Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century

I don't have any new work for today but I still want to keep the blog active so I figured I'd pull a few quotes from a book I recently picked up. Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century. It is a collection of essays by different authors detailing different views on approaching an art education. I'm still reading it, but so far its been very enlightening since I only have one perspective concerning my own Education at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. This isn't a review of the book but a a handful of quotes that I highlighted during my reading. These quotes are all from different authors, and like the book, they represent not one opinion, but many. Hopefully it will serve as some food for thought.

"The Issue of Audience is not raised enough while looking at student work in art schools. Therefore, by omission, it is usually assumed that the work is being made for a gallery context, and this assumption becomes self-fulfilling. Educators should guide artists to help viewers through their works complexity. This is what art students find most difficult to actualize. They themselves do not always know how they arrived at their own images, so they are unsure of what information is necessary to give people. And yet the amount of 'information' revealed by a work of art is the measure of how much power an artist gives to an audience. (10 Ernesto Pujol)"

"...we are living in a society where the profession of the artist (unlike that of the architect) is not protected, and anyone can try to become known as an artist without nessecarily having attended an institution that grants a diploma. (17 Thierry de Duve)"


"Now, as ever before, education suspends the student in an environment that is meant to isolate him or her, to be exclusively a site of learning and analysis, of experimentation exempted from the urgencies of the outside world. Paradoxically, the goal of this isolation is precisely to prepare students for life outside the school, for "real life". Yet this paradox nonetheless is perhaps the most practical thing about contemporary art education. It is an education without rules. But so called real life, where we are subject to an endless variety of improvisations, suggestions, confusions, and catastrophes, is also finally without any rules. Ultimately, teaching art means teaching life. (27 Boris Groys)"

"It is not right to say that making is secondary and thinking is primary. (66 Robert Storr)"

"...the work of art is not just about making art but also about making the conditions and initiating the networks of solidarity and sociality that enable the making of art. (76 Raqs Media Collective)"

"Words are spoken, ideas are set in motion, and these float, like pollen, in the summer air until they land on receptive ears or are forgotten. (93 Ann Lauterbach)"