In April, 51 of the 54 students slated to graduate from Columbia University’s visual-arts M.F.A. program came to the provost with an unusual demand: a full tuition refund for the 2017-18 academic year. These candidates had reportedly been working in decrepit conditions. Limestone had fallen from studio ceilings and hallways had flooded, damaging works of art. Room temperatures often dropped below 40 degrees. The environment outside the studio was equally chilly: Star professors took repeated sabbaticals. The university had cheated the students out of an education, they claimed. (One year of tuition at Columbia’s fine-arts program is $63,961.)
The state of Columbia’s highly ranked program — a “disgrace,” the provost acknowledged as he declined their refund request — may be unusual. But the ceiling has yet to crumble on the M.F.A. market more broadly. The degree has increasingly become a prerequisite for people trying to break into the art world, especially those seeking the attention of the leading New York galleries. More than half of the 500 most successful American artists at auction hold M.F.A.s. But what is really happening inside these programs? And what effects do they have on contemporary art?
Gary Alan Fine’s Talking Art (University of Chicago Press, 2018), a report on three M.F.A. programs in the Chicago area, offers us an ethnography of visual-arts education: a dispatch from M.F.A. island. Art school, Fine finds, is a subculture, with an austere patois and peculiar rites of praise and humiliation.
Valuable for its description of how the art world and the university have grown entangled, the book is in other respects less satisfying. Written in a pedestrian style that brims with banalities, Fine’s account suffers from a deadening earnestness. No matter the events he witnesses — at one point an M.F.A. administrator snarls, “You don’t have to eat shit. It tastes bad. … Put that in your book, Gary” — Fine the sociologist maintains a dutiful detachment that flavors his often-outrageous material with blandness.
But suppose the book is a ruse. For with a small effort of the imagination, this unexceptional work of scholarship could double as a piece of extended performance art. The two years Fine spent observing art students, taking diligent notes on Homo artisticus in the captive environment of the M.F.A., may seem like a sacrifice. But by the standards of canonical performance art from the 1960s and 1970s — offstage, a man is shot in his left arm with a .22 rifle; in a darkened room, an artist, kneeling silently, invites her audience to scissor off her clothes — the professor emerges unscathed.
The book treats us to the spectacle of a distinguished, gray-headed scholar — Fine himself, of course — watching as a young artist commands her audience to spit Jell-O into her pantyhose. “I like to question the socially constructed notions of our sense of sex,” she declares. Our hapless sociologist-hero scribbles notes as a male art student screens hard-core pornography as part of his “practice.” Another artist-in-waiting reflects: “For me the vagina is the solution.”
Once we see the book as a stunt, even Fine’s banalities assume a gnomic weight. On writers: “Writers vividly depict the status and strains of literature. Words are their passion and their currency.” On art: “Once artists were mute, today they talk and write as well as create.” On students: “Students’ selves shape their lifeworlds.” On female students crying in their studios: “One faculty member claimed to have seen male students cry, but these stories are less frequent (and perhaps less plausible) than those of women crying, which fits cultural narratives.”
An outsider peering into art school might seem like a hermetically self-referential subject for a work of art. But no less so than the substantial body of contemporary art that takes the people and institutions of the art world — curators, dealers, museums, galleries — as targets of critique, for which boldness a lucky few are awarded millions from the same parties whose pride they seek to wound.
Fine’s book, bearing the sober imprimatur of a university press, is not art but scholarship, not satire but description. It carries forward the ethnographer’s longstanding interest in elite small-group cultures (he has previously written an acclaimed study of the competitive chess world). But art and scholarship are not always easy to tell apart. Indeed, contemporary visual art, with its sense of “research” and “questions,” its moves of interrogation and critique, and, above all, its increasingly intimate entanglement with universities and academic credentialing, has become something resembling an academic discipline.
Fine’s account, falling in the tradition, and shadow, of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (Harvard University Press, 2011), helps us see more clearly the effects of visual-arts programs on contemporary art. The book’s main interest for those of us in academia, however, may lie elsewhere. The appeal of ethnography, by turns prurient and educative, comes from the privileged access it grants to an alien way of life. But the spectacle of a cohort of students trained to speak in a rarefied lexicon, vying for their professors’ approval, instructed to compete for a tiny number of unstable jobs while courting hostility from the larger world, will not strike anyone on a university campus as unfamiliar. The M.F.A. is graduate school in a funhouse mirror.
Seven of the 10 most-expensive higher-education institutions in the United States, after financial aid is factored in, are art schools. In 2014, Art Times reported, tuition and expenses for a four-year undergraduate degree at the Rhode Island School of Design cost $253,000. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at a mere $205,000, it said, begins to seem like a bargain.
Fine’s study focuses on art departments within universities; at freestanding art schools, debt levels are even higher.
Fine examines three institutions: Northwestern, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Illinois State University (the last an enclave of eccentricity in a town called Normal). Only at Northwestern are M.F.A. students fully funded by fellowships. So, what are these students paying to learn?
Not craft or technique, it turns out. We are a long way from late-19th-century Paris, where “academic painting” signified technically dazzling neoclassical figures, lush but sterile, and where the brutal disruptions of Manet and the Impressionists were consigned to the “Salon des Refusés.” Beauty within the academies, scandal without. Today these positions are reversed, and the academic institutions that serve as gatekeepers for the art world praise the conceptual, the alienating, and the abstract while disparaging craftsmanship as “merely” pretty and “merely” illustrative — and a sure sign of political quietism.
The degree is graduate school in a funhouse mirror.
In the programs that Fine surveys, students take no classes on technique, and most take no art history. One senior faculty member likens a course on drawing to learning Latin. Another scoffs at the “preciousness” of Northern European Renaissance painting. “I’m sure we could all make beautiful Monet paintings or Picasso paintings if we wanted to,” one student says brazenly, “but that’s not what we want to do.”
The M.F.A. programs identify beauty with commercialism and with naïve illustration devoid of ideas. Art that aims for beauty, Fine writes, echoing the assumptions of his interview subjects, creates a “merchandising aesthetic. … An emphasis on the beautiful suggests an absence of critical content.” Yet there is a contradiction here, as Fine acknowledges: If beauty is commercial, then why do elite collectors, in step with art-world conventions, clamor after “ugly” art?
The endless sniping about contemporary art’s alleged abandonment of beauty has obscured an older and more significant loss: the move away from realism outside of documentary or confessional genres. The work that emerges from today’s M.F.A.-trained artists, including a few of the students whom Fine profiles, is sometimes beautiful, even if that beauty tends to be colder, more abrasive, than what we think we find in canonical European oil paintings. But the de-skilling (and the devaluation of painting) occasioned by the academy’s antiformalism has edged to the margins the very mode of art responsible for holding up maligned and forgotten people — servants, haymakers, prostitutes, prisoners — to our most intimate regard. The ostensibly conservative mode of realism contains a thread of radicalism: the demand that we encounter in a work of art the particular depth of another person’s consciousness. All this, art schools dismiss as a shallow fixation on beautiful surfaces.
A concern with surfaces persists, however, in a different guise. The M.F.A. trains artists to talk about their work with slickness and flair, in conformity with the lexicon of the art world. The premise of M.F.A. education, Fine says, is “helping students not only to be artists, but also to look the part.” Making art is not enough; aspiring artists must be able to articulate and defend the political and conceptual interventions their work performs. Learning to “look the part” entails firm, sometimes punitive, lessons in self-presentation. This instruction takes place at the program’s central ritual: the critique.
At the critique, faculty members and students gather in a room to look at a student’s work, ask questions, and offer verdicts. The student is expected to describe her intentions, justify her work, and speak fluently about how it builds on current developments in the art world. One professor declares of a work: “This is a pathetic attempt at art.” Another instructor, judging an installation of objects related to the Roman Catholic Church, demands: “Why do you want to stick with an organized genocidal institution? Why don’t you get over it?” The student weeps and apologizes for her “unprofessional” response.
One of the glorious features of contemporary art is that any material — tangled museum ropes, used lipstick tubes, untreated lumber — can be made interesting with the aid of a canny framing. (One student brings in a basket of bread for participants in his critique; the program director hastens to explain that the bread is not part of the work.) The ability to position one’s efforts as protest or satire, experiment or dream, is more than glib posturing. What the ritual of critique tests, however, is command of a particular vocabulary, one that emphasizes transgression, resistance, and rupture. An irony is that this insistence on verbal virtuosity privileges certain educational and class backgrounds.
In today’s M.F.A. programs, Fine concludes, “learning to think takes priority over learning to make.” But do M.F.A. students learn to think well? Art schools require students to justify and explain their art in highly theoretical terms, but give them no adequate instruction in philosophy, literature, or any other discursive field that prizes subtle distinctions or analytical clarity. M.F.A. candidates are assigned books by Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and other prophets bellowing down from the cliffs of high theory. But the students seldom do more than skim the reading, Fine reports, so as to reserve the bulk of their time for work in the studio. Seminar discussions of these complicated theoretical texts — led, typically, by professional artists, not art historians, literary theorists, or philosophers — do little to explicate the ideas. Students are encouraged to invoke theory, Fine suggests, as a way of claiming authority. The actual texts often remain unread.
The problem, as I see it, isn’t that M.F.A. students are being educated in what is sometimes dismissively called “bad philosophy.” We can, and should, argue about the merits of the various theorists in the art-school canon, and about how much theory artists need in the first place. The problem is that this education in theory, supposedly central, is superficial: The thinkers are too often reduced to slogans or catchwords. (Scholars in the humanities are not immune to this kind of posturing, but judging from Fine’s account, it seems rarer there.) That we get artist statements quoted here that begin, “I question modernity, while constantly interrogating Cartesian duality …" — blind lumbering in the dark plains of philosophy — results not from student incompetence but from misplaced expectations.
M.F.A. students face a magnified version of what doctoral students in the many fields currently verging on job-market collapse will recognize as a familiar bargain. The student is asked to discard the values of the larger society and prove his loyalty to a subculture. He learns to speak, haltingly at first, a language of authority, redolent with Latinate abstractions. The dim professional prospects in the field are worried over, regretted. The advised solution is to double down, to win approval from the elders, to specialize and reposition until the work becomes bloodless trivia. The self-fashioning that the subculture requires for success inside the cloister opens a gash between the student and the world he has left behind; the glances he jealously casts outward seem to confirm a mutual disdain.
Learning to think takes priority over learning to make. But do M.F.A. students learn to think well?
All this, the student is asked to give. In return, he gets — what, exactly? A faint chance at a livelihood, receding beyond a belt of hills. If he is fortunate: the private satisfactions of learning, like diamonds clutched to the chest. “Many professors with their secure positions,” Fine writes, probably overstating the security of art-school faculty jobs, “attack market logics and encourage students to select practices that distance them from dealers and buyers.” Even students who wish to be more public-oriented must justify their ambitions in the stultifying argot of recycled theory. One artist hoping for an audience beyond the discipline’s confines admits that he is “appealing to a populist kind of positionality.”
The single most significant effect of the proliferation of M.F.A. programs, Fine surmises shrewdly, is as a benefit not to students but to their teachers. Art schools have created a job market for working artists, granting badly needed stability to practitioners. The M.F.A. is a place where the specialized tastes of the art world are promulgated and where ascendant artists claim time to experiment. But it is, above all, a patronage system.
Early in his book, Fine quotes one M.F.A. candidate who describes his artistic awakening with memorable crudeness. “Part of my own narrative,” the student says, “is me painting my shit on the walls, out of my diapers as a kid, and that carrying itself onward.” In a book crammed with sober recitations of artistic ambitions, that comment sounds a different chord. Infantile, yes. Ridiculous, yes. But unmistakably true. Beyond theory, beyond universities, beyond the ring of skeptical teachers surveying an installation with their arms crossed, a hardly conscious but undeniable need to leave one’s mark on the world.
Charlie Tyson is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard University.
Correction (12/14/2018, 3:15 p.m.): This article, drawing from the book under review, originally gave incorrect information about tuition and expenses at the Rhode Island School of Design. According to Art Times, $253,000 was the cost of a four-year undergraduate degree in 2014, not a two-year M.F.A. The text has been updated accordingly.
