Book: Art School Propositions for the 21^st Century edited by Steven Henry Madoff, MIT Press 2009

I have recently documented the small part I played in Clementine Deliss’ ‘Future Academies’ and so was thrilled to find this ongoing project mentioned in the chapter ‘States of Exception’ written by the editor, given as an example of, “a program that throws itself into the issue of the art school’s social ethos and beyond.”

Henry Madoff describes the urban myth of the art school through wonderful analogies and metaphors; the experimental laboratory, the closed creative sanctum yet with far fewer differences than expected to the military camp. The sealed bubble of freedom in the name of creativity is no longer possible (and perhaps never was) - the market is an inescapable conditioning factor from the way students are judged to the selection of those that teach them. Art school is ultimately an administrator of knowledge, “it is established not only to teach but to administer what is to be taught.” The curriculum itself is an exercise in control which too boils down to market control. The artist has always been a service provider, there is no greater example than the Bauhaus model. However, how does society today use the artist? Can will still claim that while the market place runs the art world, that the market place and the art school are still at odds? Ten years ago we had the YBA boom, not only would I have said that the market place and the art school were no longer at odds, but further still, they were in many instances working together, in cahoots, boosting one another higher up the ladder of fame and fortune.

Henry Madoff hints at a rather idealised view of the artistic service the artist of today can offer. The idea that the artist can reach into the public sphere from its unique viewing platform from which they view the world. They can point strategically into that world through the new social networks coming into play via technological advancements. The art school can become the school without walls, reconnecting with the world beyond, no longer a closed laboratory. I am somewhat sceptical about Henry Madoff’s hopeful vision of art students no longer conditioned by grading systems, semester timetables and documents. As market power over society increases, pressure to conform, to compromise must increase with it. Madoff says, “The benign factory of the art school is now in the midst of reformulating pressured hydraulically by the forces of a larger life-world.” With expansion, compromise must also follow.