joaoflux / digital / analog / culture

A while ago I attended the Symposium “Radical Pedagogics” in Antwerpen and Eindhoven which is part of a series of exhibitions, projects and events under the title “Academy”.

At the symposium the implications of the Bologna Agreement were taken as a starting point to discuss possibilities of higher art education. Having graduated more then ten years ago and having little desire to go back an educational institution of any kind, I was not fully conscious of what the Bologna agreement means for art education.

Through conversations and through reading descriptions of courses on university’s web sites such as “Universität der Künste Berlin” I had noticed over the past years that an ever growing number of courses is offered in the area of art, media, communication and design which are often very compact and sometimes charged for. They seem like job training programs for cultural managers, marketing experts and such rather than enabling students to engage in the free practice that I associate with artistic studies or - to use a more fashionable term - knowledge production. I also have the impression that many of those courses are a principle part of the new business model that art academies have to create for themselves in order to survive.

I have of course also heard that art schools started to convert their courses into master programs. More recently I heard that there are discussions about PHD programs in art. The former seems acceptable because it probably improves student’s chances to find a job, because a masters degree does not seem as sinister to potential employers outside the cultural sphere as a diploma of which the reputation largely depends on the school’s reputation (a reputation which may only exist inside the cultural sphere in a stricter sense).

At the Symposium Dieter Lesage questioned the evaluation of artistic works in order to provide academic titles in compliance with university practice, in which written papers play a crucial role. I would go further and claim that the very idea of a PHD in art is absurd and their introduction in art education is highly damaging for art education and will lead to a situation where much of what can happen inside art schools today will be driven out of there. People who seek that kind of practice and who are not willing or capable of achieving titles will end in even more precarious situations than they do already, because not possessing a title when titles are the standard will of make them look more worthless than someone with conventional art school diplomas looks to potential employers today already.

Academic titles are a way to certify that a person has obtained certain skills. Titles are a way to make it easier for a potential employer to trust a person in a defined area. Someone who wants to employ an engineer can have confidence in the fact that a person who has obtained a degree in engineering will have a sufficient level of practical knowledge for the job.

A PHD communicates that a the holder of the degree has experience in scientific research within a specified area (to a lesser extend it may implicitly also communicate that the holder is likely to have deficits in other areas). A PHD makes as much sense in art history as it makes sense in history or physics. In art, however, I can not see what a PHD is good for. The fact that an artist is capable of writing a paper on his own work seems to have little to do with the quality of his artistic work. It is also impossible to evaluate a piece of art itself as a basis for the decision wether an artist deserves a PHD or not. Even if it was possible to evaluate art works in such a way, one would need to look at a whole series of works in order to be able to predict if an artist will be capable to produce work of similar quality in the future (which is what a title is supposed to communicate).

Furthermore no one in his right mind can believe that galleries or institutions would base their decision to work with an artist on a title obtained at an academy or university. Their very game is to find the unlikely success, the quality that no one else has discovered.

Then again, maybe, while everyone else goes precarious it is time for the arts to go professional: Replace galleries with companies that employ artists.

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