https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/12/the-liberal-arts-may-not-survive-the-21st-century/577876/
Yet it can seem that for any concern about the future of liberal arts educations in high education as questions about testing and class and austerities go, there can reliably be a question as to whether or not the higher education in liberal arts isn't itself part of the problem. In some cases there can be polemics to the effect that the master in fine arts has become, basically, a giant scam. Thus Charlie Tyson writes:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-expensive-superficiality/245260
...
One of the glorious features of contemporary art is that any material — tangled museum ropes, used lipstick tubes, untreated lumber — can be made interesting with the aid of a canny framing. (One student brings in a basket of bread for participants in his critique; the program director hastens to explain that the bread is not part of the work.) The ability to position one’s efforts as protest or satire, experiment or dream, is more than glib posturing. What the ritual of critique tests, however, is command of a particular vocabulary, one that emphasizes transgression, resistance, and rupture. An irony is that this insistence on verbal virtuosity privileges certain educational and class backgrounds.
In today’s M.F.A. programs, Fine concludes, "learning to think takes priority over learning to make." But do M.F.A. students learn to think well? Art schools require students to justify and explain their art in highly theoretical terms, but give them no adequate instruction in philosophy, literature, or any other discursive field that prizes subtle distinctions or analytical clarity. M.F.A. candidates are assigned books by Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and other prophets bellowing down from the cliffs of high theory. But the students seldom do more than skim the reading, Fine reports, so as to reserve the bulk of their time for work in the studio. Seminar discussions of these complicated theoretical texts — led, typically, by professional artists, not art historians, literary theorists, or philosophers — do little to explicate the ideas. Students are encouraged to invoke theory, Fine suggests, as a way of claiming authority. The actual texts often remain unread.
The problem, as I see it, isn’t that M.F.A. students are being educated in what is sometimes dismissively called "bad philosophy." We can, and should, argue about the merits of the various theorists in the art-school canon, and about how much theory artists need in the first place. The problem is that this education in theory, supposedly central, is superficial: The thinkers are too often reduced to slogans or catchwords. (Scholars in the humanities are not immune to this kind of posturing, but judging from Fine’s account, it seems rarer there.) That we get artist statements quoted here that begin, "I question modernity, while constantly interrogating Cartesian duality …" — blind lumbering in the dark plains of philosophy — results not from student incompetence but from misplaced expectations.
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The single most significant effect of the proliferation of M.F.A. programs, Fine surmises shrewdly, is as a benefit not to students but to their teachers. Art schools have created a job market for working artists, granting badly needed stability to practitioners. The M.F.A. is a place where the specialized tastes of the art world are promulgated and where ascendant artists claim time to experiment. But it is, above all, a patronage system.
...Tom Wolfe wrote near the end of The Painted Word that by the 1970s art theory had ascended far up its own fundamental aperture and came whisking down, as if from the heavens, as pure theory, literature. One of his insults of the way art education had developed within the United States was with the mock axiom that if he didn't have a theory of seeing he couldn't even see a painting. The irony was not even implicit, Wolfe spelled it out in page after page, that a great deal of what passed for compelling modern art was less about the art itself than about the literary theorizing and philosophy with which the art object was presented as an art object, the proverbial as well as more literal framing contexts within which the art object could even be perceived to be an art object.
Which could be put another way, that the literary processes of branding can take precedence over the art work itself being explicable as a work in visual media.
Now I love theoretical stuff. I sincerely love theoretical and analytical studies, particularly in music. So I'm working on refining a piece I wrote last year about the possibility of temporal/spatial correspondence between the syntactics of ragtime and sonata form because I realize I should include musical quotations from the works I've referenced which I hope to do with some help from IMSLP. I can "tell" you that James Scott recapitulates B strains in some of his work but I should really show you how he does that, or that a recapitulation of a B strain as a conclusion to a ragtime can also happen in something like "Grizzly Bear Rag". I hope to tackle that some time in the next few weeks if I don't end up waiting to do that until 2019.
But I hope you can pick up that working toward a conceptual or theoretical foundation from which to write sonatas in ragtime, one of the immensely popular styles of music in the United States in the 1890s through 1920s, is not "just" a theoretical enterprise. What I sense has been a problem perceived on either side of the academic and commercial art scenes is that each of these scenes in the United States in particular, has seemed to become, in the eyes and ears of many people, far too insular and self-referential.
In a way there's not a lot that can be done to remedy that ... but in another way there's a lot you could do to remedy that if people were willing to restore some kind of synergistic relationship between academic and popular art forms. It's been happening for generations. Guitarists could turn to Villa-Lobos and Leo Brouer as exemplars of such a high/low fusion in classical guitar music. But I don't want to belabor that point with too many historical instances. Ideally you can already think of any number of such instances yourself.
It's not that the idea behind an MFA has to be a bad thing ... it's that it seems there are people who are regarding the contemporary American MFA as having picked up a lot of bad elements.
