But

Ask anyone in the know where to find the real action and it turns out not to fall so easily in line with the city’s centralized culture program. We ended up at a place called Illiterate Magazine, which operates as a gallery, publication, studio, and meeting space for whatever floats their fancy. And tonight a conversation about art education is on the books. Go figure.

A decent crop of tonight’s participants are from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. The story of the school is becoming common. A mom and pop operation can’t make ends meet, gets bought by an educational corporation, the indefinable mess of artist-peer community gets subjugated to the moneymaking pseudo-progress of online education, and people start to wonder what the hell is the point anymore.

We heard a similar story coming out of Santa Fe. The College of Santa Fe, an operation of the Christian brotherhood, brought in some professional administrators who sold the school to an educational corporation that has the ‘progressive’ notion that artists now live in a ‘global society’ and therefore shouldn’t stay in one place too long (the emphasis is on the importation of foreign students) – meanwhile the administrators wonder why they can’t get students to take root in Santa Fe after graduation.

Santa Fe is supposedly the third largest art town in the country, but most of that is in jewelry and cowboy painting. It’s also a town full of old people who have retired to the high desert altitude to avoid the coming arthritis. There is plenty of money, which means you can’t smoke anywhere. And there are plenty of police, which means the people with the money would rather not share it.

The kids who have stuck it out are doing their best to make it work, trying on for size their abilities at grant hunting and reclaiming empty strip malls. And there persists, against the odds, a belief that all we truly have to educate ourselves as artists is each other.

This sheds some light on the running confusion we’ve come across during this little field trip of ours. We go to one location to publicly bemoan the debt-riddled professionalizing homogeneity of America’s art academies. Then we go to another location to find out what other ways artists are educating themselves. More than once audience members have responded to our presentation by asking us what alternative we’re proposing. But this is missing the point. The fact is, the alternatives are already out there, they just aren’t being called “art school.” The alternatives are at Detroit Soup, and Illiterate Magazine, and Vox Populi (Philadelphia), and The Soap Factory (Minneapolis), and 5E Gallery (Detroit). They are in the unnamed art squats and lone wolf artist studios we didn’t visit as well as the ones we did. And they are in the future of every true artist’s heart, because to be an artist is to always be learning. If we knew what art was, we couldn’t honestly call ourselves artists. It’s a moving target always floating somewhere between ourselves and the world.

Our own project, BHQFU, is not so much an answer to the MFA system as it is an example of the kind of thing that already exists all over the country that, were the academy to loosen its pugnacious grip on the term ‘art education,’ could fill in the blank. An artist’s peers are her true audience and teachers. And rather than seeing this wispy wisdom as an occasional lucky side effect of the academic industry, we’d like to see the culture embrace it as the prime mover of anything bold enough to call itself art education.

But

People still want to know what’s wrong with the MFA system.

So when we arrived in New Mexico we called Dave Hickey.

Dave agreed to meet us at a Starbucks in Albuquerque under the condition that we do not tell anyone that he is nice. He is not nice. He is, to put it as lightly as possible, brusque. And his short answer to our question of whether graduate MFAs have any value to artists was “no.”

Three hours, a few lattes, and way too many cigarettes later, we piled back in the limo with many of our assumptions confirmed. There is no quick fix of the MFA system. It’s codifying a kind of middle class aesthetic sensibility and reifying the “therapeutic institution.” Schools, like museums, fill up the space regardless of whether there is any talent worth teaching. By segregating the visual arts from its brethren in poetry, music, theater, and dance, we suffer our specialization and lose sight of the transformative capacity of metaphor.

Also, apparently rock and roll is awesome.

Hickey has taken the time to write down some of his thoughts on the matter. Caroline Peters, an artist and educator who we had the good fortune to meet in Denver, sent us the following of Dave’s quotes from an Art in America article titled “Art Schools Group Crit.” So for those looking for more specific answers to the question of why we think art education ought to be thought out of the academy, perhaps this will suffice as a starting point.

1. In the present moment, artists are better off training themselves at home and acquiring the benefit of a good liberal arts or art historical education. This, because the model for graduate art education, established in the early ’70s by John Baldessari and others (myself included), is 40 years old and virtually obsolete.

2. Art schools are unhappy, ugly places. They tend to inculcate philistine, institutional habits of mind and to teach young artists more about teaching than about art. Since teaching art has been destructive to the practice of every artist I know who teaches, I try never to forget that the few good, serious teachers of art pay a price that’s way too high for the privilege of doing it.

3. Teaching art, in my experience, is a genuine privilege that comes with its own oath to “do no harm.” It also breaks your heart.

4. Art is a cosmopolitan practice best taught in cities near the water. Teaching art in a provincial cultural environment that does not celebrate and embrace change is totally self-defeating. It transforms art into a compensatory discourse that can help a stranded student maintain his or her sanity for few years in the boonies. It cannot, however, help people who teach under these conditions maintain their sanity. These people are doomed….

5. Teachers of art practice have one overriding obligation to their students: to be intimately familiar with the contemporary standards of art practice, discourse, trade and exhibition against which their students’ work will be measured–so their students will know the unspoken rules they are choosing to break or not to break. The art market itself should be dealt with evenhandedly and explained in detail. It is a fact and an option from which students should not be cloistered. Demonizing the art marketplace does more damage to students than exposing them to collectors and dealers who are irrevocably a part of the art world.

6. Art school must be free or cheap. It is virtually impossible for a young artist to establish a mature, courageous practice with a six-figure educational debt.

7. Art students should not be placed under the authority of older practicing artists whose work they are mandated to render obsolete. This guarantees bad advice and destructive criticism.

8. Any teacher of art who conceives his or her job to be “teaching young artists to think critically” should be fired immediately for intellectual dishonesty.

9. All group crits with faculty and students in attendance should be abolished immediately. These crucibles privilege the verbal over the visual and allow faculty members to poison and manipulate peer relations among their students.

10. Nurturing attention paid to an art student should never be confused with attention paid to nurturing art.

11. Unfinished work should be presumed not to exist.

12. Art in the context of an art school always looks bad, especially when it’s very good.

13. Regular supervision and oversight of young artists’ practice should be suppressed. My rule: “If you’re not sick, don’t call the doctor.”

14. If art students want to study Continental theory, they should learn German and French and study it in a philosophy department. Because (1) art schools are incapable of distinguishing properly between theory and practice; (2) art school classes in these subjects are little more than uncritical “slow pitch” indoctrinations taught by advocates rather than scholarly adepts; (3) all of the American translations of this work are poisoned by the moment of their making; (4) this entire discourse is now “historical”–a dated, conservative, academic field of study and no longer live talk.

15. Only saints can nurture real talent. I am a writer, not even an artist, and even I can’t avoid feeling a twinge of resentment when a pimple-faced twerp with a skateboard under his arm shows me a mature and persuasive work of art. I can see, much more clearly than the twerp, the road opening before him, the obstacles falling away, and it’s all I can do not to stick out my foot and trip him. If I were an artist, with a stake in the game, I would probably trip him, and tell myself that it’s for his own good. It wouldn’t be. Better to buy the damned art and take your profit on the back end.

We all know the story by now. The auto industry built the town, and when the big three couldn’t keep up, neither could the big D. Everybody fled for the suburbs leaving a carcass ripe for urban revitalization. But the powers that be have been slow to realize the magical healing properties artists have on the real estate market.

So for now, Detroit exists in that purgatorial paradox of economic blight and genuine creative energy. It’s a tough town. Which makes for tough people. Which makes for an art scene that feels local, necessary, and resilient.

After a dinner at the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art we were lured to a dive bar called Old Miami that happened to be hosting a fundraiser for a female hip-hop collective. Organized by the 5E Gallery, we quickly got the picture that this was a community of artists who weren’t investing in their community because it felt like the right thing to do in any abstract sense. They were for real.

Within a few cheap drinks, love overcame curiosity. We could try to spin you a more interesting tale of how urbanism and artistic practice throttle each other differently in different places, but for now we just want to plug our new favorite arts organization. Look them up. Check them out. Give them all your money.

“You see, BHQF have (sic) a bone to pick with the business and economics of art and art schools. It is hard to begrudge them that the commercial art world has its unseemly practices. It is also fact that almost no one who graduates with a fine arts degree will achieve gallery representation, let alone sales robust enough to support a living. But for they would have it, it’s ars gratia artis or nothing. Art is a vocation, a higher calling—a point that I can agree upon—but one which is sullied once money becomes involved; art and business are at polar ends of the spectrum.

BHQF takes (sic) exception with the National Endowment for the Arts, picking on its leader Rocco Landesman (an easy target), and its current tagline “Art Works,” i.e. the concept that art can be a generator for local economies. In this city, such a claim is tantamount to blasphemy. Alas, there was no one from the Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, or the Arts & Business Council to go toe to toe with them. At the least, their bone of contention with the economic argument for the value of the arts is appallingly naïve. It is the most formidable tool that those in the arts have against naysayers, particularly elected officials who fundamentally disagree that public money should be used in support of the arts. It is but one part of an arsenal that encompasses and can work hand in hand with arguing for the intrinsic value of the arts, not its mortal enemy.”

Jeffrey is absolutely right to point out that the economic argument for the value of the arts has been the most effective tool we’ve had to keep any degree of arts funding alive. In fact, that’s precisely the argument with the most currency (pardon the pun) no matter what we’re arguing for.

You want lower taxes? Argue that it stimulates the economy. You want higher taxes? Argue that it stimulates the economy. You want tougher immigration laws? Argue that immigrants are stealing American jobs. You want more open borders? Argue that immigrants will do the jobs the middle class doesn’t want. You want better schools? Argue that it’s producing a better workforce. Public healthcare? Tell ‘em it’s going to save us money.

No matter the issue at hand, “It’s the economy, stupid” is always the soup of the day. The first one to make an economic argument for or against abortion wins the gold medal.

Jeffrey is right. The economic argument for the arts works. Sort of. Except the NEA’s funding is probably about to be slashed once again despite Mr. Landesman’s best efforts. But let’s assume the powers that be finally were convinced: the arts are an important instrument of the economy. Where does that leave us?

It leaves us with a quantifiable value system for the significance of the arts. Prove your economic merit and you prove your worth to society. Is that what we want from the art our government funds? Is that what we want from the art non-profits are capable of funding?

As Jeffrey must be aware, there has been a significant turn in how arts funding through non-profits works in the U.S. It’s called sponsorship. Companies that, in the past may have been compelled to give funding with the simple incentive of a tax break can now plaster their names on whatever they like. Take a look around your local MoCAs and you’ll see what we mean. In New York one of our more hilarious examples is Target® free night. A program that began because of pressure from the Art Workers Coalition is now a tool for corporate sponsorship.

We’d love to believe, as Jeffrey contends, that the economic argument can work hand in happy hand with an argument for the intrinsic value of the arts, but as anyone who has followed the recent budget debates can verify, the economy sucks up all the oxygen. Give it any space in the debate and it will instrumentalize publicly funded art into a whitewashing tool for corporate interests.

The free marketeers who have been steadily pushing the U.S. further and further to the right since Reagan own the terms of the debate. That’s why the Democrats we elect today can’t even fund the NEA as well as Nixon did. When Reagan attempted to abolish the NEA (three times!), the economic argument won the day. But, at that point in time even old Ronnie was willing to believe the government had a responsibility to stimulate the economy.

Flash forward to the present day. The current crop of tea bag sympathizers think the free market can solve everything. If it’s worth having, people will pay for it. They will pay for what they want, without government interference, thus producing a healthier, more diverse culture that more accurately reflects the needs and desires of the American people.

You see, Jeffrey, the right wing is making an economic argument too. And when it comes to the arts, they’ve got a few especially compelling angles: the best art getting made today is largely operating without government funding (therefore the free market works), and private funding doesn’t have to answer to the political pressure of conservative groups.

Go toe to toe with them over Defense, Healthcare, the highway system, and it’s not too hard to show how public funding makes sense economically. We don’t have to have a moral debate. We all save money by pooling our resources around certain things. But how do we make that argument for the arts?

Not only does the U.S. already give a paltry amount toward the arts (compare our per citizen art tax of 24 cents to Sweden’s 35 dollars), but centralizing the bureaucracy of arts funding actually makes it harder to get that money to artists.

Go talk to anyone working in a non-profit who is re-granting NEA money to artists and ask them how much it costs them to give out the grants. The fact is, in many cases, the only way that money ever gets to artists is through supplemental fundraising from the private sector: individual donors and corporations.

Oh, it’s not looking good for public arts funding now. The free marketeers can point out how much more effective the private sector already is at funding the arts, how it produces higher quality, and how it’s actually a better way to preserve free expression. And we intend to fend them off with an economic argument? Now, that’s starting to sound naïve.

The only economic argument for public arts funding is that there are already jobs there and there could be room for more. But if we really want to let economic thinking lead the way we should be funding a National Endowment for Entertainment, or a National Endowment for Trans Fats, or a National Endowment for Nascar.

So, at the very least, let’s lead our arguments with what’s in our heart of hearts. We don’t have to be naïve utopians to believe that there are reasons for doing things that aren’t about money. The entire course of human history proves that qualitative arguments beat quantitative ones. That’s why there are still religions and families.

We have much much more important reasons than the economy for funding the arts and you know it. So let’s stop being pushovers to the economic imperative. No one got into non-profit arts management because they thought they were doing something important to stimulate the economy. You didn’t do it because art works, you did it because art matters.

…

For the full text of Jeffrey Bussmann’s blog, click here.

Traveling by car across the country the terrain along the main highways all begins to look more or less the same; the first thing to change is the weather, closely followed by the companies and businesses noted on billboards, in store windows, at gas stations. A difference between either coast and the states that lie quietly between them is that specific market interests are rarely dressed up as anything else — the delusion of diversity that one might be provided on East and West is wiped off the plate and what you’re left with is the cold hard conundrum that entire cities are supported, sponsored, and employed by major corporations. Just as the American automotive company exodus from places like Detroit resulted in the fall of an empire — politically, culturally, and otherwise — arrival in a city like Minneapolis that has a red bull’s eye or Pepsi’s faux yin-yang splashed on every surface prompts us to wonder what would be left behind if these corporations decided to ditch out and head for other waters?

One answer: artists.

We arrived in Minneapolis first, pulling the car directly into the streets of Dinkytown, at the brink of the University of Minnesota campus. Here, for the first time since we hit the road, was proof that the iconic media representation of American colleges — mascots, school colors, headbands and matching sweatsuits, complete with fraternity and sorority houses decrepitly in a row — was inspired by something quite concrete. Yet, while the U of M has all the trappings of a Vince Vaughn/Will Ferrell-genre flick, the ties of the school to an intricate network of creative communities was palpable. The streets and campus bulletin boards were plastered with announcements for art events, open calls, and public programs. That first night, like shy freshmen, we dropped our things off in the dorms (quite literally, as the “University Inn” was more “university” than “inn” in its cinder-block construction and larger-than-life de-whiskered Goldy Gopher, styled with a U of M scarf) and hit the streets.

Minneapolis sprawls out in all directions making it easy to forget that it does not stand alone. Right across the way is Saint Paul, the quiet sister whom, if you’ve ever spent an extensive amount of time with either, makes the two seem more fraternal than identical. Minneapolis has asserted itself as the bold, outspoken, more direct of the two; it is in Minneapolis that one finds the majority of mainstream concert venues, the famous Walker Arts Center, The U of M and MCAD (surprisingly, the more conservative of the two institutions), a prominent smattering of galleries and independent creative spaces, and, most importantly, the artist-sometimes-known-as-Prince’s house. Saint Paul, on the other hand, is the home to a cluster of private academic institutions and liberal art colleges, many of which have BFA, Studio, and Education programs integrated into their larger curriculum.

On Saturday we checked out the MN MADE program at The Walker Arts Center, a program described to us by a local curator and educator as an effort for The Walker Arts Center to corral some of the local creative current into what would otherwise be an untouchable collection of canonized materials, the majority of which hail from places beyond the Twin Cities. It was good to see a large institution working with the surrounding community. In the peripheral space of the galleries, local artists and artisans were provided table space to sell their wares; inside the auditorium were rotating panels with such self-help titles as “How To Quit Your Day Job and Do What You Love” (how does one do that, anyway?), and “How to Buy In, Sell-out, and Spread the Word”. A local artist and musician speaking on the panel explained to us afterward that, in truth, she has no intention of quitting her day job, “My so-called ‘day job’ [of fundraising at a local college's Annual Fund] has taught me a lot; I’ve been able to build on my own creative projects using the skills acquired there…I’d be stupid to quit. The trick is to find something you’re good at that in someway intersects with what you love, and that’s what I am aiming to do, that is how we gain mobility as artists.”

Later that day we hit up the In-Flux Auditorium back on U of M’s campus, sprinkling the room with balloons and Teach 4 Amerika university-style pennants. As members of The Brass Messengers surfaced and began to warm up, we found ourselves with a room packed with novelists, musicians, poets, and painters — all showing up to rally along with us, in true “[BHQ]FU” spirit. After the talk the majority of the group stayed, pulling in their chairs for a circle pow-wow: “What’s the point of going to school at all?” several mused aloud. “To get married,” another participant joked, following up with a turn to the serious: “If we’re going to look at the school systems, we need to start looking at what role they play in social systems — like marriage. People go to school to meet other people. You shouldn’t have to pay for that.” — “FU”, indeed.

The conversation continued the next day, first during studio visits with a handful of U of M BFA students (a rather distinctive group, many making eloquent publicly engaged projects) and then later over Cokes, doughnuts, and cigarettes at the Minneapolis-based Soap Factory. There we discussed the operations of BHQFU in contrast to the older and wizened Experimental College of the Twin Cities — two collaborative models of alternative education that, as the conversation unfolded, discovered many overlapping points of inquiry: How do we avoid becoming too insular in collaborative projects? How best can we democratize our audiences within a new project without sacrificing momentum? What is the difference between “teacher” and “student”? In what way is the value of local assets determined geographically (for New York, we thought perhaps real estate, for Minneapolis, “Definitely transportation. Being able to get around in the Twin Cities is a luxury,” said one participant)?

The duality of this project – in every city doing two different types of programs as a means to strike a balance between public performance and, to follow, a more intimate gathering of folks ready and willing to discuss their relationship to art, education, and the meeting of the two – took on a different meaning during our visit in the Twin Cities. The notion of “twinning” as a means of melding two spheres, or, often, the mirroring of two spaces as they change form over time, can certainly be applied to the histories of these two cities. However, twinning also takes on a new meaning if one applies the methodology to the oft assumed symbiotic relationship of the art market and academic art institutions; in the current state of systems the two are not mutually exclusive. MFA programs enhance codependency of graduating artists entering the world beyond onto the “generosity” of the market and, if not welcomed into the elite “chosen” to be brought out into gallery spaces and onto auction blocks, artists are left to scramble for grants and funding, forced to compete with one another for resources that, small in scale, cannot possibly carry the responsibility of providing life-long sustainability.

Thus, the questions of “What is an artist’s education for?” and “How can we imagine new educational possibilities for ourselves?” in the Twin Cities began to swirl around how to empower and educate artists towards greater economic agency. If we are going to be asked to write grants, to build budgets, to defend the objects we produce and bring into the world, perhaps the best training lies outside of the MFA classroom, wherein the training for these kinds of endeavors is limited. While the MFA system has taken the most cynical approach to capitalizing on an artist’s desire to be self-sustaining and self-reliant by exploiting the human fear of failure in the building a multi-billion-dollar business, oddly enough it seems that the system fails to actually train artists to be titans of industry, business men and women capable of not only making art but also making a living. Being savvy does not have to compromise one’s creative integrity; an artist’s relationship to economy ought not to be first their leap into the hot oil of the art market, but rather something that comes way before that tipping point.

As artists we cannot consent to becoming indentured to our debt; the responsibility falls to us to make use of the tools provided us to continue growing as an influential work force within American cultural and social capital.

Staring upward into Anish Kapoor’s queasily municipal Bean, we begin to wonder whether we’re getting our point across.

In Chicago, as was the case in Pittsburgh, the Q & A following our presentation quickly devolves into the bitter battles of institutional politics. The plight of the adjunct professor, the exclusionary expense of art school tuition, the meddling of administrators – while all concerns worth having – miss the point of what we’ve been trying to mean when we talk about arts education.

Some seem to think we’ve come to offer up BHQFU as a singular sweeping solution for all that ails our educational institutions. No. We aren’t. We’re arguing for the shriveling down of institutionalized arts education.

Generally, we get one angry professor. It’s a pattern of performed criticality, and while we’re happy to contend with criticism and adapt what we’re doing as we go along, the redundancy of their positions is making it more apparent to us what annoys us so much about the art education industry:

Homogeneity.

“Do we want our nation’s artists to have all been funneled through an increasingly regulated system of sameness or do we want our artists to be more different from each other so that they can offer us more ways of seeing the world?”

We need difference. It’s what keeps art interesting, that we can stretch our divergence from one another, push its bounds, yet find our humanity at the end of each fingertip. Art has the capacity to limber our empathy.

And the academy, for all the valiant attempts made by professors with their minds in the right places, is treadmilling what it means to be an artist. Fifty years ago no one thought an artist needed an MFA to call herself an artist. But we’re becoming a society of credentials. Artists in their twenties worry how to format their resumes.

And what good has the professionalization of the artist done? Do we have unions? Do we have health care? Do we have tax incentives? Are we considered to be a more critical part of American society? Not really. Our strength is in what remains of our willingness to challenge normalization.

We rolled up to a rolling campus teaming with teams playing soccer and engineering students attempting cricket and lone gunmen noodling acoustic guitars in fair weather, banners for professional conferences and posters for our best friends’ bands’ gigs at the Brillo Box. This is Carnegie Mellon. Black and yellow, black and yellow. Jon meets us in the parking lot with his daughter. She digs the limo.

Time ticks so we set to unloading and blowing up balloons, meeting Machete, our new favorite Pittsburghian Afro-beat salsa band, cocking the t-shirt cannon, and running sound check.  Lights go down. Rallying ensues. Our new friend Rob Blackson who we met in Philadelphia recommended we add a Q&A after the rally since the twenty-year-old artists in the room can’t come out for drinks with us afterwards (grumblings of the like we’d also heard in New York, but seriously – what twenty-year-old college student can’t get into a bar?) so we decide to go for it at Carnegie Mellon. Lights up.

To begin with we get a bit of the usual: how does BHQF work? How does the school function? Are things different after the Whitney Biennial? (A little yes, a little no.) And then the waiter comes with the meat and potatoes. Do you really believe it’s advisable for art students to forgo formal education? What is BHQFU doing to bring art into the wider community? Can N.A.S.A.D. be all that bad if it’s made up of arts educators?

This last question precipitates a defense from a member of the art school faculty. Who do we think are making curricular decisions? As it turns out the faculty are artists. Artists with experience. Artists who very well may be making good decisions about what types of classes ought to be taught and required and who may very well be tirelessly devoted to their students’ interests.

To which a student countered – but why couldn’t the students collaborate in making those decisions? I’m required to take an art history survey, but several of my friends and I would really like to focus on a particular area.

Professor: So why not make the class yourself?

We agree. Why not? In fact, that’s more or less what we’re arguing for. People that want to learn about art, who think making better work might be supported by a collaborative critical environment, ought to organize learning situations for themselves.

The pushback we’ve gotten on occasion from professors seems to assume we’re calling for an out and out revolt of the twenty-year-olds. But that’s not the case. We don’t think a group of twenty-year-old students would be served well by divorcing themselves from the wisdom of their forbears. Quite the contrary. We just don’t see why a generational difference should constitute a hierarchy. The best teachers we’ve met think they have something to learn from their students. And we’ve heard that the best way to learn is to teach. So if we really believe these time-honored clichés have any tooth to them, why don’t we scrap the power dynamic for something a bit more fluid?

Meat and Potatoes and Waffles

Pittsburgh was a steel town, but then they built 446 bridges and now there is no more steel left. Now it is all bridges. Straddling the snot-nosed East coast and the laborious Midwest, it’s fondly and self-effacingly known as the Paris of Appalachia, the City of Champions, the City of, well, Bridges. And plumbing along with its healthcare and robotics industries is its 750 million dollar bastion of intellectualism, Carnegie Mellon University.

Carnegie Mellon University is an empire all its own, the kind of institution that, by hook or by crook, finds its fingers spread wide amongst the pots of Pittsburgh. And nestled neatly within its magisterial paws is the School of Fine Art. Jon Rubin, who we had the pleasure to spend some time with here, runs something like a department within the School of Art called Contextual Practices.

Speaking of bridges, Jon’s idea is that the resources of the University might be directed outward into the city – that a pragmatic way of de-ossifying the way we learn as artists might be to re-route some funding and expertise from the big boys like CMU into more transient socio-educational situations.

Case in point: The Waffle Shop.

Jon took some money from CMU and used it to open The Waffle Shop a couple years ago. You can check out how it works here. What interests us is that it’s used as the classroom for Jon’s class, but affords him the freedom to build an educational moment with the reigns from on high loosened up a bit. We imagine this circumstance can only help encourage students to make their own world – for themselves and for their work.

Now The Waffle Shop is not a complete break from the institution, but it does provide a great example of how we might start to imagine such a transition. What started solely with funding from CMU has found ways to “diversify revenue streams,” from grants and donations to rentals and waffles.

And why not? Try as we might, we haven’t found the magic bean that grows a perfectly pure solution to the funding problems of arts education. It’s probably going to cost something, which means the money has to come from somewhere, which means we’re going to have be resourceful. Luckily, artists are good at being resourceful. After all, making art is an indefensible travesty in the face of a productive society. We have to have our wits about us if we intend to keep trucking anyway.

A lot of our conversations in Pittsburgh centered on this question of funding. If we want to create lots of ways to learn, we’re going to need lots of ways to pay for it. We heard about a place called Unsmoke Artspace that has been creating cheap studio space for artists in Braddock, PA with some help from Levi’s. Back in Philly we met people running programs off a combination of member dues and grants. Our own school back in New York currently combines some non-profit funding sources with sales from art works.

We don’t mean to suggest there is no baggage that comes along with funding. If Haliburton offered to house our art school, we might think twice. The point is simply that we need to keep our options open, to weigh the costs of capitalism against the gains of what we’re doing: creating alternative modes of art education that keep costs to students down, break down some tired old hierarchies, support curricular agility, and keep the focus on supporting a critical conversation among artists as the best way to learn.

Two hours outside of New York City, our fair nation’s commercial fine art mecca, Philadelphia’s art scene is built on the backs of non-profits, alternative spaces, and a few prominent art schools. As we learned from the conversation generously hosted by Vox Populi, a twenty-three-year-old collectively organized exhibition space, most of the funding for these types of spaces is coming from a single source, the Pew Charitable Trust. The political scrambling and squabbling produced by this money funnel is an interesting counterpoint to the dominance of New York’s for-profit galleries as well as its diversity of charitable sources.

The obvious danger is the centralization of power. Despite a continuous influx of new artist blood to the city thanks to its art schools, proximity to New York, and comparatively cheap rent and available space, the promise of a continuing artistic practice in Philadelphia often threads back to the same fount, the decision-makers at the Pew Charitable Trust.

This is a source of anxiety for artists working to create new venues and self-organized projects. Yet, from what we gathered from the conversation, artist-teachers working within the institutional frame of the university system are feeling more burdened by the bureaucracy of that system than by the difficulties that come along with self-organization. Some professors we spoke to expressed a sense of guilt from encouraging students to pursue formal education.

Philadelphia’s art schools aren’t the most expensive in the country, but they do “compete for students” like everywhere else, selling themselves on their facilities, faculty, and the cultural capital of the city. These schools provide many local artists with teaching jobs, which sound to be much more stable than the situation of adjunct professors in New York schools where competition produces rapid turnover.

Artist-students in Philadelphia have the benefits of a relatively inexpensive city, a large potential network of artist peers, and a well-established history of alternative venues and artist-run projects. But the supposed safety net of institutionalized education clearly predominates. Many expressed a desire for some kind of contemporary apprenticeship model. Finding a way to cross the generational divide outside of the established institutional frame is a concern.

We met students who have begrudgingly taken on a great deal of debt to be in art school because it does manage to provide the kind of rigorous critical environment it’s not always easy to find otherwise. And we met students who managed to find scholarships and so are able to attend school relatively anxiety free despite some concern over that value of the institutional setting. And we met students who made the decision to forgo graduation school entirely, feel great about that decision, but are faced with the difficult work of a self-organized education.

The challenge is to create some sense of shared purpose among students who have chosen different routes. It’s easy enough for each student to make decisions about their education in the moment, what they can afford, what they’re willing to put up with. The difficulty is to imbue our decisions regarding our own education with a sense of solidarity. Our participation in systems that may help us individually in the moment contribute to the continuing predominance and professionalization of those systems, ultimately to the detriment of the larger artistic community.