A postscript (and continuation) on the dubious value of art education

The conversation around art education that got rolling last week among various blogs including this one has picked up a further thread courtesy of Gabrielle Moser, who is herself just starting a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture at York alongside those same contentious studio-based PhD candidates. As someone with an insider’s view on the situation, she raises a number of valuable questions:

“At present, all of the PhD candidates at York, in both art history and visual arts, are women. That demographic tidbit alone raises all kinds of interesting questions about what motivates these PhD applications and why women are more likely to enroll in advanced degrees. What are men artists doing differently? Is it just that, socioeconomically, they continue to have greater advantages as professional artists? And what is happening in the contemporary art world so that this level of specialized education seems appealing and necessary to so many artists, art historians and critics? Is it a scarcity of jobs that makes university positions seem so appetizing? or is something more significant at play?”

The fact that York’s visual arts PhD is essentially an Amazonian tribe does beg scrutiny, especially considering that the parallel programs offered at Western includes a precise balance of male and female candidates. The question of which is the more disturbing scenario - one where all places go to women or another where a proactive effort kept the gender balance even above other considerations - can’t be easily answered by an outsider such as myself, as any guess at the university’s motives would be just that: paranoid guesswork, at best.

As for whether a scarcity of jobs is adding appeal to the PhD, I would have to answer with a resounding ‘Hell, yeah.’ The job market in Canada is flooded with MFA graduates, many of whom undertook that degree for the explicit purpose of teaching their discipline at art colleges and universities. I’m one of them, and I still meet undergraduates all the time professing the same career goal. There simply aren’t enough teaching positions for everyone, and if the PhD offers a competitive advantage in that field (and I can only assume it does) then it’s well worth an artist’s time to add that extra abbreviation to their name. It’s a scenario that rather dangerously brings the issue back around to the exploitation of underemployed artists already feared by Roberta Smith and one that risks making the PhD a commonplace pursuit when it should, ideally, represent the highest level of scholarship.

While Moser is seriously concerned about the sociological, political and economic conditions that are making a PhD in studio art such a hot commodity, her interest was seemingly sparked by James Elkins’ Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art, which she recently reviewed for C Magazine. I had somewhat yearningly mentioned said book in my last post on this topic, but Moser does us the added service of linking to Elkins’ webpage for the afore-mentioned book. It’s no substitute for getting my greedy little hands on the volume itself, but Elkins does provide some explanation of the contents that provide a good grounding for the possible conceptualization of the PhD:

“In the book, I argue that it remains deceptively easy to talk about what artists know, and even how they might be taught, but very difficult to talk about artist’s knowledge in places where making is also part of the experience. Analogously, it is crucial to find ways of addressing the relation of university life and the act of making art, as opposed to the variegated and often fascinating ways of talking about the relation between the university and finished art.”

A Field Guide to Observing Art, opened last week at the McMaster Museum of Art (more on this show later this week)

As one of a good number of artists who first undertook her training in a university rather than an art college, I can fairly say that the university provides a context for art-making that differs from a more intensive studio program, one that comes closer to the idea of the artist-as-thinker that I vaguely waffled about in that last post. Access to resources like the McMaster Museum of Art’s permanent collection, the medical school’s anatomy lab and well-stocked libraries covering all the disciplines taught at the university had a definite impact on my practice as a maker; I understand that collaborations with McMaster’s engineering school have become ever more common in the years since I graduated. Art production as a fusion of academic and applied disciplines - as illustrated most recently in A Field Guide to Observing Art, McMaster’s current exhibition of art adapted from scientific methods - is just one possible path of inquiry for the artist engaged in doctoral research.

Ultimately, though, there is a need to remember that the traditional purpose of the PhD is to conduct scholarship that results in a new body of knowledge, which would make the PhD in studio art an ideal opportunity to explore the essential questions raised by its very existence in these early days. It’s quite possible that the very difficulty of understanding the knowledge specific to the act of making art is precisely why the work of a PhD in studio practice needs to be done.

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