IF MOST PEOPLE were asked, “What is the point of art school?” they’d probably say, “To turn out artists and designers.” It’s a bit obvious, really, but for some reason it perplexes the boss and students of Central St Martins (that’s an art college to the Philistines among you) who had to organise a one-day conference to sort it all out.
The conference, which obliglingly went under the title What Is the Point of Art School? (WTPOAS), featured a number of academics and designers and a couple of outliers, ie, Johnny Vegas, to add some celebrity glamour, and Suzanne Moore of the Guardian, to give it a contemporary media edge.
If you bother to watch the videos of the conference sessions you’ll probably notice a couple of things. One is the incessant use of the words “creative” and “creativity”. That’s fair enough, given that the discussion is about artists and designers who have to be creative, but there’s no discussion about creativity in the specific context of the visual arts. In fact, hardly any time at all seems to be spent talking about what art the students are producing and who they will be producing it for once they’ve graduated. The only time this question is addressed is in a round table discussion involving professional designers, including Sebastian Conran. You could watch most of this material and if you bleeped out the words “art college” you wouldn’t have any idea what kind of institution they’re going on about.
The other thing you’ll notice is that most of the talk is about politics. Politics as in bashing the government, for instance, for raising fees and showing their contempt for everything arty. This is piquantly ironic, given that the opening speech of the conference was given by ex-Labour MP Kim Howells, who, when he was a minister described modern art as “crap” and “cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit”. An art school education didn’t do him any good.
And there was Shelly Asquith, President-Elect of the Students’ Union, describing the government as “a bunch of festering maggots feeding off the poverty of the working classes”, which must have sent shivers down the gilded spines of Cameron and Osborne. It certainly made me giggle.
Unfortunately, Marxist rhetoric of this ilk from the Little Red Book of Student Revolution 1968 and the Students Against Thatcher Manual (1984) is not just stale but completely misses the point. Still, if that’s the kind of huffpuff you need to spout to get on in student politics these days, then Ms Asquith clearly knows her revolutionary, career-enhancing onions.
Then there was politics as in blathering on about neoliberalism, the crisis in capitalism (again!), access, diversity, poor people, elitism, prejudice, being privileged (bingo!) and students complaining about not being able to afford anything (still). I’m grateful they missed out the tree-hugging, whale-saving, multiple-gendered vegan brigades, but you can’t always fit everyone in.
YOU MAY HAVE gathered from this description that the event was, from beginning to end, a typically self-obsessed, self-pitying, leftist whinge-in. I kept hearing everything through the voice of Neil in The Young Ones: “Why can’t everyone go to art college, man?” and “Why can’t it all be free…like, we can tax the rich and the corporations to pay for it, yeah?” Ms Asquith, by the way, did suggest the latter, thus demonstrating once again the unchanging impulse of leftists to spend other peoples’ money.
The acme (or should it be the nadir?) of all this narcissism came with the closing speech by Professor Jeremy Till, Head of St Martins and Pro-Vice Chancellor of University of the Arts, London. I implore you, beseech you to watch it.
Till’s speech was entirely about politics – and he graciously made that plain from the start, just in case we expected at this stage, eventually, to hear an answer to What Is the Point of Art College? After duly admitting his privilege (Eton and Cambridge) in order to absolve himself of liberal guilt, he relieved us of any foolish ideas we may have had (I think he called them paradigms) about individual genius and the consequences of the Enlightenment. Capitalism, neoliberalism, consumerism, are all, according to the Professor, the fruits of the Enlightenment and therefore bad, bad bad. And environmental apocalypse, let’s not forget the green stuff.
Art schools, therefore, should be about the “moral collective” and “contested ethics”, places where people can come up with real alternatives to those blasted paradigms, all “working towards the common good” and presumably coming up with solutions to everything from elitism to global warming. Nothing about art. Nothing about design.
His performance was magnificent in the grandeur of its self-conceit, overwhelming in the depth of its arrogance. I was in awe of the Professor as I watched him, even when I was prodding my screen and matching his high-flown academic Marxoid jargon with invective of a less intellectual character. Early in his speech he had shown his true elitist colours by slagging off “those awful people in pubs, who have common sense and know how things work”, people who don’t see The Point of Art College and resent seeing their taxes pay for it – possibly because they don’t understand the vital need to find alternatives to all those pesky paradigms. People, he said, “now called UKIP”. Fie on those Philistines!
Never have a I felt closer to the earth-bound dullards of the saloon bar. There’s nothing more elitist than an establishment anti-elitist.
I don’t count myself among the Philistines and have no desire to see art schools closed, but if this is the best that they can do to justify their existence to the outside world then they’re doomed. Most parents would not be happy if they knew their children were going off to college just to get a three-year course in Marxist indoctrination, which is, unfortunately, what so many of them do receive these days.
So if art colleges want to persuade people of their worth, I suggest they talk about art and design and leave the politics in the union bar.
This article was edited to correct a misidentification on 24 June 2013.
