+ WRITING

The following art school art talk stars an impressive cast of competent professionals such as Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Colin Lang, Robert Linsley, Mira Schor, and Howard Singerman.

The professionals discuss the professionalization of the art-field in addition to non-traditional teaching methods, the history of art’s academy, and the further development of ‘models for the future of art school.’

The two hour thirteen minute and fourty-eight second performance is a wonderful tool for discussing the art production of institutions and their abilities to define the philosophical grounds in which art develops its social functions. The performance does [through attempting to] do much more than this, but you’ll have to listen to name the what and how. Listen and download from Cabinet magazine’s site.

Additionally, this discussion is great when coupled with considerations of the amateur in relation to the professional, in After the Amature, by Ed Halter, on Rhizome.Org.

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The Art School that I attended [2000-2004] placed the thinking/writing of Dave Hickey squarely at the center of its belief-framework because [I think] it appeals to a pragmatic need for cynicism and a totalizing gaze when considering the ‘what the fuck is going on?’ situation.

[I'm going to make a brief aside here as I point out that this defense-strategy was one of the only tools that my education gave me for 'dealing' with the real world of art. I'd love to hear additional strategies if they exist.]

Hickey has that personable wise-man from the woods way about him that when regarding the common hierarchies of social-art-relations is terribly pleasant [similar to your favorite uncle, whom tortures you with tickling]. And as much as I don’t want to like his position in the history of art thought, he does bring up a lovely lineage of troublesome support-system relationships that pervade the field of art practice [troublesome mostly from the artists' perspective].

It’s clear that practicing art in an idealistic and ‘pure’ fashion is becoming more difficult and complicated by the second. I personally have no idea what the overproduction of art students is going to do with the art world, nor do I have any idea of whether or not art is sustainable enough to survive within the hyper-development of our attention economy. I suppose we’ll look to our wizards [like Mr. Hickey] to show us the way as we continue to try and calm our neurosis and keep walking down the eerie path of solitude.

Below are four embedded video’s of Dave Hickey talking. If they don’t work on this site, please follow this link.

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[Curious minds will investigate ☝.]

I hate to share the end with you first, but it’s too poetically pragmatic to not:
“The fact that such strategies devolved inexorably into their own sort of market-friendly style just proves a point. On both sides, “traditional” and “conceptual,” the perceived ill of the other is actually just the displaced face of the market itself, with its tendency to transmogrify and vulgarize everything. Which should provide a lesson for critics about the kind of promises they make for art: There are no formal or esthetic solutions to the political and economic dilemmas that art faces — only political and economic solutions. Consequently, the only critical temperament that makes any real sense is an eclectic one that doesn’t build up one or the other side into the answer for problems that they both share.”
Please read the entire article, by Ben Davis, here. It’s highly recommended.

Here-in lies the implicit beauty of conceptualism and its relation to “the marketplace”: All the best conceptual artists are advertisers.

For some reason, artists like to imagine themselves as a band of outsiders [or just a single outsider], huddled next to the campfire of art history, letting it burn all sorts of psychedelic images into their behavioral corneas while they wait for a message from their gods to show them the way. The problem is that they don’t realize the gods have a relationship with “the market,” and that the art history flame has always burned a little brighter with the help of currency.

Thus, I’ve always been a firm believer in the position that any position, including that which is in direct opposition of another position, is still just that “other” position itself. Or, a little differently: the thing in which we hate is hate itself, embodied by the hater, being the hated.

The fact that we still have this conversation of The Conceptualist Vs. The Traditionalist is most likely due to the repetition of collective discomfort during times of shifting abstractions [otherwise known as The Crisis].

Unfortunately [because I'm an advocate], if I were to be critical of the current state of conceptual thought and practice, I might draw parallels such as “conceptual art is a blanket behavior of representational self-reflection, which is unfortunately, at this moment, more superficial than a landscape or a still-life.”

[Post prompted /in part/ by a conversation with Bradley Wester.]
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The Art School As Fashionable Education Culture theme that I touched upon on in the previous entry of +ART SCHOOL is beginning to surface once again in the work of artist collective Bruce High Quality Foundation’s installation/performance-series called Bruce High Quality Foundation University.
Read more about the free and unaccredited University in this NY Times article by Roberta Smith.

Listen to the Bruce High Quality Foundation discuss their previous work, Isle of the Dead, below.

[Additional information on the unforeseen catastrophe that is relational aesthetics, coming soon.]

Required Reading: As stated before, elements of the codification of various professional art behaviors are listed in Paper Monument’s I like your work: art and etiquette, pictured below. [Highly Recommended]

Happy Educating!
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There is nothing* that had more impact on my perspectives on making/loving/organizing/keeping art than art school. While involved in its processing I worked rather desperately against it, testing its boundaries and opportunities as only a student can. Now, outside of it, I can’t help but continue to look back at it and consider its role as a behavioral script which proposes an expressiveness akin to free-jazz, where the “spontaneous” and “improvisational” gestures of the mind and its tools are simply the paradoxical tension of a highly specific system and an idea.

Because I believe that collective sharing of such ideas will soon become quite fashionable, all while the intentional augmentation of the young-artist becomes that much more transparent, we’ll soon move towards collectively understanding the limits of art education [primarily as a remote economy] and its supposed economic expansion of the creative mind. With such collective understanding might come a renaissance of creative concern for populist well-being, or conversely, a hyper-ironic rebirth of the super-specialized-art-school-artist. The questionability, of outcomes alone, is enough to pursue an ongoing post [+ art school] in order to participate in a developing market of art values.

References:
Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) [A more thorough than thou version of said topic.]
I like your work: art and etiquette [A pamphlet of codified art professionalism, or an attempt thereof.]

*nothing is not true. It’s safe to say that the compilation of my most recollected memories within my personal history is just as responsible for my art behavior, if not more, than art school.

[posts prompted by multiple conversations with Bradley Wester]