Killing Art

If your name were Fine you would naturally be drawn to the world of fine art. If you were an academic scholar named Gary Alan Fine, a professor at Northwestern University, you would be drawn to study the Masters of Fine Arts programs in Chicago.

To guide us through Fine’s new book, Talking Art, we have a Harvard graduate student named Charlie Tyson.

If you had been holding out hope for the world of fine art, Tyson’s essay about Fine’s book will disabuse you of your illusion. In a slightly better world Tyson would have open his essay with a line from Italian poetry:

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

You immediately recognize it as the slogan that welcomes you to Dante’s Inferno. In English, it reads: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Fine arts programs supposedly prepare some students to be artists. They prepare others to teach in universities or even to curate and criticize art. In itself, this is harmless. In reality, when translated into work, it descends into pure idiocy:

The book treats us to the spectacle of a distinguished, gray-headed scholar — Fine himself, of course — watching as a young artist commands her audience to spit Jell-O into her pantyhose. "I like to question the socially constructed notions of our sense of sex," she declares. Our hapless sociologist-hero scribbles notes as a male art student screens hard-core pornography as part of his "practice." Another artist-in-waiting reflects: "For me the vagina is the solution."

Will any serious and sentient adult consider this to be art. Does it not more closely indulge the infantilism of today's coddled children? Art students are initiated into a cult where people speak a foreign language, one filled with passwords that make no coherent sense.

The book’s main interest for those of us in academia, however, may lie elsewhere. The appeal of ethnography, by turns prurient and educative, comes from the privileged access it grants to an alien way of life. But the spectacle of a cohort of students trained to speak in a rarefied lexicon, vying for their professors’ approval, instructed to compete for a tiny number of unstable jobs while courting hostility from the larger world, will not strike anyone on a university campus as unfamiliar. The M.F.A. is graduate school in a funhouse mirror.

If you think that art has something to do with knowing how to draw, you would be seriously out of date:

the academic institutions that serve as gatekeepers for the art world praise the conceptual, the alienating, and the abstract while disparaging craftsmanship as "merely" pretty and "merely" illustrative — and a sure sign of political quietism.

It gets worse. Students do not study art history and they are taught to disparage anything that appears to contain the least smidgeon of beauty. Tyson continues:

In the programs that Fine surveys, students take no classes on technique, and most take no art history. One senior faculty member likens a course on drawing to learning Latin. Another scoffs at the "preciousness" of Northern European Renaissance painting. "I’m sure we could all make beautiful Monet paintings or Picasso paintings if we wanted to," one student says brazenly, "but that’s not what we want to do."

The M.F.A. programs identify beauty with commercialism and with naïve illustration devoid of ideas. Art that aims for beauty, Fine writes, echoing the assumptions of his interview subjects, creates a "merchandising aesthetic. … An emphasis on the beautiful suggests an absence of critical content." Yet there is a contradiction here, as Fine acknowledges: If beauty is commercial, then why do elite collectors, in step with art-world conventions, clamor after "ugly" art?

One notes, with chagrin and dismay, that collectors have drunk deeply of this swill. It’s not just about making non-art. It’s about adopting the right pose, looking the part. If your work cannot speak for itself, you can at least put on a beret and look like a starving artist. But you must also master the art of bullshit.

The M.F.A. trains artists to talk about their work with slickness and flair, in conformity with the lexicon of the art world. The premise of M.F.A. education, Fine says, is "helping students not only to be artists, but also to look the part." Making art is not enough; aspiring artists must be able to articulate and defend the political and conceptual interventions their work performs. Learning to "look the part" entails firm, sometimes punitive, lessons in self-presentation. This instruction takes place at the program’s central ritual: the critique.

It gets worse. Art students are supposedly being taught how to think. And yet, nothing about the process leads Tyson to believe that they have the least notion of what it means to think:

In today’s M.F.A. programs, Fine concludes, "learning to think takes priority over learning to make." But do M.F.A. students learn to think well? Art schools require students to justify and explain their art in highly theoretical terms, but give them no adequate instruction in philosophy, literature, or any other discursive field that prizes subtle distinctions or analytical clarity. M.F.A. candidates are assigned books by Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and other prophets bellowing down from the cliffs of high theory.

But the students seldom do more than skim the reading, Fine reports, so as to reserve the bulk of their time for work in the studio. Seminar discussions of these complicated theoretical texts — led, typically, by professional artists, not art historians, literary theorists, or philosophers — do little to explicate the ideas. Students are encouraged to invoke theory, Fine suggests, as a way of claiming authority. The actual texts often remain unread….

We can, and should, argue about the merits of the various theorists in the art-school canon, and about how much theory artists need in the first place. The problem is that this education in theory, supposedly central, is superficial: The thinkers are too often reduced to slogans or catchwords. (Scholars in the humanities are not immune to this kind of posturing, but judging from Fine’s account, it seems rarer there.) That we get artist statements quoted here that begin, "I question modernity, while constantly interrogating Cartesian duality …" — blind lumbering in the dark plains of philosophy — results not from student incompetence but from misplaced expectations.

To say that this education in high theory is superficial is overly generous. It is pure gibberish. Students have no idea what they are reading, and yet they learn to mouth the proper phrases. The point, Tyson correctly notes, is to affirm membership in a cult.

The student is asked to discard the values of the larger society and prove his loyalty to a subculture. He learns to speak, haltingly at first, a language of authority, redolent with Latinate abstractions. The dim professional prospects in the field are worried over, regretted. The advised solution is to double down, to win approval from the elders, to specialize and reposition until the work becomes bloodless trivia. The self-fashioning that the subculture requires for success inside the cloister opens a gash between the student and the world he has left behind; the glances he jealously casts outward seem to confirm a mutual disdain.

As we have noted, there is a market for this silliness. Thus, try as we might, we cannot dismiss it entirely. And yet, the marketplace has been so thoroughly corrupted. The result has been that the mania over multiculturalism and rage to be radically French has produced a subculture dedicated to nothing other than to killing art.