The questions of how, why, and to what end an artist should be educated have long animated discussions regarding art-school structure and pedagogy. In recent years, the incursion of collectors and curators—and hence the “market” more abstractly—into students’ studios and the increasing professionalization of the creative class have contributed to many transformations regarding the training of artists. This is one of the focal points of Katy Siegel’s wide-ranging discussion of American art education in “Lifelong Learning.” For Siegel, the increased professionalization of the artist contrasts starkly with the diminished career prospects of the current economy. In response to the narrowly conceived professional artist, Anton Vidokle in “Art without Institutions” describes his own efforts to repurpose art education by using the pre-existing model of a school and construing it as something completely different, creating an educational experience that is neither compulsory nor predicated upon institutional tradition.
Important in these shifts is the legacy of post-studio practice. Indeed, beginning in the 1970s, as many artists began to work outside the studio (and often abjured the production of objects in favor of ideas, performances, and time-based or ephemeral projects), education shifted to reflect this reality. The Bauhaus model, for example, based on material experimentation within an interdisciplinary situation—so prevalent for much of the twentieth century—gave way to the cultivation of discourse. New issues arose: What kinds of knowledge and skill were to be transmitted in the absence of medium-oriented, craft-based learning? Did the model of the master and the disciple still obtain?
Likewise critical are problems of legitimation, as the MFA degree began to function as a prerequisite to exhibition and teaching opportunities; even the viability of a studio PhD is up for debate. In this environment, historical models of emulation and originality brush up against the creation of so many autonomous yet networked individuals. There is also the issue of the differences between traditions of art education throughout the world. Pi Li’s “Will the Academy Become a Monster?,” for instance, describes the condition of Chinese art academies, in which the demands of art education, the constitution of departments, and the relationship between artists and students, confront a monolithic and inflexible state apparatus.
The history of art education—the education of artists—in twentieth-century America begins with the mission to teach artists to be teachers and ends with the mission to make artists.1 In the first decades of the twenty-first century, certain aspects of this history remain resonant, brought to the fore especially by current social conditions. But there have been apparently new and somewhat surprising developments as well, visible in the contrasting extremes of the institutional drive towards a PhD in studio art, and the self-generated, informal school—each offering answers to longstanding (if newly interested) questions of how to teach art. Considering why art school—its very ubiquity as an object of consideration—may open a window onto its what. “What” figures art school today throughout the United States and Europe; “why” belongs to a still more global condition. This essay, however, will focus on art school in the United States.
Fine art has long been taught at American public colleges and universities as simply one discipline among many. Students enrolled as undergraduates in these art departments and art schools graduated with medium-based competencies, knowing how to develop photographs, carve and cast sculptures, stretch and gesso canvases, and paint paintings. By contrast, Yale is the only elite university that historically has emphasized the graduate study of art; most others had small, weak programs with no graduate study or even an undergraduate BFA degree, as the artist’s role was too vocational to fit comfortably into the elite university and its image of a liberal arts education. That is, being an artist was both tied to specific manual labor skills and a “calling” (and it therefore remained socially marginal; art was and still is to some extent vocational and so fits more comfortably into public school).
In the past ten or so years, elite schools have turned their attention and finances to their arts programs in general, and to the teaching of fine art more specifically.2 The most visible aspect of this has been the application of a star system philosophy to programs such as Columbia University’s MFA in studio art, with much attention and success, as recent graduates (and current MFAs) got gallery representation, and a general sense of “buzz” in terms of collectors and dealers and art-world personalities attending open studios and exhibitions (effects that seem to be fading amidst conditions I will describe). Still more recently, there has been a push for PhD degree programs in studio art, a phenomenon that already has considerable traction in Europe and the UK. A topic of intense discussion at both art schools and universities including the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and Stanford University, the PhD is a symptom of art’s awkward fit in higher education—and purported cure.
Most flat-footedly, the PhD is the ultimate in academic credentials, a truly terminal degree that would aim to put art on an equal footing with other disciplines in the university. It insists that art school has the same rigor and measurable standards as chemistry or the study of German literature. The anxiety that art be perceived as the equal of other disciplines is one of professional pride and also job security. Tenuring faculty in art has always been a problem; sitting around a table with people from other departments, an art department chair has always had a hard time justifying his support for one of his artists and explaining the professional criteria for evaluation. This perplexity of the university in the face of what artists do is evident in a recent book on the PhD in studio art. The book opens not with the question of what is contemporary art or how best to teach it, but the problem of professional certification to teach art: “It appears that before too long, employers will be looking for artists with PhDs rather than Masters or college degrees. For the best jobs, it will be no longer enough to have an MA or MFA….”3 A surprising number of students already pursue an MFA in studio art primarily because they want to teach, rather than to make art; they don’t see teaching as a fall-back to a real career in art, but as itself a real career in art (although in light of the changing and precarious nature of university teaching, hardly a safe haven).
The most pervasive and longer-term mutual adaptation of art and university has been the (itself much-discussed) emphasis on discourse in and around art: Crits and competence in reading art theory and writing artists statements have replaced developing manual skill in art-school curricula. Related to this turn towards discourse (alternately laid at the feet of conceptual art in the 1960s or the rise of critical theory in the late 1970s) is the current emphasis on research. As the head of the Mellon Foundation opined recently at an arts-in-the-university conference, “Every child is born with an instinct for research … a thrill in discovering various types of order.”4 The sentiment that everyone is born not an artist but a researcher lacks a certain utopian ring, though it conjures the touching image of wide-eyed babes rifling through databases. Naming research as the content of the studio PhD would appear to be a retreat into the ivory tower; the concern that art made in the university would acquire an enervated, solipsistic quality is longstanding. A 1966 report on art and higher education speculated that training artists in the university would make them want to return to the “purity” it represented, setting the conditions for art more “real through verbal description than in the fact of its own existence.”5 At that moment, studying art in a pure sense meant hewing to disciplinary thinking, as opposed to broader social needs. The advance of art framed by Clement Greenberg as serial solutions to a professional problem, not, as Leo Steinberg and others complained, unlike Detroit car design, was exaggerated in school, where the ideas and theories underlying art were stressed, rather than craft or individual passion. But today, the university stands against purity, replacing that value with that of interdisciplinary. For example, Stanford’s proposed PhD in arts practice shifts “the focus away from ‘pure’ creation toward the management of networks, links, flows, translations, and mediations.”6
Art is perfectly suited to this ambition. It is the discipline where one can exercise any other discipline—from cooking to sociology to architecture to biology to theater—free of the normative rules proper to those disciplines, professions, schools. This loosening makes the category of art useful to individuals who want to engage these other activities without really learning them in their material and social sense, and without extended study and accreditation: as amateurs who won’t be judged as architects or actors but as artists. This identification is itself necessarily and increasingly weak. Many younger artists today don’t even want to announce what they do as making art, but as just making, tout court, free even of that disciplinary grounding. The hyper school’s PhD in art recognizes the contemporary artist’s propensity for research and problem solving, but doesn’t try to make the case that contemporary art has a separate discourse and development of its own that itself can sustain the advanced graduate work of artists.7
Finally, reverting to collectivity and laboratory models not only is more comprehensible and serious-sounding to a university; it can also be cost-effective. Art takes up a lot of space and money: everyone needs her own studio; you need table saws and charcoal and oil paint and video cameras and monitors and now also computers. By contrast, the research model advocates shared square footage and classroom time and attention from faculty, directed at groups rather than individuals.
Apparently on the other end of the spectrum from the intensification of professional accreditation is the un-school, or self-directed school, or, to borrow critic Lane Relyea’s term, the DIY art school. Relyea described yoga classes and cooking sessions at places like Los Angeles’ Sundown Schoolhouse, which took place in artist Fritz Haeg’s geodesic dome, schools where students spent long days (and nights) hanging out. These rebellious and anti-hierarchical structures were designed to resist official art schools, institutions condemned for their academic, outdated courses and even more for their commercialized funneling of approved products directly into the art market.8 The new para-schools did indeed resist the former, but often seemed to merely improve on the methodology of the latter aspect of art school. Many became important sites for networking and connection-making, their loose curricula geared to middle-class students/artists who understood the benefits of working outside old-fashioned constraints like medium and disciplines.
The past few years have seen the growth of still more peer-generated schools that are not linked to a “real” academy; they also increasingly lack the serious social capital of the slightly earlier schools (which in the United States were primarily based in Los Angeles, a location where schools of all kinds have always been more central to the art world than New York). “Institutions” such as The Independent School of Art, Public School, The Art School in the Art School, and the Anhoek School are appearing (and disappearing—they are not stable forms) not only in Los Angeles and New York, but also in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Minneapolis; some of them are peripatetic, but not to the extent of Future Academy and other European para-schools that stress global connections and networking. (They are paralleled in museums and curatorial work by what has been called “the new institutionalism,” a focus on education and dissemination rather than conventional exhibitions that attend to the protocols of art history.)
In the United States, these schools tend to have both less official imprimatur and less theoretical rationale behind them. They increasingly deal in more specific (or minor) histories and subjects, from a teacher’s strike in Brownsville, Brooklyn to felt-making for nomads; they often reflect on the form of “marginal pedagogies” itself as subject. Critical theory, the curricular heart of older schools such as 16 Beaver, is one option among many; the distinguishing characteristics are politics that fall somewhere between American self-reliance and anarchism, and also at least some practical training in manual trade skills. Sometimes the skill is even obviously art-related, such as darkroom photography, or the now-ubiquitous life-drawing classes, held as intimate clubs or as open calls in bars. Art students (like those in law and medicine) often have to teach themselves after school the things their actual work really requires. In the old days, it was assumed that for artists this meant professional practices: how to shoot your work, get a gallery, write a statement, etc. Now all of that stuff is learned, formally or informally, at school, and the missing professional, real-life information is more likely to be how to make and build things. Parallel to and overlapping the DIY art school are the informal meets to swap skills and exchange lectures like Brooklyn Skillshare (the name alone speaks of the current US turn to education as vocation). Even the art-school projects range wildly in and out of, beyond and around art—even experimental art—proper, beer-making, Bataille, crocheting, self-publishing, Scrabble.
These skills may be useful or just fun to learn; they also seem somewhat arbitrary choices to facilitate interaction among people, people who are not so much like-minded as belonging to the same sector of the same socioeconomic class, and may prove to be useful professional contacts (schoolroom as golf course). The most peer-driven, anti-hierarchical classroom, whether real or self-driven, might eschew the teacher as Beuysian demagogue only to replace him with endless, pointless dialogues—or “conversation,” to use current art-world lingua franca. That’s the worst possible scenario. I tend to see the ongoing popularity of the homemade school in the US city more charitably, as a matter of survival: finding other people to depend on when it comes to locating a studio, to help you pick up hours as a preparator, to lend a hand in building a frame for a large wooden sculpture, or moving that sculpture across town. Taking the measure of the education of the late modern artist as recently as around the year 2000 meant describing a shift in the historical aim of art school, from making art (1940s) to making artists (1990s)—the slide from signature style to personal style. Just a decade later, the individual artist and his subjectivity no longer seem to be the pedagogical object of art school, but rather collaboration, and even for the individual, the context of a life lived, with others.
Thinking about the two extremes of hyper schools and amateur schools points out a number of shared conditions: the exteriorizing of the artists by getting rid of studios, working in teams or collaborating, as well as the intersection of different disciplines. Most basically, both extremes radically extend the time spent in school. Those conditions are symptomatic of the more general condition of the large submerged middle between them: all the art schools and departments filled with art students and teachers.
These developments in art education reflect a still broader perspective: changes in the role of professionals generally. For one thing, the dominant or desired image of the professional has been changing, as I have briefly hinted, from a buttoned-down man in a gray flannel suit to a casual, flexible creative person. This outside-the-box CEO or knowledge worker has been discussed at length in critiques of neoliberal reimagining of work, including its implications for art. Much has been made—celebratory and derogatory— of popular author Daniel Pink’s catchy line “the MFA is the new MBA,” quoted in a New York Times story.9 What the MFA as MBA and the PhD as MFA have in common is the instrumentalization of “right brain noodling”: research, collaboration, transdisciplinarity, an emphasis on both means and ends, process and accountability. As the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities put it recently, art education can promote “21st Century Skills, or habits of mind, and include problem solving, critical and creative thinking, dealing with ambiguity and complexity, integration of multiple skill sets, and the ability to perform cross-disciplinary work.”10
The changing nature of the professional naturally implicates its opposing term, the amateur. The amateur is the new professional: The provisional, flexible, and self-invented is the new condition of business. The appearance of the savvy and well-connected nonprofessional, hailing from the groovy un- or de-institution, reflects this; If you’re so under the radar, why are you in Artforum? The instant apotheosis and embrace by big-money collectors of educational art collective Bruce High Quality Foundation (which has its own university) reveals the truth of this career strategy. As the Bruce High Quality Foundation slogan goes, “Professional Problems. Amateur Solutions.”
As the concept of the professional has changed, so have his material conditions. More quotidian, and less popular a topic than the putative shift to the knowledge economy is the clear decline of the professional in American society. Rewards for doctors, employment possibilities for lawyers—the quintessential professions—have been fading in recent years. This aspect of “social reform”—the removal of all moneys, not just that of the classically working class, to the top one or two percent—is leading towards the disappearance of what in the United States is called the middle class. Middle-class security and status have evaporated: a degree earned in a field, a lifetime working in that field for a single employer, an upward trajectory of stability, saving, status. Now instead there is the absence of stability, replaced by flexibility, and the constant imperative to learn new skills, to give oneself over to the “retooling process” (as Bill Clinton called it), perpetually starting over as an amateur and having to figure out the new, next thing. The shape of life is changing. Long after we gave up on the Hegelian line of progress in history, art, or even painting, belief in the individual narrative of increasing accomplishment and success has lingered on. There was nothing sadder in the 1950s than peaking young, an artist who had “fallen off,” in Greenberg’s damning slight to Pollock. Now, whether one thinks of it as retooling or deschooling, the “trajectory” of the individual career or life looks more like a flat line. (With the upside being, you’re never too old.)
All of these factors put pressure on the social value of education, and the possibility that higher education is itself obsolescent is an argument surprisingly being floated by the far left and the right in America. School, as one of the last bastions of public, putatively universal social rights, is being attacked both ideologically and by budget cuts throughout Europe and the United States (where the project of privatizing state universities is being furthered by their evisceration). As education becomes both less universal and more standardized, it hews increasingly to 1970s left-wing critiques of school as an instrument of social subjugation and reproduction. Most global is the fact that the very point of school for so many—not the long-gone ideal of the well-rounded gentleman/citizen, but even the more modest goal of attaining a middle-class life through a good job—is no longer in any way guaranteed by higher education. Conservative professors, pundits, and CEOs are perhaps quicker to see this than liberals, and hold up the examples of Bill Gates and other non-matriculators as having made more rational (and yet passionate!) decisions than the legions of plodding college-goers. This amounts to even more stress on the ability of a few spectacular (or spectacularly lucky, or spectacularly vicious) individuals to become super-rich. A stodgy ivory tower education, it is implied, may not prepare you for the brave new world; more neutrally, it may just not be cost-effective. At least for now, undergraduate and graduate degrees do make a statistical difference in income, but costs are rising exponentially, and the benefits (basically, decent employment) for attending college are dropping in relation to not attending. It is hard to imagine this heading in any other direction any time soon.
How do the people formerly known as middle class, the ones raised with certain social expectations, caught in this shift, react? There have been large and violent protests across Europe; in the United States, there have been protests in California, largely driven by low-income students who seem to have a better grasp of the threat. The reaction of the middle-class culture has been more inclined towards the broad glamorization of skilled jobs such as cook and bartender and even traditional handicrafts. Whether one considers them to be manual or service work, these jobs have acquired the patina of cultural capital formerly reserved for professionals (without the accompanying stability). In part, work that needs to be done is thus rendered dignified (or at least cool) for those who expect work to be dignified. And in part, often, there has been a passionate return to pre- or early industrial practices like cheese-making which require not formal education but apprenticeships and vocational training. This same retro-passion for institutions and practices that suddenly appear obsolete and therefore attractive also applies to print culture; as newspapers and magazines migrate to the web or just disappear, we have experienced a revival of those antiquated forms in a variety of intellectual and social niches, art among them.
One might start to think of school in the same way: No longer burdened with being a central and viable institution, it is similarly available as a subject for artists in a very material way. One might see the art schools that pop up everywhere young people gather as in some ways akin to the broadsheets, off-print posters, newspapers, and magazines that they are producing en masse. In the familiar Benjaminian trope, the old medium becomes the subject content of the new one. As discussed above, for younger artists the role of student-participant can take the place of art, whether they are in self-formed schools and/or in “real” school: with radically dispersed and even random-seeming subjects, self-consciously holding lectures and workshops primarily points not to any pressing curriculum but to school itself. (Like post-studio theories of art, this educational emphasis stresses the social rather than the individual as the maker of art—should we call it “pre-studio”?). Theorized as transpedagogy or deschooling, teaching and learning—the practices of schools—morph into making art in the work of mature artists such as Tania Bruguera and Pablo Helguera.11 (Again, this has correlations in the educational activities of museums and other art institutions, where lectures and educational events have become much more self-conscious as formal objects, experimenting with forms like Pecha Kucha, the super-short Japanese presentation of twenty images in under seven minutes.)
It also affects older artists in their roles as faculty. For the major European figures in this respect, following the powerful example of Joseph Beuys, the role of teacher is much like that of the avant-garde leader of a social movement, even if the models of learning are not necessarily grandiose. There is a more subtle and widespread change in the nature of artist as teacher, which stretches broadly throughout the major art schools in the United States. People no longer find it odd that someone like Mike Kelley would teach even after his career was financially sustaining, assuming that art school was a fecund arena even for a productive, successful, and nominally anti-establishment artist, for vague reasons like the “energy” of being around young artists. If the class pictures that Michael Smith (acting as his everyman character Mike Smith) takes every year with his University of Texas students are unusual, both moving and creepy, it’s extremely common for artists to talk about the integration of their teaching and art-making—and not just in job interviews. A myriad of artist/teachers like Liam Gillick and Fia Backström are known for teaching classes and for making art that depends and draws on local social dynamics of group making, with an unstable line dividing the two. Ernesto Pujol typifies this blurring in describing himself as “a contemporary artist who sees no difference between my studio and my teaching practice (they form a seamless legacy)”; it may not be an accident that this is in fact the first sentence in the first essay in the recent book Art School.12 In the past the choice has been primarily either to model being a “real artist” for students, even if that meant being taciturn, hostile, or solipsistic, or to gradually stop showing and then even making art. The modernist self-reflexivity once reserved for asking, “what is painting?” is now directed at school.
School is still not completely synonymous or continuous with life—it represents and embodies a particular interlude in an artist’s life. The “bubble” is what Hunter College students call it.13 What do they mean? They live in Brooklyn or Queens, and when in Manhattan for school/studio time hardly confine themselves to their urban “campus.” They are referring to a moment in their lives when school and school loans provide temporary respite from a life of full-time employment and/or worrying about money; while in school they can work only twenty hours a week (or whatever part-time looks like today), and still survive. Other students at fully-funded programs often don’t work at all. What school gives them is “space,” as one SAIC MFA student put it. Real space—an accessible studio in a central urban location—time space, and head space. Most broadly, art school is a place to think about what one wants to do. Most narrowly, it is a place and time where the art student has a studio, exhibits his work, and receives intense critical attention. Quite straightforwardly, art school is the only opportunity most artists have to behave in a discipline-specific manner—to be artists. While the former aspect is valued and accounted for by new developments in art school, the latter is less and less crucial.
The question then becomes: space between, amidst what? That space is the “and” between a “before” and an “after” that are less and less different from each other. If in the 1990s, faculty at the coolest art schools prided themselves on treating the students entering their schools not as students but as people who were already artists, one might say that today when artists leave school, they are still students in some sense. Without the acquisition of a finite body of professional knowledge or the promise of a career—which, to be honest, art (unlike law or medicine) never really held out—before and after aren’t really so different, lacking the post-degree shift into professional life or adult status, and the money that has historically marked those life passages for the middle class. For most, school brings no magical metamorphosis, whether a transubstantial and internal conversion, or a Lana Turner-style discovery that transforms the artist’s social status.
But while the instrumentality of school may never materialize for most artists, the potential pleasure of school itself— the pleasure of potentiality—and so the value of prolonging that pleasure as long as possible, remains certain. It’s the pleasure gotten from something that doesn’t work. From obsolescence and consequent openness. Even from the lack of a guaranteed job waiting at the end. There are positive aspects to the new trajectory offered by the crumbling of institutions. In a funny way, there is freedom in the way that artists were supposed to be free: poor, piecing together a life, but not driven by a narrative of success and failure. Art school can’t say this, of course, without violating the belief system of higher education. But it’s something school offers, nonetheless.
Notes
1 As brilliantly detailed in Howard Singerman’s book Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
2 Witness the ArtsEngine conference at the University of Michigan on “The Role of Art-Making and the Arts in the Research University” (May 5, 2011).
3 James Elkins, “Introduction,” in Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2009), p. iv.
4 http://chronicle.com/blogs/arts/mellon-foundation-president-asserts-1-culture-not-2/29304.
5 The Visual Arts in Higher Education report, undertaken by the College Art Association (published by Yale University Press in 1966), cited in Matthew Israel, “A Historical Effort, an Unparalleled Wealth of Ideas,” in Susan Ball, ed., The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association (New York: CAA, 2011), p. 176.
6 Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Michael Shanks, “Artereality (Rethinking Craft in a Knowledge Economy),” in Steven Henry Madoff, ed., Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), p. 143.
7 Thanks to Lane Relyea, who generously read this essay in progress, for this observation.
8 Lane Relyea, “All Systems Blow: The Rise of the DIY Art School,” Modern Painters (September 2007), pp. 80–85.
9 Janet Rae-Dupree, “Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain,” New York Times (April 6, 2008).
10 Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future Through Creative Schools (Washington, DC: The President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, 2011), p. 28.
11 Irit Rogoff “Turning,” e-flux (November, 2008); Tom Holert, “Art in the Knowledge-based Polis,” e-flux (February 2009); Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, eds., Curating and the Educational Turn (London: Open Editions, 2010). There have been a number of conferences as well, including, “You talkin’ to me? Why art is turning to education” (July 14, 2008) ICA London; and linked conferences at New York and London (at MOMA and the Serpentine Gallery, 2009 and 2010 respectively) on “transpedagogy” and “deschooling.”
12 Ernesto Pujol, “On the Ground: Practical Observations for Regenerating Art Education,” in Madoff, op. cit., p. 2.
13 Thanks to the group of Hunter students who met with me in January 2011 to talk about their experiences in art school, as well as the SAIC students whom I spoke with during the course of the academic year 2010–11, particularly Nicholas Cueva.
The Editors (TE): One way to start would be to ask you about your relationship to art school, as well as to its increasing professionalization.
Anton Vidokle (AV): Well I dropped out. I never finished.
TE: You never finished school?
AV: No. It’s a funny story: I was at graduate school at Hunter College. And I did the coursework; I did a thesis show. I wrote the thesis and submitted it. It was accepted, but then I found out that in order to actually get my degree, I needed to put together all of these papers in a specific kind of a black plastic folder, which could only be purchased at this one stationery store. The secretary told me that the department chairman kept the folders in a closet in his office and that the folders had to conform to the dimensions of its shelves. I was idealistic and thought that the MFA meant something … but it came down to a surreal formalism. I never got the folder or the MFA!
TE: That’s bureaucracy.
AV: Right. Education is one part of the professionalization problem. The whole art field is becoming professionalized in a very, very narrow way. There’s still the old Marxist problem that professionalization is really about a division of labor and division of labor is about alienation. It’s kind of a contradiction that a lot of people go into the arts because they want to be a little bit less alienated from what they do, but more and more what is imposed on artists—and it comes both from market sector and public sector—is the increasing professionalization of their activity.
For one thing, I think this transformation has to do with the disappearance of bohemia, which was an intellectual space that allowed for a fluid communication between poets and artists and dancers and writers. And that went out the window sometime in the 1970s; it just vanished. And the visual art sphere just became much more self-reflexive. On the other side of it, it’s interesting to look at artist initiatives like the original White Columns, which was started by Gordon Matta-Clark as a garage on Greene Street in New York. Any artist basically could have it for a day to do whatever she wanted: use it as a studio or a social space or whatever else.
Of course, if you compare that to what White Columns is now, there is a pretty radical difference. And I don’t mean to pick on White Columns, since I think it goes across the spectrum. Artists decided that to legitimize themselves, they needed to mimic existing institutions and become more institutionalized, so that’s another strong influence on what’s been happening.
TE: How and why did you decide to take up the school as a model for your own practice?
AV: For me it was actually very different because the art school was a model—but it was not only the art school. When we started working on Manifesta 6 [the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, which took place in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2006], the reasons were pragmatic. We looked at the situation in Cyprus, and realized that we needed to deal with the fact of its postcolonial legacy. The ruling power, Great Britain, actually did not want to create cultural or other kinds of national institutions because it would have undermined the colonial project. After colonization ended the island immediately plunged into ethnic tension, which is something that the British created through their divide-and-rule colonial strategy. So now there are writers and some filmmakers and artists, but they lack a basic cultural network that we take for granted. I grew up in Moscow where there was a very strong network of art academies, art museums, opera houses, theaters, and a well-defined cultural sphere. In Cyprus it was almost completely absent.
We then thought about what it meant to have a biennial in Nicosia for 100 days. What would happen when the exhibition structure disappears? So we thought that maybe the most productive thing would be to use the resources we had, and to use this occasion, to start a temporary art academy, which could potentially become permanent if local people wanted it to continue. I started working on this and doing more and more research, when I came across all of these earlier models. For one thing, it’s really uncanny how embedded teaching and being an artist really is. And not just now, while some people support themselves by teaching, but since the beginning of formalized activities of artists—you know, being a teacher, having apprentices, getting students, starting a school, or a class. And there was such a proliferation of that at the beginning of modernism because I think people understood that you could not continue teaching with the same methodology. Completely, radically different practice and new situations had to be developed. And this may be banal, but the Bauhaus is so interesting because its tiny initiative had a disproportionate effect in terms of changing curriculum and the whole structure of art education in Europe and the United States. Black Mountain College was also very inspirational.
I also thought that what was so attractive about what happens at school, is that the different kinds of activities that comprise the sphere of artistic work, are more integrated than within the exhibition sphere or other of aspects of a professional life of an artist. It seems in the exhibition context the discursive part is always inevitably marginalized: It’s always put in the basement somewhere, as an afterthought. Research is disregarded completely in favor of display even though recently there’s been this kind of fad of artistic research; but one has to be a bit skeptical.
In taking up the school as a social form, the idea was to see if it could actually create a situation where these different elements came to exist in a more balanced way. So that’s basically the interest in education. I don’t teach, I never taught, and I’m not really interested in that. I think that with unitednationsplaza or nightschool what I keep doing is taking existing social forms, like a video rental shop or pawn shop, and use them as kinds of shells for other kinds of activity.1 It’s the same with a school—school as a kind of a concrete social formation that could be used in a different way as space and object of artistic practices.
TE: When you think about the form of a school do you want to reorient the structure of that form? It’s hard to think of learning as not being hierarchical in some fashion. The traditional model requires that someone has more knowledge than someone else.
AV: I was not so much concerned with the politics of education as I was concerned with the politics of exhibition and conditions of production for an artist. So nightschool did not represent a reversal of roles. There were the people that gave lectures, there were the people that listened to lectures, there were students, there were speakers … so it’s not a political project in that sense. Somebody actually needs to transmit knowledge. Things are not equal because we’re not equal: intellectually, by way of experience, by way of talent, even. But a person in a position of authority need not abuse that authority.
Plus you have to realize that we’re not dealing with a school that one is forced to attend. As much as education is a right, education is also something that we are socially forced into—one has to be educated to function in society, so it’s not something that everybody does voluntarily. It is compulsory. I fully understand the power of conflict, because if you don’t want to be in a class and there’s this asshole that’s talking down to you, that’s something that makes you want to rebel. But when you’re dealing with a situation that is completely voluntary—nobody had to come to nightschool, nobody had to attend unitednationsplaza—people only chose to be there because they wanted to. There were no grades, and these sessions had absolutely no bearing on the participants’ careers. There are completely different motivating factors that bring this particular group of people together, which might again be closer to an exhibition in its radical openness. In an exhibition, you can leave at any point you want, you don’t have to look at the work if you don’t want to … nobody’s forcing you to do any of this.
TE: But how do you balance that with the opposite problem: having more students wish to participate than you could accommodate? How did you select students?
AV: Well there are a couple of structural things here. The idea of the core group of participants started with Manifesta because it was on a small island, where—counting both the Turkish and Greek sides—maybe sixty or seventy people have specific interests in the kind of discussion offered by this kind of programming. Sure, for the opening there would be 10,000 people flying in from abroad, but they would leave after three days and then we would be there for 100 days with empty rooms. So we tried to restructure this in a way that we actually get people to come and commit for three months to experience the duration of this program. We also tried to subsidize them being there. So there were several thousand people who applied, and we couldn’t provide for all of them, so we chose about a hundred. This had to do with our economic capacity alone.
When Manifesta 6 was canceled I decided to realize my part of the project independently in Berlin as unitednationsplaza. Most of the people who were supposed to be part of the school on Cyprus came to Berlin instead at their own expense, which was very special. We had no means of supporting them; they came on their own, and some of them stayed for one seminar, and others stayed for months. This was really interesting because it reproduced the radically open nature of an exhibition, where we dealt with a drifting audience. But then if you think about the totality of the project, it became important to have somebody who saw the whole thing because there were thematic components that moved from one seminar to another. The core group involved with nightschool got a chance to experience the entire thing. And you know the selection was fairly random there’s not much you can tell from a one-page statement of intent. Some of those people were great, some of these people were not particularly interesting, but that’s just kind of the nature of this. We asked the applicants not to send images because it wasn’t really a school for only artists. The idea was to have a combination of participants, some curators, some art historians, there was an investment banker…
TE: It seems that you believe that unitednationsplaza worked better than nightschool?
AV: Yes. The difference is in the museum.
TE: How would you differentiate between the institutional aspect of unitednationsplaza—especially by the project’s end—and working with another institution as such? nightschool already had a sort of cache, something built upon what you’d established in Berlin.
AV: Well thank God for that, because otherwise it would have been completely squashed by the New Museum and their agenda. But still the New York version was really a compromise compared to what was possible in Berlin and most of those things are really simple: When you deal with durational processes such as education, you have to be able to continue talking as long as it takes to discuss whatever needs to be discussed. It is hard to work with arbitrary hours—ok, it’s 10:30 so you have to close the doors—so even the temporality of the thing was radically different. In Berlin there were seminars that ran until 3:00 in the morning. And look if there is something urgent enough to talk about, that keeps people up until 3:00 in the morning, it’s so incredible, you know. Also what was radically different was that in Berlin we didn’t have to spell out the rules of the place or effect people’s behavior. After Berlin, being in the New Museum felt a bit like a jail, imposing limits on one’s physical behavior through regulated movement and consumption. For example: In the beginning we were told that we could not bring water into the auditorium—a kind of a bureaucratic prohibition without explanation. Some of those lectures were two and a half hours long, and you simply need to drink. Then after a month, suddenly they decided to do a tequila party at the end of the seminar, so it went from no drinking to drinking hard liquor … typical institutional schizophrenia where everything pretends to be a kind of a law, but the fact is that there is no rational explanation for this; it’s completely subjective.
And maybe the most important difference is that in Berlin one of the key elements was that there was no clear limit to what degree audiences or participants could enter the project and how involved they could get. I mean, they could essentially become lecturers, they could become presenters, they could make an artwork and display it there. Of course in the New Museum you could see the limits right away, which short-circuited the project by telling people exactly where the limit of their involvement was from the start.
TE: So what did you do with that? You must have worried about that from the outset for the nightschool project.
AV: Well I realized that it’s not going to be as good, but I thought that the benefits outweighed the flaws. The reason why I agreed to do it is that I used to work in the New Museum a very long time ago when Marcia Tucker was the director and they were on Broadway. I used to help them install art exhibitions and I remember from the time that New Museum used to have a fantastic publications program and Brian Wallis really focused it on publishing. Under Dan Cameron and even more so now, they ignored their own intellectual legacy, so this was an opportunity in some way to bring that back to the museum.
TE: How much do you think the actual city determines the success of such a project? What is determined by place?
AV: I do think that there are different kinds of art contexts and certain places that are less market driven and much more ideological in nature. For example in the Middle East, some artists become successful on the market and some have careers in commercial galleries, but they don’t really care about this all that much, because what is at stake is something else, which is much closer to ideology, to some kind of production of national culture, to upholding certain kind of values. It’s just a different valuation system. This also has its own limitations because a lot of times it becomes a very local conversation.
TE: So in your thinking about this, how do you differentiate teaching from school, or are these terms necessarily…
AV: Well school is just an excuse. That’s what I mean by a form or a shell.
TE: But could teaching be that too for you or is that somehow different?
AV: Yeah because I would be in the position of a teacher and I really don’t want to occupy that position. I’d rather be a student.
TE: And of course these roles constantly shift.
AV: There are moments where someone has more, and you sort of give or vice versa, and then you receive, and I think that’s something very interesting, this exchange of knowledge. Certain situations afford that better than others and a traditional classroom or art school is not necessarily the best place for that. To finish the point about institutions from before, it seems that you need such a delicate balance to make all this work: just the right amount of institutional structure, to sort of give it a format or a system to work with, but not too much that it becomes repressive. And you need just enough people interested but maybe not too many before it becomes like a real “thing” and then it has to become professionalized.
For me it clearly needs to end. I mean, I was not interested in starting a new institution. Instead, the idea was to make a temporary project. There were certain objectives, like a certain kind of curiosity—if you do it like this would it actually work? And then sometimes we answered these questions. I think for me it was not necessary to continue with this. I mean somebody else can continue something else, because when you continue doing something past the point of urgency, it just becomes like formalization. I guess the most interesting part is really the experiment itself.
TE: So how does e-flux journal relate to any of this?
AV: Very directly. The journal is very much an extension of unitednationsplaza and nightschool. It’s printed to reach much broader audiences, because for the schools you had to be in Berlin or New York. And I suspected that there were a lot more people interested in the kind of conversations that were taking place there, but they were inaccessible for them. So the journal idea was just to take it one step further and to develop it as a kind of a textual platform that could be accessed from anywhere in the world. It’s less of a conversation because it’s more of a one-way communication, but it gets the ideas out there, it circulates the ideas.
TE: Editorially, when you think of the journal, within this sort of extension of the school, what type of audience do you conceive of reading it?
AV: From the start we didn’t want to publish exhibition reviews. You know we wanted to have an art journal, but I’m afraid that it’s becoming less and less of an art journal and more something yet to be defined, some kind of general intellect publication or something like that. But we simply could not find the kind of writing about art that we were particularly interested in publishing right now; so much of it was too academic. There is a certain kind of writing about art that I love, historically, you know, like Paul Valery, or even early T. J. Clark, but somehow writing about art also got so professionalized and so formalized that I don’t feel the kind of richness or depth that would make me want to say well, it’s urgent that we publish this, it’s urgent that people read this. Whereas a lot of theoretical texts and political texts that deal with art and culture in a way impress a sense of urgency.
Our original idea was triggered by this strange failure of an experiment of Documenta 12 [2007]. They wanted to do this journal project—documenta journal—which I thought initially was brilliant. They were proposing to give substantial space and resources to hundreds of art journals from all over the world because art journals are kinds of think tanks. Then they just went in the opposite direction and instead of asking these publications what is urgent for you to think about, what is urgent for you to publish, we’re going to tell you what you should think and write about, and in fact we’re not even going to fund it or translate it. You have to pay for it yourself. So they basically monopolized the budgets of this entire sphere for self-serving topics. In the end it was almost nothing. All I saw there was a big table with some magazines strewn on it … and it made me very angry and it made me think that we should really try to do something. The resulting project is not too set on an editorial agenda, but we reach out to people, to thinkers, that live in very different locations. We ask what is urgent for them to think about, and make that available to our international readership. And this is the editorial direction that we’ve followed the last couple of years and will continue.
TE: And is an international scope essential to this?
AV: Absolutely because I think it’s an international conversation at this point.
TE: Where do you distinguish knowledge and information?
AV: Well to me knowledge always had to do with understanding. Information is just information if you don’t understand it; if you don’t understand it there is no knowledge. And understanding is really something that is so contingent on the subject, right, because it requires an understanding subject. So I think the two things are really kind of pretty different, and I don’t know how to produce knowledge because only the thinking subject, understanding subject, can produce it for themselves. It seems to me that I can only produce information, hoping that it finds an understanding subject.
Note
1 The unitednationsplaza was a one-year project held in Berlin in 2007. It followed the cancelation of Manifesta 6 by Cypriot officials. Unitednationsplaza maintained the model of an open school originally planned for Nicosia, but smaller in overall scope. Nightschool continued the tradition of unitednationsplaza in New York; it was held for most of 2008 and parts of 2009 at the New Museum.
Criticism of Chinese universities from scholars in a variety of fields has grown over the past several years. The main focus of this criticism has been the question of power and its distribution in university administration; in the humanities, for instance, there is the basic moral problem of independence and autonomy in scholarly research, while, in the sciences, there is that of national resources primarily supporting pragmatic disciplines and “bureaucrat scientists” to the exclusion of others. But perhaps such questions are, at times, only the surface of the true problems at hand.
The Chinese education system has experienced change on a massive scale since 2000, manifested in the fluctuation of number and size of individual universities. In order to keep pace with the accelerated speed of economic development, the state initiated large-scale university reform, the fundamental reasoning of which intended to integrate and consolidate existing educational resources in order to make their operations more effective. Under this directive, a large number of small-scale specialized schools with their own advantages and characteristics were merged into large-scale comprehensive university and institute systems: Take, for example, the Central Academy of Art and Design, a highly specialized and accomplished design institute founded in the 1950s that was merged into Tsinghua University.
Because all Chinese universities theoretically belong to the state, the realization of such projects is not difficult. Minister of Education Yuan Guiren began to admit in 2011 that the greatest disadvantage of the educational reform of the past decade has been the standardization of education: The universities have begun to lose their defining characteristics in terms of the distribution of disciplines and training of talent, among other issues. Although Chinese art schools differ from general universities in some ways, the recent wave of criticism has revealed a variety of ills and abuses here as well—problems that are often overshadowed by the continued expansion of campus facilities, the introduction of new majors, and increased enrollment numbers.
The most defining characteristic of the Chinese art academy that emerges in comparison with other universities and educational institutions may be that, under the current state education system and because of the effects of the art market, those employed as professors often also maintain separate identities as artists with a degree of economic independence. Views of the matter vary according to perspective: This economic independence can either offer creative autonomy or cause conflict between artistic ideals and the sustained transformations of the academic spirit, thus forcing the artist to retreat to his or her own world.
At the same time, the state seems to lack a critical standard for the evaluation of art schools. For most universities such a standard of success might be determined by the percentage of students able to find work within a year of graduation, the number of instructors whose work merits accolades at a national level, and the frequency of essays or research published in state-owned periodicals or journals. According to such a standard, the employment rates of the art schools would be the lowest among all other majors and departments in general universities, while national recognition from government awards and state-owned periodicals appears to instructors engaged in contemporary art as a form of mockery. This mockery, of course, goes both ways: A professor undergoing evaluation will find that an exhibition at MOMA is less significant than one at a provincial art museum, that the Venice Biennale is worth less than the national exhibition held every five years, and that art criticism published in any venue other than a state periodical may as well not have been written at all.
Art schools in China previously enjoyed a certain number of privileges because they were managed directly by the Ministry of Culture, but, following the guidelines of university reform, they are now fully managed by the Ministry of Education. Because of this background, the academy finds itself squeezed between free artists and conservative bureaucrats; at times attempts at balancing these two sides result in expanding the scale of the school and raising enrollment numbers in order to seek the favor of the official system while, on the other hand, developing programs in new media and experimental art to temper the dissatisfaction of professors.
With our academy beaten into such a corner by government norms and quotas, we may have forgotten the basic role of the university within our cultural ecology. If we still believe that universities are systems for the storage and production of knowledge, it is with no small measure of regret that we find art schools functionally deteriorating into repositories of selective memory. Rather than representing the realities of current transformations in art, they choose to focus on phenomena legitimized only by their own partial criteria.
Two climactic moments in recent memory frame the situation of Chinese art education, occurring respectively during the mid- and late 1980s. Most artists active in the art world today graduated between 1985 and 1986, and their activity leading up to and just after those years has become known as the 85 New Wave movement. Later, the student movement of 1989 produced in those who would go on to graduate that summer a special quality, as well as the school of cynical realism. These two peak periods in the art schools were able to occur in the 1980s for several reasons: First, the education system, obliterated by the Cultural Revolution, presented itself in that moment as a blank slate; and, second, students of that era typically entered the academy only with great difficulty and after many years of experience living in society at large—they were already linked with social realities in innumerable ways. As a direct consequence of the 1989 student movement, however, schools facing a shortage of instructors refused to hire artists or professors who had engaged in protest activities. Even more significantly, they also developed a complete set of systemic measures for control, including the eventual university reform program and procedures of evaluation mentioned at the outset of this essay.
Now subject to forms of control far stricter than those of the 1980s, our schools are no longer an important agent in the creation of new art; at present, they lack both standards and a stable grounding in reality. They produce value judgments linked to the retention of power and focus on their own choices, but do not consider the origins of their values or their relationship to society. In fact, concepts of contemporary art production initiated as early as 1979 have been unable to fully enter the academic system of these schools. The artistic products of the past three decades are reduced to the status of decoration within the national educational rubric, which seems to have been constructed in something of a hurried panic. These new concepts appear rather as images, broken into fragments and scattered through the syllabus of art education.
With the passage of time and the marketization of education, many successful artists have been invited into the academy, including both some who drifted abroad in the early 1990s and other contemporary painters who have achieved significant commercial success. The choice of specific figures is often random, often depending—like the Chinese political system itself—on personal taste. In this context, the organization and educational transmission of art and artistic production is based on a series of exclusions centered around a certain group of people and lacking any rational premise. Even for those invited into and employed by the academy, without the systematic and scholarly work of coherent organization they too will be reduced to the reproduction of certain symbols and schematics. Because the fundamental educational methods and systems have yet to change, the symbolic meaning of the entry of these artists into the academic fold is greater than any substantial value they may contribute; at times the image of successful artistic practice they offer actually encourages young students to study a certain “science of success,” copying imagery and symbols from their mentors but failing to constitute a methodical and general concept of culture.
Despite years of reform, the educational system of the Chinese art schools has failed to change. In contrast to the Western education system, the greatest defining characteristic of the Chinese academy may lie in the fact that its disciplines and majors of study are divided according to media, including ink painting (or Chinese painting), oil painting, printmaking, sculpture, and so on. Since 2000, the academies have expanded to include new institutions in design, architecture, and public art in accordance with education reform and marketization, merging previously distinct departments into new institutions focusing on the “plastic arts.” But such changes have not incited transformation in terms of how training works within these institutions: Our mode of training continues to assume as its core task the mastery of a particular medium and skill in the plastic production of form, utterly lacking in terms of any training on a conceptual level. For this reason the academy in China does not emphasize attempting to break down the barriers between disciplines, but instead produces a new set of traditions by which students are recruited and tested based on their skill in modeling existing forms. This has caused the ossification of system and spirit alike within the academy.
Even as these schools become rigid and atrophic in spirit and structure, however, they are rapidly expanding in scale. The trend of expanding enrollment first spread to art schools beginning in the 1990s as institutes sought new sources of revenue, a wave of expansion that was not accompanied by any genuine democratic or educational reform. Its only real function has been to encourage the proliferation of cram schools aimed at applicants hoping to pass the academies’ still-rigorous entrance examinations. Now numbering in the thousands, these training centers—veritable concentration camps—allow students without high school diplomas who seek to become “successful artists” to adopt the rigid tastes of the academy two or three years prior to actually entering its halls. Rather than fueling creativity by exposing these students to fresh artistic sensibilities, such classes provide three-hour sessions on sketching, coloration, and production according to existing school standards. From the perspective of the academy, students can only form their own perspectives after mastering these skills; from the standpoint of true art, on the other hand, thinking no longer matters once these standards have come to control the mind.
This trend toward expansion also raises questions about the pedagogical direction of the academy. We excessively focus on cultivating “useful” talents, often forgetting that “useless” talents are also important to society. A democratic society requires democratized education, but this does not give universities the authority to use technique to blot out thinking. The emphasis on technique at the expense of thinking has allowed enrollment to increase tenfold over the past thirty years, but the increase in instructors has been limited by the exclusivity and conservatism of the institutional academic system. This has not proven an obstacle to the training of students in foundation courses like sketching, coloration, and drafting for two years before making them master the standardized language of a certain medium and a certain genre—a method of training that cultivates not the thinking of the student but rather a particular sensibility of technique.
Under this model, the discussion of thinking within the academy becomes inappropriate and inadvisable, because such thinking cannot help but lead to suspicion of the entire education system. Art has become increasingly democratic, and strong artists have more opportunities than ever outside of the academy. Even artists within the university system focus more on their identities as artists, not instructors—the latter can only lead to a discussion of technique without thinking. Consequently, the education offered by these institutes comprises only verbal instruction; the hands-on, personal mentoring component has faded. This latter component has now been transferred to personal friendship, which occurs only outside of the academy and occasionally even then.
Indeed, the very possibility of teaching by example is disappearing. In order to alleviate the tension between simultaneous growth in enrollment and the sealing off of the educational realm, our art schools have often joined the newly constructed “university cities” formed by campus relocations to the rural edges of major cities, as has occurred in Guangzhou and Chongqing. We might suspect that the large-scale removal of university campuses to suburban areas involves an intentional model of quarantine or imprisonment, and can confirm with some certainty that it functions as such at least on a symbolic level. The art schools, many of which have long histories, were previously located in the city centers, and this central location guaranteed an ability to listen and perceive within artistic practice. With the expansion of the scale of education, however, these urban campuses are no longer sufficient for ballooning enrollment, and the government is unwilling to make available more land in the same area.
In the past ten years, most of the art schools have moved to the urban fringe for the sake of space to grow. But as campuses have grown in size, they have also moved further and further away from their instructors. Under the old economic system, campuses in the city centers functioned with high efficiency, serving as spaces for learning and for living for teachers and students alike. Now, instructors are left in the city while students are cast out to the fringe, connected only by one shuttle bus at 8:00 in the morning and another at 5:00 in the afternoon. This peculiar geographic phenomenon means that students’ activities, spaces, and perceptions are as constrained as their thinking. Their worlds are limited to grassy suburban scenery and three-hour sessions of standing straight to sketch live models in their studio classes. They are connected to the real world only by a limited version of the internet in which even Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866) is filtered as pornographic material. We might fear that expecting them to obtain any kind of valuable or real experience from such sources—anything other than the glib sarcasm of netspeak—is an exercise in futility.
Further complicating the issue, art schools use hastily established programs in “new” and “experimental” disciplines in order to advertise an ostensible ability to keep up with the times. Those that attract the most attention are the programs in experimental art and new media art: The former is used to educate students in practices that differ from contemporary art executed in traditional media, while the latter is used to develop art in all manner of comprehensive or mixed media. Both are reduced to concepts of media and medium rather than emphasizing the substance of experimentation and cultural negativity. Experimental art and new media appear open but actually constitute little more than a fig leaf for the ossified academic system; that much of the experimental art program is engaged in painting, for example, seems strikingly inappropriate. As such, experimental art programs have become Installation Departments and new media programs have become Video Departments.
More importantly, the revelation of any resolute cultural attitude or artistic motive within the scope of such “new” or “experimental” programs would make them immediately incompatible with the academy as a whole. For this reason, experimental art can only ever extend within the framework of “experimentation,” a word that, in Mandarin, fails to capture the halo of cultural investigation and exploration but rather implies immaturity and imminent cancellation. New media, on the other hand, has become another name for the creative industries, laying undue emphasis on the practical capabilities of art. What is required is not a concept or thought but an idea—a modular, key idea. Faced only with this requirement, experimental art and new media fail to develop in any systematic way; without the ability to preserve even fundamental knowledge, however, what more can we ask of them? These programs ultimately provide training in the use of various software and facilities, which students learn as if they were memorizing characters or learning brush strokes—hardly the way to engender true creative inspiration. To the contrary, these majors only serve to further shape students into useful if thoughtless cogs in a commercial machine that understands exactly how aesthetic talent can be made useful.
Despite significant economic progress in recent decades, China is actually becoming increasingly conservative in both culture and politics, leading to the ossification of the education system among other problems related to the spirit of cultural preservation and innovation. Just as economic growth has encouraged this conservative and stubborn pride, expansion of the universities in terms of scale and facilities has managed to obscure the inherent conservatism of the education system. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we must continue to ask ourselves: Will the academy become a monstrosity? With a massive infrastructure, advanced constitutive facilities, the ability to repair its injuries, and the will to reinvent its likeness according to changes in the outside world, there is nothing it cannot devour. Remaining imprisoned of its own volition, however, it lacks both thought and soul. We must constantly and anxiously ask: What can we do?