Who Will Go to Art School

7/17/2019 Who Will Go to Art School

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Who will go to art school?

The question “Who will go to art school?” needs further unpacking. Firstly, there is the issue

of “who”, the future scenario imagined in ‘who will go to art school’, also raising questions

in relation to whowent

to art school, and who goes

to art school now. Art school: past,present and future tense. To whom do we refer when we talk about art students? How has

the prospective art student changed? How are they changing? How does an art education

both accommodate and challenge this new demographic? Secondly, there is the issue of

opportunity, the sense of who will go to art school overshadowed by the implication that

there will also be those who won’t and don’t, a suggestion of inequality and exclusion.

Perhaps we might ask how has the economic, political, social and cultural climate

impacted on arts education and learning at different historical moments? How have the

opportunities changed? How are they changing? How might they be actively changed still,

and by whom? What are the different factors that encourage or indeed prohibit

participation, for economic barriers and incentives speak to just one facet of the problem?

Thirdly, there is the issue of ‘art school’ itself. What do we mean when we say ‘art school’– do we refer to the few remaining autonomous arts schools, the various art ‘courses’

forming part of a broader portfolio of university education, or the proliferation of

alternative art schools? Indeed, the response to these various questions will depend on

individual perspective, even outlook.

The pessimist: Who will go to art school? The future indeed looks a little doom and gloomy.

The current political and economic climate is one in which the privileged benefit,

seemingly at the benefit of the less well off. The introduction of higher and higher fees for

higher education creates the conditions of exclusion and elitism, an increasingly

prohibitive situation in which the prospect of a lifetime of debt in exchange for three yearsof art education might seem less and less desirable. Education is presented as investment

for the fortunate few, those whose schooling will ensure a higher yield salary in years to

come. However, according to some recent reports, more than half of UK university leavers

are working in non-graduate jobs.1 Furthermore, engagement in an arts education has

been shown to have an inverse relation to future earnings; an arts graduate might well earn

less on graduation than their non-university schooled contemporaries. So, why go to art

school? Arts and culture in the UK would seem to have been systematically eroded

through the cuts and austerity measures of recent government. What incentive is there for

a prospective art student, when the opportunities and support for arts and culture seem

increasingly impoverished? How might the prospective art student be nurtured, when art isincreasingly excluded from the school curriculum? A pervasive neoliberal model of

education has made clients of students, focusing their attention towards the attainment of

grades rather than of education, the quest for the improvement of mark rather than

knowledge.

Even as early as 1972, Ivan Illich argued for a radical rethinking of education, criticizing a

system in which “the pupil is schooled to confuse teaching with learning, grade

advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to

say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value”.2

Illich goes on to argue how, “Health, learning, dignity, independence and creative

endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim

to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more



resources to the management and other agencies in question”.3 For Illich this

“institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization and

psychological impotence”.4 Against this context, how can the art school remain – indeed

how do the arts as a higher education subject survive the increasing instrumentalization,

bureaucratization and commodification within the education sector, the increasing

pressure of its various systems of measurement, reportage, reward or punishment: the REF(Research Excellence Framework), the proposed TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework),

the NSS (National Student Survey) … the list of acronyms proliferates. Moreover, how

does regional art education compete with the expansion of provision in the capital, or

even, how does the old art school compete with the proliferation of new alternatives? In

these terms, will there be an art school of the future?

The optimist: Who will go to art school? Art is one of the most fundamental expressions of

human capacity, creativity and questioning. There will always be artists, there will always

be art, and therefore there will always be a need for some form of art education. Art as

often exists in spite of , rather than because of. Even in the most politically, economically andsocially challenging contexts, art finds a way of prevailing, for it is often through modes of

creative and imaginative expression that the potential of resistance, of critique but also of

hope might be voiced. Art is a history of insurgents, risk-takers and advocates, of voices

spoken up and against an oppressive norm. In the late 1980s and 1990s the rise of the

alternative, artist-led scene in the UK emerged as a distinct rebuff to the Thatcherite claim

that ‘there is no alternative’. There is always an alternative. For the first time in a long

time, there is the possibility of a real alternative within the UK political landscape,

moreover, the shapings of an opposition that actively values the role and impact of

education, art and culture. Tides indeed can turn. Contemporary arts education has

changed from the old art school model, and there is both loss and gain. The elitism andeven misogyny of the old regime is hopefully a relic of the past. At NTU, for example, NSS

scores report 100% positively on the passion and enthusiasm of teaching staff; there is

commitment to innovative research-informed pedagogy; embedded professional practice

opportunities prepare students through the cultivation of both real-world subject specific

and transferable skills; the successful retention of fine art alumni in the city has created a

vibrant artist-led scene establishing a context for prospective students to see art, show art

and participate in the artistic ecology through intern experiences and social networking.

Graduates have not only left the art school become SME (small to medium size

enterprises) but have also initiated and now manage key artistic infrastructure within the

city. More broadly, in recent happiness surveys, artists are reported to be amongst the

highest scoring. Monetary measures and economics are not the only way of determining

success, for setting civic and social values. Perhaps, as a health and wellbeing agenda gains

pace, it is not inconceivable to imagine graduate success measured in reported happiness,

through engagement in meaningful work, as much as according to a statistical account of

paid graduate-level employability. In these terms, it could be argued that contemporary

society needs more art schools. Indeed, why would you not want to go to art school?

It is the cusp of a new academic year, and whilst I recognize the reality of the pessimist’s

model, I know that despair is no foundation upon which to enthuse a new generation of

artists. Admittedly, I am inspired by the tone of the opposition leader’s message – “let’s do

hope not despair”. Now is not the time for nostalgia, for bemoaning change; instead, let uslook to the future of the art school. But, let’s not confuse hope with blind faith or



delusion, the optimist’s “it will be alright”, the hope that “things will change”. The

problem with both the pessimist’s and optimist’s views is that both are relatively passive;

both look towards the current situation – the as is – as a given, the difference primarily

being one of perspective, “Is the glass half empty or half full?’” Between these two poles,

perhaps it is possible to conceive a middle way, closer to the meliorist belief that the world

can be made better through human effort. In his Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and

Civic Courage, Paulo Friere differentiates a form of active and activist hope, from “false

optimism and vain hope”.5 He laments the “immobilizing ideology of fatalism … which

insists that we can do nothing to change the march of social-historical and cultural reality

because that is how the world is”. 6 Against this neoliberal tendency – which conditions

the individual to passively adapt to a situation they have no hope of ever changing – he

offers a radical form of resistance: critical curiosity. He argues that, “one of the essential

tasks of progressive educational praxis is the promotion of a curiosity that is critical, bold

and adventurous.” 7 He describes such “Curiosity as restless questioning … the curiosity

that moves us and sets us patiently impatient before a world that we did not make, to add

to it something of our own making”.8

Art school actively cultivates critical curiosity, and now more than ever we need such an

education, its training in the curious capacity to ask ‘what if’ or imagine an ‘or’, to nurture

the possibility of thinking ‘otherwise’. At its best, art school offers a radical rite of passage

or even ‘de-schooling’, capable of overturning the passivity and fatalism often perpetuated

within contemporary neoliberal education. You only have to look to the artist-led scene in

Nottingham to recognize the relation between a fine art imagination and the capacity for

affecting change, for ‘making a difference’, for ‘making a scene’.9 So, as artists and

educators, how might we affect rather than bemoan change? Who will go to art school is

in part dependent upon our advocacy, our insistence on the value of the arts and of artseducation. Moreover, the future of the art school is dependent on the will of the future art

student. Who are they, how will they make and shape the future of our artistic landscape?

Investment in an arts education is not just about progressing one’s own practice, but an

investment in the cultural capital of our society. Alongside, “Who will go to art school?”

we might add, “Who is willing go to art school?” This is not a question, but rather a rally

cry.

Emma Cocker, 2015

Reader in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University

This short provocation was presented as part of the event “Who will go to Art School?’

(24 September, 2015, New Art Exchange, Nottingham) curated by Niki Russell and

Rebecca Ounstead, as part of the wider contextual events’ programme for New

Contemporaries, 2015. Other panelists were Anna Colin (Open School East), Paul

Goodwin (Black Artists and Modernism (BAM), and Emily Pope (School of the

Damned).

1 For example, by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. See

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-339830482

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1973, p.9.3 Illich, 1973, p.9.



4 Illich, 1973, p.9.5 Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage , Rowman &

Littlefield, 1998, p. 26.6 Friere, 1998, p. 27.7

Friere, 1998, p. 388 Friere, 1998, p. 38.9 See also Emma Cocker, ‘On Making, Making it and Making a Scene’, in New

Contemporaries exhibition publication, 2015.

http://www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/publications-and-editions/publications/bloomberg-

new-contemporaries-2015-catalogue

Who Will Go to Art School

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