Commenting on the state of art in the academic world, brad brace wrote:

If you should stumble-over dawdling faculty-artists, you'll still notice
a heated contempt for "applied-arts," "self-taught or naive" artists,
and actually, anything created outside the "purebred" realm of
art-academia. Unless of course, some "position in respect of" the
hallowed halls of Criticality, makes a condescending recognition
institutionally safe. Applicable realworld insight and talent are not
tolerated in the bogus collegial cesspool of art-academia. The
outrageous cost of college art education is of little concern;
alternatives are ridiculed or ignored. Blathering professional pretense,
arrogant posturings of simulated art-careers, and woeful tales of inept
administration, are all there is to offer artstudent-victims (and
taxpayers), in a vain attempt to legitimatize the shady dealings in this
rancid, high-art snakeoil.

Illustration: http://www.teleport.com/~bbrace/flim-flam.html

… you gotta laugh… or do you?

Donald Theall, Professor Emeritus at Trent University and formerly
Molson Professor of Communications and English at McGill, is the subject
of an article in the current issue (#25) of the Australian based
magazine _21*C_ (Scanning the Future). The article concludes that: "As
someone who has held his gaze on these adjustments, anticipating the
shift from telecommunications to telematics, and witnessing the
encroaching infiltration of cybernetics into everyday life, Theall is
well placed to evaluate the state of contemporary culture. When it
comes to understanding the global trade in signs, Theall knows where
it's at."

The article declares that he has shown how "The generic, broad reach of
the concept of the poetic is strategic, a response to the perception
that 'the study of communication has suffered by not being more directly
involved with the entire spectrum of the arts of cultural production'.
Furthermore, as Theall argues in his book _Beyond the Word:
Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and
Communication_ (1995), 'the study of all modes of cultural production
have until recently suffered from being carried on in relative isolation
from one another.'" Claiming that "Theall's strategy has been simple
enough: embrace complexity," it is asserted that "He shares the
cyberpunk's taste for hybridity, and the informaniac's conviction that
semiotic excess means an end to the pigeon-holing of meaning."

lonsway replied:

I'm glad that you see your project as the childish lambasting of one of
the only realms for progressive education in this country. Sure, I have
been 'bred' to expect certain accomplishments to arise from my schooling
(Washington University in STL and Columbia University), and certainly
there is no doubt in my mind that there is a lethargy inherent in the
ivory system. But given the absolutely sorry state of education in this
country, I find it hard to believe that there are those who (seem to)
consider themselves worthy of productive discussion and intellectual
pursuit attacking with such glib reactionism the only foundation of
higher learning that is left.

Am I also to assume that you are against the NEA because of its ability
to institutionalize art, against NYSCA because it caters to the academic
artist, against PBS because it projects a certain air of commercialism,
and against the organization of art collectives and cohousings because
they cast the artist into a position where he or she desires to make a
living and deal with the commercialized society on its own terms?

Please at least be mature about your critique. There are those students
who go to a school and appreciate only its image so they can ride the
wave of de rigeur 'art.' These are certainly affected by the problems
you are attacking. But there are those as well who go because there is
a venue for critique and discussion, for support and development.

+ + +

Quoting from an interview with John Baldessari by Christopher Knight of
the LA Times, murph the surf posted the following text (for the entire
interview do a search on Baldessari at http://www.latimes.com):

"Q: L.A. is home to four prominent art schools: UCLA, Art Center, Otis
and CalArts. Today it's highly unusual for an artist not to have gone to
art school. Is art too academic?

"A: The start of that was the era of [Robert] Rauschenberg and [Jasper]
Johns. There was a jump from the image of the Abstract Expressionist,
stripped to the waist with a paintbrush in one hand and a Jack Daniels
bottle in the other, to somebody in a tuxedo with a martini. That was
the beginning of the university-bred artist. Conceptual art is something
that can be taught, because it deals with ideas. Ideas are something you
can read about and discuss. You don't need easels and all that stuff. It
made it a lot easier for art departments to be in the university,
because there had always been the conflict that artists really are not
academics. So now we could have people that have degrees in philosophy
teaching art. Schools love that."

Have I missed something in this debate? Does the ass in the tent that
Brad Brace links to signify a specific school?

This thread about the location of education in art and other areas has
been appearing in a number of places lately and I think it's quite
important.