Several dozen students and professors gather around an artist and his latest creation. The sculpture: “Into the Abyss,” a six-foot wooden maze that resembles a digestive tract. The artist: David Bodhi Boylan, an M.F.A. student at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Mr. Boylan listens, chin in hand, as the crowd plunges into a 45-minute critique of his “Abyss.”
“I’d like to hear you speak a little bit more about this notion of expectations,” says one person.
“The question of the front and backness of the work—I want it to be more complex.”
“If we’re going to stay in binary mode … a more productive space to look at it is interior versus exterior and how that relates to utility versus aesthetics or judgment.”
Such critiques are an M.F.A. staple. What’s unusual about this one is the guest scribbling notes at the back, a sociologist named Gary Alan Fine. Over the past two years, his agreeable personality and ornately patterned sweaters have become as familiar to these students as the scuffed floors and exposed ductwork of the university’s galleries. He’s here, on this Friday afternoon in May, to wrap up the research for an unprecedented study of art students.
In a career that spans some four decades, Mr. Fine has made a specialty of moling into subcultures of work and play, emerging with books about meteorologists and restaurant workers, Little Leaguers and Dungeons & Dragons players, mushroom hunters and high-school debaters. Five years ago, he got interested in a subculture closer to home: campus-based art worlds.
What piqued his curiosity was the migration of so many art domains once external to universities—visual arts, yes, but also poetry, fiction, wine-making, you name it—into the Ivory Tower. In the visual arts, Mr. Fine estimates that the number of M.F.A. programs has increased fourfold over the past half-century, to roughly 300 today, a major shift in how artists are trained.
When art goes to college, what are the consequences?
Mr. Fine set out to answer that question by observing visual-arts M.F.A. programs on three campuses: Northwestern University, where he is a professor of sociology; Illinois State University; and the University of Illinois at Chicago, known as UIC.
Today’s student critiques at UIC reflect many themes of his findings, which will eventually become a book. The sociologist argues that universities force, or at least encourage, artists to incorporate theory into their work. An artist doesn’t just paint a beautiful picture. She must explain the intention of her brushstrokes, how they fit into an argument, into a theory.
M.F.A. students, as Mr. Fine observed them, take no courses in technique—unlike graduate students in, say, sociology, who must study methods like statistical analysis and ethnography. M.F.A. students spend a lot of time writing and talking about art.
“I grew up in an era in which people would say, ‘Art speaks for itself,’” says Mr. Fine, 64, who was raised in Manhattan, where his father worked as a Freudian psychoanalyst. He adds, “That doesn’t fly very well in art schools. … You’re always being challenged. What does this mean? Why are you doing this?”
With their tattoos, black T-shirts, and progressive ideas, the students and professors peering at Mr. Boylan’s “Abyss” may seem like individualists. From his sociological vantage point, however, Mr. Fine sees something more: a social system that turns art into a profession, like medicine or law.
Theory and Expectation
Who decides what constitutes a competent doctor? Other doctors. Likewise, the growth of M.F.A. education creates spaces in which artists and art teachers can control their profession, the sociologist argues, wielding power over what is seen as good work.
Ensconced in universities, Mr. Fine says, artists can survive without selling their work in galleries. They can do conceptual work. Performance work. Work that critiques the art world. Work that inspires political change. Work derived from casual materials.
Mr. Boylan likes to build from found wood, for example. The artist begins his critique by explaining that the “Abyss” sculpture is composed largely of debris collected from his studio.
“I’m using that as a vehicle to question how we encounter an artwork … and what expectations we bring to it,” he tells the audience.
Mr. Fine is hardly the first person to raise questions about these developments. Nearly 40 years ago, Tom Wolfe covered related territory in The Painted Word (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a slim, snotty critique of the ascendance of theory over beauty in art. Mr. Wolfe jests in his epilogue that the Met or the Museum of Modern Art will eventually exhibit giant copy blocks of theoretical texts on its walls, accompanied by small reproductions of paintings. More recently, Howard Singerman captured the historical sweep of how art training evolved in American universities in his 1999 study Art Subjects (University of California Press), which also took up the theme of language.
“The university makes a demand on art as a discipline that it not be merely technical and not be primarily manual,” says Mr. Singerman, chair of the department of art and art history at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, in an interview. “Because, historically, things which are merely technical or manual lie outside the purview of the university.”
What sets Mr. Fine’s work apart is its ethnographic method: the close observation of on-the-ground details and interactions. Beyond critiques, the sociologist attended classes, parties, meetings, studio visits, and student thesis shows. He began the project as an art lover with conservative tastes. He came away with an appreciation for more unusual fare.
Consider the eels.
While showing me around the UIC art building, Mr. Fine comes upon a white styrofoam cooler of eels on a gallery floor. He notes the slimy fish as casually as if he were commenting on the dusty heat outside.
“Those are eels,” Mr. Fine says. “Live eels.”
Live eels?
“Yes,” he says. “Very interesting.” He points out the gallery walls, hung with four photographs of a tattooed man, asleep. The eels and photos make up an installation created by a UIC student, Jenyu Wang. Its tentative title: “Boyfriend.”
“It has to do with desire and unconsciousness, and the Freudian symbolism,” Mr. Fine says.
The eels speak to another theme of Mr. Fine’s study: the boundaries of art. Boundaries are a central issue in sociology. What can people in a particular domain get away with and still be considered legitimate?
Mr. Fine attended one critique that seemed to fulfill the mirthful predictions of Mr. Wolfe’s Painted Word. For the session, a well-respected student fastened a sheet of paper to the wall. It announced that he had served as an assistant in the studio of one of his classmates. Basically a sentence—that was it. Mr. Fine never expected this gesture to be taken seriously. But it was. It prompted the group to evaluate the role of the artist. Must an artist be a heroic figure who makes his own work? Or is collaboration enough?
Just Self-Improvement?
After presenting his sculpture, Mr. Boylan joins three classmates in a studio for a different kind of critique. I want to hear what students make of Mr. Fine’s analysis. These are the ones he suggests talking with: a sculptor; a nonfiction filmmaker; a self-described “video and performance artist and concrete comedian”; and Mr. Boylan, who does sculpture and drawing.
Their reactions are mixed.
In response to one of Mr. Fine’s main themes—all that talking and theory—some do feel that the academic language and framework can foster a lack of diversity in the art created.
“People end up making work with very similar motivations, very similar rules,” Mr. Boylan says.
“If you can’t frame it appropriately, you won’t begin it,” says Matt Brett, a sculptor.
“Yeah—the theory shuts it down before it actually manifests,” says Courtney Prokopas, the filmmaker.
But the relentless questioning of an M.F.A. program can also help. A lot.
“One of the strengths of school is that you’re really pressed here to shine a little light on those subconscious motivations,” Mr. Brett says. “It’s almost like therapy, man.”
“Part of the interesting and important thing about critiques … is just to have an additional 50 people’s voices and minds in your head when you’re making things,” adds Jesse Malmed, the video and performance artist. “One of the great human problems is not being able to be anywhere but your own head.”
Another great human problem is finding a job after graduation. The best students will leave their M.F.A. programs and shape our culture. But for a “fair number” of people, the degree, at least at the outset, is a ticket to minimum wage, Mr. Fine says. One artist that the sociologist knows plans to work construction after graduation. Another sells men’s clothing.
That’s one of the sensitive issues raised by Mr. Fine’s study. Art may be professionalizing like medicine or law. But, as the graduating students on this studio’s plaid couch are aware, it lacks the clear career track of other professions.
“There are a lot of artists that go into M.F.A. programs, and then after their M.F.A. programs, if they don’t get what they want, they stop making work or they make a lot less of it,” says Mr. Boylan. “There’s something that doesn’t line up there, where you’re supposed to get this education so you can have a professional life, but it doesn’t—"
Mr. Brett cuts him off. “It’s better to think of it as just self-improvement,” he says. “If you think about it that way, then you’re undoubtedly a better, smarter person now.”
“But we’re talking about the expectations that are really set,” Mr. Boylan says. M.F.A. programs, he notes, are relatively new.
“The group of teachers that came before the baby boomers didn’t have M.F.A.’s,” he says. “They were artists regardless. It seems as though it would have been less discouraging.”