In Brief: The Future of Art Schools etc.

THERE ARE TWO principal challenges facing art schools today. Both pertain to the decades-long impact of neoliberalism. The first relates to funding models persistently dominated by the fiction of ‘the market’ as an inviolably rational enterprise. The second, and considering this, pertains to the types of art and culture implicitly deemed ‘legitimate’ and encouraged under neoliberal conditions. 

We have recently seen governments targeting the humanities via their laissez-faire asymmetrical restructuring of university fees. The targeting of humanities particularly impacts art schools whose relationship to academia ‘proper’ has always been ‘complicated’ to say the least. The effects of these impacts are, nationally and globally, already highly apparent even though they vary. Widespread redundancies have already been set in motion across numerous art schools, while a minority appear to be thriving.  

Negative impacts on art schools in Australia, as everywhere else, are the result of principles of neoliberal austerity. According to the austerity mentality, only that which generates profit can be allowed to survive. Market rationalists will always argue that austerity measures are ‘necessary’ because the neoclassical numerical principles underscoring the neoliberal project are innately rational and therefore cannot be wrong. Conversely, the international situation today, heavily impacted economically by the effects of the COVID-19 virus, only highlights how irrational and politicised this allegedly ‘neutral’ economy is. Attesting this ideological bias is the fact that whenever arts lobby groups draw up detailed evidence of what art actually contributes to ‘the economy’, or just how employable art school graduates are, it makes no difference whatsoever to those currently in power.

For producers, neoliberal survivalism means everyone is innately a self-entrepreneur or should be. Artists, and even art students, are implicitly encouraged to see themselves as what Foucault once called ‘enterprise units’. The increasing encouragement to collaborate with overtly monetisable industries, while pretending in a perverse way to embrace the ‘exciting’ yet, in actual fact, retro mantra of ‘progress’, diminishes everything that philosophically distinguishes (the best) art at least since modernity – difficulty, complexity, unruliness, satire, dissent, criticality, ‘negativity’. Channelling art towards something more ‘useful’ (for instance, reliable profits) extracts art from art while eradicating its historical specificity. Linked to philosophy, if art is only valuable because it can pay, then the indigestibility of philosophy is only useful as self-help.  

At least one thing is certain for anyone looking at the world with open eyes: the future will not be neoliberal. It might be authoritarian capitalist which would be even worse. Or, after decades of corporate right-wing rule, it might actually be progressive. If the latter is the case, art schools, which engender manifold levels of intellectual and manual skilling, and a distinct capacity for lateral thinking rare in other fields, will have something uniquely valuable to contribute. 

Alex Gawronski

Published as part of Art Education in Crisis under COVID, Ann Stephen (ed.) ART MONTHLY Australasia, Issue 327, Autumn, 2021.