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2 years ago
NEA/Fed Art Policy Followup Q’s (2nd/final revision)
1. As a working artist do you see yourself more closely aligned with the nonprofit arts sector or with the ‘for profit’ arts field? Why?
I have to maintain relationships with both to survive as an artist. Neither completely satisfies artistic priorities. “For profit” entities of necessity prioritize cash flow, and NPs prioritize programming to mission and fundraising. Corporations dominate the arts field today. They align with each other. I have chosen to align with art, artists, democracy and community, roughly in that order. Except to engage in civilities at openings or other social functions peculiar to the art business, or to introduce within the exhibit context the requisite representational/dimensional auto-content, I have chosen to leave my personal life/alignments out of the picture. As to the why: Reciprocation is the guiding principle in every case.
2. What role(s) do you think working artists can play in arts education and how might the Endowment (if at all) help facilitate that involvement?
Artist education has been a major component of my artist activities. I have taught technical skills in private, museum and school settings (up to and including collegiate level), instructed all age groups from toddlers through elders, in a diversity of communities and cultural demographics, and lectured. I have also engaged in art studies through the terminal MFA, and my art education has been supplemented by: many kinds of work/study jobs, including some at the field’s best support shops; and attendance at many lectures; pursuit of independent research projects; participation in residencies with education components, etc.
By far the best art education method is mentor/master-apprentice transmission. The worst is critique, which - for the decades it has reigned as standard practice - has proved itself an abject failure on many levels, not least being the degeneration of craft competence throughout the artist domain. On another point, artists are wrong to not advocate forcefully for unionized teachers and the other NEA (the National Education Association). The National Endowment for the Arts should expand its material support for visual art apprentice/master programs, but that only makes sense if the Endowment is willing to again define and standardize recognition of American art and reward achievement by individual US artists. NEA apparently can do so for other disciplines, and should do so for visual arts.
The most devastating consequence of NEA’s failure to identify individual excellence and achievement for visual artists - aside from the cost to artist’s lives and livings- is inflicted on arts education. Beuys and Warhol win out: Everyone is an artist, and everything an artist makes is art. This cheerful-sounding mythology constitutes cultural fraud, and disenfranchises hundreds of years of craft tradition and the American artists who cleave to those traditions.
A final comment on college art programs (undergrad and post-grad): Art academies that offer critique-based, careerist (corp/art-org-centric) “practices” as curricula are really Ponzi schemes designed to generate institutional/financial sector revenues. The Ponzi-value is illustrated by schools like Yale’s, which effectively promote exclusive professional networks as feeder systems for the Super Class-oriented art market. With respect to art education and artist advocacy, NEA must confront the gutting of America’s artist “middle-management” – the so-called mid-career artist/educator. The standard corporate anti-labor practice (pushing out expensive but proven workers for cheap, young and underequipped replacements) over the past several decades has not only impoverished the nation’s middle class, it also has adversely impacted the American art ecosystem, to our collective detriment. A cursory review of college art programs reveals the trend’s damage: tenure positions disappearing, education quality down, etc.
