If you’re a recent MFA or PhD you’re not an artist nor a curator.

–“They are like high priests murmuring to each other”

\Camille Paglia

A recent PhD graduate aiming at a curatorial career published her book  “What is our Role?: Artists in Academia and the Post-Knowledge Economy,ARC ArtistBooks (Canada).

The speaker, reflecting on what she learned on her own journey through academia, said that artists today need a Ph.D. to attain the high level of accomplishment that only advanced academic studies deliver. The symposium illustrated this with work by four post-graduate students, all showing strong, interesting, even fascinating art when they started their doctorate. The work got weaker as they progressed through the program; by graduation day their art looked like postmodern clones, the ones that make us roll our eyes in despair. The best way to make this point is finding the stuff that’s overtly bad and shining a massive light on it — data-driven observation.

It looked as if these students had been homogenized, the passion squeezed out of them, they learned to get with the program. Postmodern tries to be difficult, shocking the way purposefully boring art would be shocking; ideally it is work no one would know was art unless they were told. Unfortunately, according to Bell Laboratory’s  Claude Shannon, information decays without definition.

Robb Storr, MOMA curator and now Dean of Yale Fine Art, said that during the 1960s art moved from the Cedar Tavern to the Seminar Room. Art went academic, a problematic move not obvious at the time, rejecting sensory modalities in favor of words. After graduation these students put their dissertation into practice, leading to the complaints we read of the deplorable state of contemporary art.

Back in 2008 the banking community crashed the global economy with sub prime loans. If  bankers and accountants can go off the rail, then certainly artists are at risk of wearing the emperor’s new clothes. History bears witness to these temporary cultural delusions, from the Dutch Tulip craze to real estate and stock market bubbles.

Which suggests that if it’s 2019 and you’re an MFA or PhD graduate, you’re neither artist nor curator but likely an esoteric priest in an academic cult as far removed from art as homeopathy is from real medicine.

The more we have scientific thinking about art through history, the more we see art consists of an effort. The epistemology says art is vision and excellence in execution, think of the art of cuisine, the art of conversation, the art of medicine.

And because our thoughts differ from the subtle nonverbal languages of the unconscious, it takes an effort to connect with the liminal or subliminal. But these modalities co-exist, the non-verbal influences the verbal and vice versa; together they form our personality and character. We know of body language and dance; aural language and music; visual language, worth 999 words with inflation. The continually announced death of painting is a delusion; painting predates writing. It would be like announcing the death of speech or text, though it’s true visual art is harder than both, witness how few visual artists there were till recently, when tan academic diploma made you an artist.

At our newly minted PhD’s lecture’s end, I raised a question; the student’s work ignored aesthetics, yet Nobel prize winning physicist Paul Dirac is quoted saying “if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress”. The doctor of philosophy frowned, came down like a ton of bricks at hearing the word “beauty” used in a conversation about art. Did I know nothing of current theory? I was spooked by her angry voice, perhaps defending curatorial territory… yet anger reveals insecurity. I mentioned Einstein agreed with Dirac, as did Denis Dutton in his YouTube video “The Art Instinct, a Darwinian Theory of Beauty”.

Aesthetic taste, argues Denis Dutton, is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. It’s not, as most contemporary art criticism and academic theory would have it, ‘socially constructed.’ The human appreciation for art is innate, and certain artistic values carry across cultures. It seems an aesthetic perception ensured the survival of the perceiver’s genes. What does that mean for the entire discipline of art history? Dutton argues, with forceful logic and hard evidence, that art criticism needs to be premised on an understanding of evolution, not on ‘critical theory’.

Today science says an art predominantly intellectual is severed from its foundation, restricted to superficial levels of consciousness. Discarding a sensory and aesthetic base, we deprive art of the vocabulary and grammar integral to our intellectual being. I gave a condensed version of the above to keep it short. Some in the audience murmured agreement but the newly graduated doctor of philosophy was not pleased.

A while after the doctor’s symposium I got in touch with the ARC Artists’ Outlet director, as I wanted to work with ARC to publish a book. She asked me to wait, being overworked; a few more emails through the year met with a silence much like the flat-earth society’s answer to astronomer Carl Sagan.

ARCBOOKS attest they are an alternative Canadian press dedicated to critical writing on art and culture. Their mandate is to encourage ideas and critical thinking and to foster appreciation of contemporary Canadian art and culture by producing challenging yet accessible publications that reach diverse audiences. Their objective is to provide a discursive forum for artists and writers and to facilitate new avenues of discourse within Canadian publishing. ARCBOOKS is the publishing arm of ARC Artists Outlet, a Canadian non-profit artist-run center.

Eight months later ARC Center announced the publication of our PhD graduate’s book, but my emails went unanswered. I then sent the gallery director and our PhD a first draft of this article suggesting a discussion, expecting they’d invite me to chat over Glenlivet and Dufflet’s pastries, but no such luck. A deathly silence gave the impression they had pulled up the medieval drawbridge and barred the gate. Perhaps they were not fully committed to encouraging scholarly critical writing? They really don’t seem eager to produce challenging yet accessible publications that reach diverse audiences. We live in a time when we root for the team and pay lip service to diversity.

A disingenuous response came a year later, when this article first appeared on my personal blog. The board of ARC found time to reply immediately, unlike the director, and they said that ARC was grateful to their director for all the work she was doing, and the reason she had ignored my emails over 12 months was simply because she was busy, very very busy.

“On behalf of the board of directors of ARC Artists Outlet, we were disappointed to see your text single out our Director who has been employed with us for many years and has done an excellent job in all facets of her work. We take this kind of mistreatment and misrepresentation of our staff very seriously. We also take input from all community seriously and have attempted to remedy any misunderstandings by adding more information regarding our publication process to our website. I will repeat this information below:Our publishing process takes time as we convene in separate review stages that involve staff, a series of specialized committees, and later as a Board of Directors”.It should be noted however that we do not work with artists or writers who attempt to bully us or our staff through public defamation. At this time, we are not interested in publishing your work with the exception of the open call entry you submitted to our questionnaire, the publication of which will hopefully occur in 2019.”

Hum… Cognitive dissonance and a denial at best insincere. Ignoring 3 polite emails over a year is not your typical attempt to remedy misunderstandings. Then I looked up what I’d written for their questionnaire years ago and started laughing: “repeated complaints from peers on Facebook tell us that over the last decades, academics at artist-run centers have censored the art shown, restricting it to intellectual values, and in doing so they may have throttled the muse, poor thing. Most fine arts producers graduate from similar schools and share the same values, which are reflected in their association, their production, and the systems created thereby… surely a cultural blindness results from such group judgments. This homogeneity includes limiting participation to those sharing the same outlook and language, narrowing the game to believers in a common ideology, in effect creating a tautology. “From years of effort and funds invested in the doctor of philosophy’s work, The gallery director and ARC were in effect ‘married’ to her. They were not going to support and publish a contrary view, not for all the diversity and inclusion in their mandate. This is a decision to reject diversity, and it questions their claim of impartial knowledge brokers. There’s clearly a bias, failing their mission statement. (Later note: it’s now March 2020, 4 or 5 years after their call, they still haven’t published their questionnaire responses which would be like shining a light on what they hide. This reluctance could be unconscious, or purposeful.)

Flash back to H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World, on the papacy of Innocent III (1160-1216): “And it was just because many of them secretly doubted the entire soundness of their vast and elaborate doctrinal fabric that they would brook no discussion of it. They were intolerant of questions or dissent, not because they were sure of their faith, but because they were not.”It’s interesting to find this pattern prevalent in today’s art. “There is a concerted effort among many progressives to per-empt artistic risk-taking. They want the artist to work on per-approved themes and express per-approved truths, even if the artist herself or himself suspects those truths may not actually be truths at all.”

The context here was that when you placate ideology, art turns into marketing. Helen Pluckrose even wrote in Aero that “something has gone wrong in the university… their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview.”Danielle S. McLaughlin of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association says that when we can no longer explore and discuss ideas that are troubling and even transgression, we are limited to approved doses of information in community-sanctioned packets. Worrisome at best, our Canadian failure of logic and scholarship, this refusal to engage for fear that it might shake the tree. Possibly ARC Artist Books allow ‘critical thinking’ only for their friends, and friends don’t critique each other or the status quo.

Basically I disagree with our PhD’s faith in academia as a site to shape artists. I think some serious reforms are needed, if not an entire revolution. Is this idea disturbing? Some find it offensive, I’m more like “I came, I saw, I pounded the keyboard”. One jumps through hoops and gets with the program, learns to be an artist like all artists should be… the homogeneity, what’s not to love? Unavoidably, when a bad idea enters the system it spreads like a virus, and when bad ideas take root they are tenaciously hard to uproot.No school wants to stand and rock the boat – there’s no place for opinions once curators have spoken, yet immutable laws say the good must make way for the better. As Oliver Cromwell might say to them too: “begone, you have sat too long for all the good that you have done”. Many of those who grew up with learning that art needs no skill or effort will object, in fact will actively resist change. But the times they are a-changing, some of us want more from art than religious conformity.
Ross Dothan, Oh! the humanities! The New York Times, August 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/opinion/oh-the-humanities.htm