Professional Documents
Culture Documents
t used to be that the teaching of art was academic and proud of it. Rooted
in the observation of nature and the imitation of previous art, the long
apprenticeship of a would-be painter or sculptor was primarily an acquisition
o skills put under specific cultural constraints. Life-drawing and its underlying dis-
course, anatomy, provided the basic skill ennobled with humanistic knowledge. Never,
though, was art equated with skill. What deserved admiration in the accomplished
artist was talent, not craftsmanship. Skill could be acquired, talent could not, since
talent was thought of as a gift of nature - a gift, however, which could neither
develop nor express itself outside the rules, conventions, and codes provided by the
tradition. Tradition set the standards against which the production of art students
was measured. Academic teaching had great ambitions as regards the maintenance
of tradition and the passing on of quality standards; it had little vanity as regards
its ability to "turn out" individual artists. All it could hope to do was nurture and
discipline its students' gifts within the limits of nature's generosity, and to grant even
the most ungifted students a technical know-how capable of securing them a recog-
nised, if humble, place in society and a plausible, if modest, source of income.
Between the work of the artisan and that of the genius the Academy recognised a
leap in quality, but also the cultural continuity of one and the same trade in which
everybody held his (or her) rank.
From Stephen Foster and Nicholas deVille (eds.), The Artist and the Academy: Issues in Fine Art Education
and The Wider Cultural Context (Southampton, UK: John Hansard Gallery, 1994), pp. 23-40. Reproduced
with permission of Stephen Foster. This paper was originally presented at a conference, "The Artist and
the Academy: European Perspectives on Today's Fine Art Education," held at Chilworth Manor, Univer-
sity of Southampton, UK, on December 9 and 10, 1993.
l students who haven't had the time to construct an artistic culture of any kind are
being tutored in the deconstructive suspicion proper to our time. I have seen one art
school (not that long ago) where the first year course (what used to be the foundation
course) had been transformed into a seminar in which the point was to "deconstruct"
anything entering the classroom. One week it was an advertisement, another week it
was the policy of this or that public art institution, and yet another week it was a
student's work - a work done at home, that is, as if no assignment had been given to
her beside the unspoken injunction to produce material to be deconstructed in the
classroom. The ensuing paralysis was not just sad, it was revolting.
Of course, as I warned you at the beginning of my talk, I have simplified matters,
and I have turned the world of present-day art schools into a caricature, just as I did
with the old Academy and with the somewhat younger Bauhaus model. In the
everyday reality of art schools things are a lot more complex, more subtle, more
ambiguous. But since all of us, here, are gathered around the problematic and
general issues of "perspectives in fine art education", I hope you understand that it is
not on the level of our everyday endeavours that I have situated my remarks but on
that of the historical ideological paradigms that we inherit from our institutions or
with which, willy-nilly, we have to work. It is thus my contention, which I really