autonomy and opting out of state provision:'It's your world. What will you change?' It sounds like the heady rhetoric of liberation or collective revolution that harks back to the days of May 68, where anything seemed possible. It is in fact the strapline of an advert for Middlesex University's Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, run in last month's Art Monthly, and it's ironic that it followed directly on from the troubled debate on the state of art education in Britain. It reminds us that higher education has become a business, a business that does not necessarily sell knowledge, but rather the potential experience of individuated, personal transformation, which reduces learning to no more than a set of purchasable access points to the development of a secure, professional career.
Read Charlesworth's polemic
Essay
Who Took the (He)art Out of the Art Schools?David Harding wrote this essay shortly after his resignation from Glasgow School of Art in 2001. He describes it as his attempt to describe where things were going wrong. This article has not been printed in the magazine.
Read Harding's essay
Report
Frederika Whitehead reports from a debate on the government's new strategy document Creative Britain: New Talents for a New Economy:Estelle Morris posed three questions for debate. 'Will the structure in the paper - with all its committees - actually damage creativity? Will the accountability mechanisms jeopardise risk-taking? And, will mainstreaming discourage some people from wanting to work in the creative sector in the first place?'
Read Whitehead's report
Artlaw
Life after Art SchoolHenry Lydiate reflects on the way that professional practice is taught in art departments and how it could be improved.
Read Lydiate's Artlaw column
PUBLIC DEBATE
What is the Future of Art Education?
In response to demand Art Monthly organised two public debates; one in London in September, and one in Birmingham in October. At these events readers were given the opportunity to question educational professionals and policy makers. The panels debated the motion: is further privatisation, corporatisation and instrumentalism inevitable or are there alternatives? And responded directly to the question What is the Future of Art Education?
Saturday September 27 2008
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
Panelists:
Michael Corris is a writer and professor of fine art at the Art & Design Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University
Lisa Le Feuvre is a writer, curator and lecturer on the curatorial programme at the Department of Art, Goldsmiths.
Paul Gough is chair of the art and design group of the Research Assessment Exercise and pro-vice chancellor at University of West of England in Bristol
Irit Rogoff is an art historian and professor of visual cultures at Goldsmiths.
Paul Wood is the author of 'Between God and the Saucepan', a study of English art education from the 18th Century to the present day, which will be published in the History of British Art this November
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
Panelists:
Pavel Büchler, artist and research professor at Manchester Metropolitan University
Phyllida Barlow, artist, professor of fine art and director of undergraduate studies at Slade
Michael Corris, writer and professor of fine art at the Art & Design Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University
Vaughan Grylls, artist and former director of Kent Institute of Art and Design
Both panels were chaired by Patricia Bickers, editor of Art Monthly
A transcript of this event will be available shortly.
A podcast of this event will be available shortly.
Other Art Monthly events
