What is Wrong with Fine Arts Education?
A Tale of Mediocrity
Jan Havicksz Steen, A Riotous Schoolroom with a Snoozing Schoolmaster, 1672. Oil on oak panel, late Dutch Golden Age. Image source: wikiart.org, public domain
Camille Paglia’s criticism of the current state of liberal arts education is rooted in her belief that continuity and structure are necessary to provide students with a cohesive picture of the humanities. She argues that there has been a fragmentation in the way knowledge is presented to students, resulting in a lack of sophisticated thinking and a sophomoric understanding of the bigger historical picture. Similarly, within fine arts education at the university level, there has been a fragmentation in how technical knowledge is taught, and how such knowledge is discussed in critique.
A granular analysis of issues within Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department, testimony and writing from fine arts students and faculty across the country, and a review of art school curricula and websites reveals that Pratt is a microcosm of a multifaceted national problem with university fine arts education. We threw away the core fine arts curriculum, got rid of rigor, and distanced ourselves from western values in the fine arts while replacing them with nothing. It is true that education is a personal enterprise which requires students to take personal responsibility for their own learning. However, universities are failing to keep up their end of the bargain. They are not providing a comprehensive fine arts education. This leaves students with incomplete and underdeveloped skills. Many fine arts graduates are unable to create drawings and paintings which appear the way they want them to appear because they do not know how. These failures are the norm, not the exception.
There was a stark contrast between the quality of education during the first year of Pratt, known as Foundations, and following years of study in their Fine Arts Department. Foundation year is governed by its own department and sends students to a variety of majors upon completing their first year. The presence of similar Foundations departments is common at art schools. The quality and intensity of instruction was high. Students developed skills in the areas of observational drawing and color theory. Critiques could be brutally honest and bruise egos. Students were expected to rework and improve their assignments. Instructors could be intense and passionate. This was the educational excellence I and many others sought as Fine Arts majors.
Prior to my time at Pratt I was a visual arts student at a highly competitive application-only magnet high school called the George Washington Carver Center for Arts & Technology in Towson, MD. The rigorous program, having been rated one of the best in the world, included an intensive drawing and painting curriculum with an emphasis on drawing from observation, especially the human figure. There was a strong critique culture which focused on both addressing the technical problems in student’s work and guiding students to create engaging compositions. Foundation year at Pratt was like a fifth year of Carver. Upon entry into Sophomore year at Pratt, the quality of instruction changed. The workload was significantly less intense. There was significantly less feedback from faculty. Most noticeably, there was little to no overarching system of values and standards.
Universities, especially art schools, have massive incentives to retain every student they can. The enormous administrative class which has exploded in size over the last several decades has moved from facilitating education as its primary function, to preserving its own existence. This jobs program for busy bodies needs to be funded. The average annual cost of art school in 2021 was $60,000 a year. This is a huge market failure which both the private and public sectors are responsible for causing. When education stops being a public good and becomes a service, when students are no longer pupils, but customers, we cater to the laziest among them. Pressure to not fail students is real. The home that the academy once gave to professional art teachers now shuffles them between schools as the adjunctification crisis worsens. We have cheapened cultural education by making it obscenely expensive.
Echoing Sir Edmund Burke’s suspicion of a free market that infiltrates civil society, Sir Roger Scruton offers this view in his 2010 book The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope:
"The university is a place where knowledge is pursued for its own sake, and where the young are initiated into the intellectual and cultural inheritance of their society. It is not a place where the customer is always right, or where the aim is to maximize profit. It is a place where the professor is always right, and where the aim is to maximize understanding. In this respect, the university is like the medieval monastery, which was also a place of learning, and which also had its own internal hierarchy, its own rules, and its own way of life."
We Need a Core Curriculum in the Fine Arts
The quality of education within the fine arts is inferior to the design, architecture, and animation education being provided on the same campuses. Faculty within these more challenging disciplines are bound to a unified system of standards and expected learning outcomes. Their students often lament about the long hours spent in the studio, lack of sleep, and critiques which drive some students to tears. Once or twice a year in Pratt’s Architecture Department a student’s model would be smashed to pieces as part of the critique process. Conversely, within the fine arts each professor has the liberty to teach whatever they want however they want, or not to teach at all. A great professor here or there may emphasize certain skills for a semester, but those skills are not presented in a cohesive context. As a supporter of academic freedom, I recognize when that freedom has gone too far.
Mark D. Gottsegen, a distinguished figure in art materials research and former Professor of Painting, Drawing, & Materials at the University of North Carolina Greensboro puts it well in his essay The Decline of the Visual Education of Artists and the Remedy published by the Art Renewal Center:
“Today, a painting class may likely consist of the instructor tossing out a few ideas for the students to consider, or validating an idea the student proposes. This is followed by a few days or weeks of painting, with or without instruction in class or ‘independently….’”
A common sight across university fine arts departments is faculty walking around the classroom and looking at in-progress student work without providing much in the way of instruction. There is not much teaching going on. This laissez-faire attitude in the classroom is called the “open studio” or “working independently.” This style of teaching, which usually starts during the Sophomore year, deprives many students of the structure they need. Students are permitted to make whatever they want instead of continuing to develop their observational drawing, painting, or sculpture skills. The most ambitious and industrious students who would succeed in any environment naturally progress faster than others. However, most students require the level of rigor which was present at the traditional academies to develop the skills they came to art school to learn.
This supposedly progressive system of non-teaching creates a gross inequality between students who need robust instruction and those who are more naturally gifted. Education requires structured routines of practice and expectations in order to build skills. Skills are built in a progressive sequence. In the arts, foundational technical skills are necessary prerequisites for artists to compose visual stories. One cannot illustrate if one cannot draw. Imagine if the social or physical sciences gave students one year of instruction in scientific methodology and writing and then let them do anything they wanted. Some students may excel, but most would suffer the deprivation of not having been taught. They would lack the necessary epistemological tool belt to do science and flounder.
Matthew Napoli, Graduate Teaching Fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said about his time as a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in a recent podcast:
“I remember one student in particular, a pretty skilled painter. We talked twice towards the very end of our education there [MICA] and he’s kind of lamenting to me…. he wished there was ‘more brush to canvas instruction….’ it seems like that would be the very first thing that you would get in art school, is a pretty rigid and steady technical materials and process education that you can stand on and then experiment from, but I think a lot of us were granted the levity to just start experimenting right out of the gate.”
Similarly, Laurie Fendrich, American painter and Professor Emerita of Fine Arts & Art History at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY shares in her like minded 2016 essay How Critical Thinking Sabotages Painting published by the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“I’ve had a depressing number of students in advanced painting classes tell me that when they look back at their beginning classes suffused in thinking critically about the practice of painting itself, they feel cheated because no one required them to learn anything fundamental about the craft itself. They were asked from the get-go — to use the language of art-school catalogs — to ask bold questions, conduct rigorous social and political investigations, and engage in playful creativity.”
Indeed, a senior Pratt Painting faculty member shared with me her sorrow: “Our students do not know how to draw!”
Returning to Gottsegen’s aforementioned essay, he asks “Is it better to do a few things very well or many things only fairly well?” We encourage students to think conceptually and politically so early on, as well as expose them to a dash of “this” style and “that” movement, rendering incomplete basic skills that are much harder to learn to do well. It is not being argued that conceptual art or abstract expressionism are not difficult to master, but learning to draw, paint, and sculpt illusionistic art is more difficult to learn how to do at a professional level. If we are going to teach students to create representational drawings of human figures, objects, and environments as their most basic foundation, those skills must be developed in their fullness for nearly their entire time as students.
Critique
During my Sophomore year another student invited me to the studio classroom where he was working on a hard edge abstract painting. I began to critique his work in the fashion I had been taught at Carver Center. We discussed his goals for the painting, how the painting met those goals, and how it fell short. I told him what parts of the painting looked attractive and what parts looked unattractive. Ultimately, it was a critique based in honesty, problem solving, and a desire to improve the work.
A nearby professor overheard the critique and interjected. He asked if I was a faculty member and commented on how “...no one wants to talk about form or improving the work these days.” I was delighted to meet this professor and later took his class for two sections. He gave excellent critiques, taught materials, how to properly handle the brush, mix paint, and brought art history and art criticism to the classroom in a manner which was extremely applicable to student’s work. Unfortunately, this was a rare experience.
Baltimore artist Julia Gould, who earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting with a minor in Printmaking from MICA, shares her opinions and experiences:
“Too much variability in critique quality from class to class and professor to professor was the norm. There was too much freedom and allowance for professors to govern the class how they wanted to.”
“My [ceramics] professor had a rule, no ‘fixing….’ Critiques were focused on making thoughtful observations and drawing connections to traditions your work is in discussion with. The medium is hard to master in an intro class, so naturally there will be many technical issues in the work. I remember being asked to stop when mentioning a technical solution that would have solved an issue, which the artist themself mentioned about the work. I feel like there should be room to provide solutions to a finished piece, even if it could only be applied to the next project….‘Wrong and Right’ are terminologies that I found people avoided.”
Fine Arts students at Pratt hungered for high quality critiques and would sometimes organize them outside of class. A series of student lead critiques, which largely did not focus on the formal qualities of the work being critiqued, nevertheless spoke to the passion in students for a communal art pedagogy. A good critique culture is a learned socio-pedagogical process which mirrors the system of debate, discussion, and argument which brings us closer to moral and scientific truths. In other words, the artist is pointed in a better direction through the power of speech.
It is clear to this author that universities are both abdicating their responsibility to provide high quality critiques to fine arts students and failing to teach students how to critique in a manner which improves their work. This problem is another consequence of the absence of a core curriculum within the fine arts. Without an undergirding system of values and standards to govern critique we fall into mind numbing hours of merely analyzing the work in a manner which accomplishes nothing. In other words, the empty and tired bromide, “art is subjective.” A common student response to the pointing out of obvious errors in their work, “I like it that way,” is considered a valid defense of technical ignorance. Therefore, there are no consequences for the technical or conceptual underdevelopment of student work.
Not instructing students in how to conduct a critique can make for silent critiques. Critiquing poorly executed work is uncomfortable. Maleducated students teeter anxiously on the edge of wanting to speak but not knowing what to say. This void of silence is a common complaint from students studying the fine arts. Students from the Rhode Island College of Art & Design (RISD) discuss the phenomenon in the 2016 documentary The Room of Silence. They specifically focus on how critique shuts down when student work focuses on sensitive issues like race and gender, when honest critique is needed most.
Two RISD students share their frustrations with the impact current sensitivities have had on learning:
“I guess they don’t know what to say…if I try to critique this am I gonna come off as racist or – or not a good person or whatever reason that they choose to stay silent? If no one wants to say anything, how are we gonna get any feedback?”
“I had a friend who was asking, ‘Malaika, I just feel like if I were to try and…critique your message when you make art about race I would just feel like this white person coming in…trying to white wash your art….’ I was like no, no I need you to say something about this because how am I supposed to learn? I could be making the shittiest work about race and no one would tell me because…it's a touchy subject…. I’m here to learn.”
However, RISD students who appeared in The Room of Silence seemed to share a common view best encapsulated by two of the other students:
“We’re lacking a critical framework where these problematic pieces of work are parsed out and picked apart and analyzed in a group setting, the group setting we are paying for…. I don’t think responsible analysis, and criticism, and discussion of issues of identity and so forth should be something that you can opt out of.”
“...how are you [RISD] sending out the best artists and designers without teaching them how to be – responsible, and breaking down the crit environment and critiquing crit…there’s this specific language that every RISD student has to talk about a painting, but not about a piece that addresses something beyond formal aspects. Like, talking about privilege when the person who made this piece has never even realized that they are from a place of privilege.”
It is heartening to hear that a RISD student feels she has been given the appropriate language to discuss the formal qualities of student work in critique. It is disheartening, however, to hear so many students arguing for a classroom in which education is “responsible” when it enforces the dictates of the critical framework in every possible situation.
The quest to “decolonize the curriculum” aims to finish the project of deconstruction the post-modernists started: the problematization and eventual elimination of western values from fine arts education through the “pedagogical turn” away from the transmission of knowledge and toward a shallow prefab social activism. The classroom is seen as a space of power and privilege which needs to be deconstructed and transformed by the only people who know how, the oppressed.
The decay of critique has also been exacerbated by the prudishness students have to violations of current social taboos, as well as a sensitivity some students carry with having their work criticized at all. A number of faculty and staff from multiple departments at Pratt shared with me their experiences with the investigative bureaucracy. A student was offended, almost always by something frivolous, and a weeks-long investigation ensued, sometimes accompanied by public smears on social media. This prompted future self-censorship. Merely knowing that others had these experiences encouraged some faculty to keep their mouths shut out of fear. For certain faculty, this severely interfered with teaching.
“…Pratt Institute supports and upholds freedom of speech and other forms of expression…in the context of law…” in their Community Standards & Student Policies. These concerns about free speech at Pratt are not about the Institute’s formal policies, but a classroom culture within the Fine Arts Department which does not value free speech as a tool to improve student work and an administration which chills speech through superfluous investigations which may not result in formal discipline for members of the Institute, but intimidate them into silence.
I complained about this matter to administrators in a manner which protected the anonymity of those who shared their stories with me. My concerns were thoroughly dismissed because no one had ever leveled similar complaints. The existing “spiral of silence” around these sensitive issues is compounded by the need for universities to comply with laws like FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act). These factors make it especially difficult for faculty to make a case to their superiors, colleagues, and the public that there is a toxic culture of reporting and investigating. Most do not contact the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) because they do not know it exists, or because it is too difficult to be the lone person within an institution to challenge a massive agenda-driven bureaucracy.
This phenomenon is not unique to Pratt. This national issue has been thoroughly discussed by the moral psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the psychologist & lawyer Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE. Both in the media and in their book The Coddling of the American Mind they make the case for why we have free speech, why it is necessary for a university to function, and why faculty currently feel silenced. Free speech is a problem solving mechanism which allows us to come closer to moral, factual, and aesthetic truths. The same logic can be applied to fields outside history, the humanities, and the various sciences. These fields are the countless applied disciplines that focus on making and inventing things. What would happen to carpentry or engineering if teachers in those fields were unable or unwilling to criticize inaccuracies and failures in the work of their students? Look to fine arts education for the answer.
We are teaching artists to be “theorists.” We shouldn’t.
The legacy of deconstruction is confusing and alienating to the public, further disconnecting lay people from the fine arts, just as it has disconnected artists themselves from their craft. The idea that fine art should speak for itself is a view held by drawers, painters, and sculptors; not the theorists and critics tasked with teaching art students the humanities. Religious, mythological, and historical themes once celebrated in the salons are degraded as “white,” “male,” and “phallogocentric.” Fine arts students are being trained to think, speak, and write about their work in terms of continental philosophy, recent history, and postmodern writing style. Multiculturalism, which should be associated with the authentic study of other cultures, is often a reference to further study of the theoretical humanities.
At Pratt, students must take seven writing classes within the Fine Arts Department along with their standard liberal arts and art history requirements. One of these courses focuses on the business of art. In the other six courses students are given thick packets of readings, often with a political bent, and examine the social-political circumstances around art. Conceptual art, the theoretical humanities, Neo-Marxism, the need to write “artist statements,” and long conversations about the current hot jargon were areas of intense focus.
MICA has a requirement that students take one 3-credit course in “Theory” outside other liberal arts requirements. A look at MICA’s Humanities course offerings reveals the all too common intrusion of identity politics into the arts of reading and writing, accompanied by the prejudicial baggage and epistemological brokenness endemic to these pseudo-disciplines.
The excessive emphasis on writing for fine arts majors is perhaps the most extreme at Parsons School of Design within The New School in New York, NY. Their Fine Arts curriculum is littered with the language of Theory and fashionable interdisciplinary classes which combine art making and writing. Drawing foundations are considered fundamental for Fine Arts majors at the New School, yet not properly reinforced during their sophomore year.
The only thing worse than teaching fine arts students to be writers is teaching them to be bad writers. Teaching art students to write with Derrida like obscurantism provides them with an easy to deploy excuse for ignorance. Instead, we should teach them to master the wordless language of visual storytelling. Buzzwords like “positionality” and “fetishism” ought to be replaced with a robust knowledge of how to use the art elements & principles to create compositions people can relate to.
Is all hope lost?
No, of course not. Catastrophic rhetoric about how the arts are dying and how the figure is dead is vastly overblown. The recent Armory Show in Manhattan at the Javits Center which ran from Sept 8th-10th, 2023 was a joyful experience. The figure is alive and well in the fine arts today, having been beautifully rendered by countless artists who presented at the show. Further, the non-objective drawings and paintings were aesthetically engaging and ambitious. Artists who want to draw, paint, and sculpt with excellence will do so because they are inspired to, regardless of what is happening in the art schools.
A visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art is revealing. The galleries within the museum showing figurative painting, landscapes, and still life are often filled to the brim with museum patrons. The Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, known as a hub for contemporary art, features many galleries showing living figurative artists. In fact, Americans prefer representational art. Artsy recently released its Art Industry Trends 2023 report which found figurative and landscape paintings to be responsible for 57% of gallery sales.
According to the artist collective BFA MFA PhD only 16% of working studio artists have an arts-related bachelor's degree. The number of ateliers, which are less expensive traditional certificate granting art schools, has skyrocketed from 15 in 2002 to over 80 today. The Art Students League in New York City is another organization which provides young artists affordable technical arts training. These organizations are very much like trade schools and give artists the skills they need to make technically ambitious work. Many organizations exist for the preservation and expansion of illusionistic art. Organizations like The Society of Figurative Artists, Oil Painters of America, The Art Renewal Center, the Academic Artists Association, and The International Guild of Realism, among many others, have grown in influence and hold regular events, exhibitions, and conferences.
For those who wish to attend degree granting institutions the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, PA and Laguna College of Art & Design (LCAD) in Laguna Beach, CA both offer a BFA & MFA. The New York Academy of Art and the New York Studio School in NYC offer MFAs. These programs emphasize a much stronger classical foundation for students. Unlike an atelier, they also provide a liberal arts education as well as a space for learning newer forms like abstract painting & sculpture. LCAD and PAFA also offer some of the only comprehensive undergraduate figurative sculpture programs at accredited universities in the country.
We require a restoration of western values in fine arts education at the university level. It is incumbent upon young people who feel passionate about the arts to make a difference. Unfortunately, I feel compelled to make my case outside the art schools. A central reason is the political purity tests, both formal and informal, which permeate hiring and promotion processes at many universities, especially art schools. Values like cultural diffusion, the inclusion of diverse ideas & beliefs, equality of procedure, and the teaching of our cultural inheritance are antithetical to the rigid DEI industrial complex which demands ideological submission and obedience from those under its thumb, often in the form of mandatory loyalty oaths.
The foundational skills our students need are not a form of colonialism, but the necessary technical ingredients to make great artists equipped with the skills required to create masterpieces. Critique is a precious instrument which must be protected from degradation. It is a valuable process which brings us closer to technical and aesthetic truths. We want our students to learn how to create art which gives us a sense of place and meaning in the universe, a void which politics has sadly filled. Our students deserve the education they are paying for, and our culture deserves fine arts graduates who can make art which speaks to the human condition.