Verbatim

ART SUBJECTS: MAKING ARTISTS IN THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, by Howard Singerman (University of California Press)

Although he holds a master’s of fine arts in sculpture, Mr. Singerman cannot carve, cast, weld, or model in clay. An assistant professor of art history at the University of Virginia, he writes that universities teach students not to master a set of skills, but to create self-conscious statements of their position in the history of art. Their audience is other university-trained artists, he says, and their work is always “ideological art.”

Q. You say your book is not meant to decry the decline of art and artists in the university. But isn’t that, in effect, what you’re doing? A. The knowledge university-trained artists bring with them is very interesting. I wouldn’t use the word “limited,” but I would use the word “specific.” As T.J. Clark famously put it, there’s a difference between a public and an audience. I think classical artists assumed that there was a transparent good that anyone with an eye could see. So the audience wasn’t really a question for them.

Q. Would Abstract Expressionism have happened without university art training? A. Yes, but it would not have been the movement it was if not for the economic and cultural field that the university provided for that work. Where the universities make their difference is in the mid-to-late 1950s, when the second generation comes, out of places like Rutgers and the University of Iowa.

Q. What should M.F.A. programs do differently? A. Every M.F.A. student should be required to read [Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s] The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Art school is the lived experience of having all the myths you came in with about art systematically destroyed. I think if the conditions of this training are foregrounded, it doesn’t end the cruelty but exposes its conditions.

Q. What’s going to be the next big art movement? A. Several critics are saying, “Let’s throw theory away and go back to making beautiful art.” I’m not sure this is a good idea, however seductive it may be. It’s more theoretical, university-based practice.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Page: A20