On Art Schools

In training students for a career as creators, are art schools misleading aspiring artists and delaying their creative prime.

If you wander through Toronto’s Queen Street West, Montreal’s Plateau or Winnipeg’s Exchange district, you’ll notice an explosion of young galleries showcasing work by recent art school graduates. Each year, students sweep through programs at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Concordia University, Emily Carr College of Art, the Alberta College of Art and Design and many more, picking up Bachelor's degrees, then Master's degrees in the hopes of claiming the elusive status of "art star," or at least launching a respectable career. But have art schools given students the wrong idea?

Throughout history, artists have rarely been able to count on a steady career or income. Rather, an artist’s path is predicated upon talent, determination, patience, perseverance despite all odds and a desire to create – regardless of financial return. Occasionally, these factors result in a message so powerful that it needs little explanation – a quality that all great art possesses. Furthermore, it’s often the case that artists can’t explain why they do what they do. It’s a feeling. The famous conceptual artist Bruce Nauman said, “When I was in art school, I thought art was something I would learn how to do, and then I would just do it. At a certain point I realized that it wasn't going to work like that. Basically, I would have to start over every day and figure out what art was going to be.”

A Bachelor’s degree teaches students basic artistic skills, and a Master’s allows for further exploration and refinement of their ideas. But schools are institutions, influenced by historical precedent and subject to structures such as a need to provide a stable (tenured) environment for faculty and the decisions of advisory boards. Institutions remain beholden to student tuition and other funding streams that influence what and how they teach.

It seems to me that artists truly grow once they are released from an academic environment. And yet as a critic, I continually encounter young artists with more ambition and networking skills than talent. This makes me question whether art schools, as they are structured now, are relevant. Is their rationale at odds with the outcome for most graduates? It’s an issue worth exploring.

My own definition of art comes down to this: Art is the creative expression of a deeply personal feeling that it’s impossible to otherwise convey. Art has always been a very serious pursuit. That one person’s creative exploration can speak for humankind – as Picasso’s Guernica did, for instance, or reflect a new way of seeing, as with Duchamp’s urinal – is the miracle of art. Can such an effect be taught? Perhaps not.

It’s difficult to pit art institutions against the art world, since the latter continually redefines itself. What is clear is that artists need freedom to create, and the danger of an institutionalized system is that it can stand in opposition to this freedom. That’s not to say that schools are unaware of the situation. The biannual Leadership Symposium hosted by the European League of Institutes of the Arts is one event that works to flesh out ways for schools to jive with the art world’s constant flux; and people like Sara Diamond, president of OCAD, are working hard to provide students appropriate room for growth.

Nonetheless, it’s not clear to me that art schools are able to best prepare young artists for a world in which everything is art. Can institutions simultaneously provide skills and nurture independence? And is it more important for them to prepare artists to succeed in the market, or not? In short, after an artist has received basic technical skills, what else can an institution offer?

If an artist’s real growth begins after graduation, then this is when they most need support. Interestingly, art institutions evolved from the medieval apprenticeship system where students learned under a master craftsman, and some of today’s biggest artists (Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami) have set up huge studios employing scores of young artists, so perhaps the market is offering a solution. But the solution must not be market driven.

What is needed is more support for emerging artists in the form of discussion and awareness of the importance and earnestness of art. I think we should encourage not collectors, but patrons of the arts, people with an investment in the creative process, rather than just the market. Patrons for whom the value of art is far beyond the commercial, who seek art’s true meaning, not what a press release tells them.

Artists, critics, collectors and patrons should create communities where art is discussed. It seems clear that social networking opportunities could facilitate such discussions on a global level. Artists need to constantly question themselves: Where are they going, what are they doing? Whose ideas have merit, and why? Complacency is anathema to art. After all, Nauman also said: “Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true.”