On Art education

My reservation about the contemporary art world stems from what I see at the present time, which appears to me to be so cerebral that its visual qualities have become secondary. Is this because of societal change? Have we become to expect everything ‘now’ and are too lazy to commit to anything arduous? For instance Art Education - the theorising about visual “Art” in British art schools is, I think, leading to a worrying loss of practical skills. Sadly the resulting conceptual art produced often sounds much better than it looks. Is this because the ‘wannabe’ artists lack both the technical experience and the visual education to create their ideas?

“They have stopped teaching what can be taught and try to teach what can’t be taught”. (David Hockney on Art Schools)

I am sure that this has partly arisen because of financial pressures - it has always been costly to teach craft skills both because of equipment needed and because the student groups have to be smaller. Tragically, because of the decline over many years in the number of these types of courses, there is now a lack of those who have the necessary skills to pass them on to a new generation. Ironically this has coincided with the massive increase in the costs of higher education which has led students to demand durable skills training rather than the ephemeral attitudinising that mostly prevails. I am hopeful that upward pressure from students will in future arrest this downward spiral.

I find it hard to fault the eminent Victorian art critic John Ruskin’s assertion that making art should employ “The head, the heart and the hand”. While I believe its possible to have craft without art I don’t think that you can have art without craft. I am not advocating a wholesale return to the traditional “Atelier” or apprentice system - when it was only when you had learned the craft that you were expected to suddenly awaken your dormant imagination. There is a current imbalance between nurturing imaginative potential and learning the skills necessary to express ideas. Fortunately humanity, from our cave dwelling ancestors to the present, has never been content with mere existence. We have this innate desire to create and (as celebrated by this website) the skill and imagination to make artworks is irrepressible.