Is art education necessary?  Can creativity be taught?  The skills of an artist can be.  Drawing, painting, and sculpture can all be learned, but what to draw, paint, and sculpt cannot.  And now the de-emphasis on skill created by open departments that allow students to try different mediums giving art students the opportunity to discover what they like and how they want to express their ideas.  This may also create artists that know a little about a lot.  And even so, does it matter?  In the age of the art factory where the Jeff Koons and Damien Hursts of the world have other artists execute the ideas.  This puts a formal focus on the concept over the skill.  Image creation has also become easier and more prolific.  With introduction of photography over 150 years ago, the mass production of the camera at the turn of the last century, and now the digitization of light drawing, anyone can make an image and easily print it.  This means many forgotten images of the wife and kids in front of the Eiffel Tower languish on a server waiting to become concrete ink on paper.  Better than taking up real space in a shoebox in closet.  The ubiquity of image making puts more pressure on artists.  Contemporary (with a little “c”) artists need to be more thoughtful, more creative, and more cutting-edge because anyone can snap a photograph print it and frame it.  Anybody can make a video, edit it, and put it up on YouTube.  Some of the best, freshest, movies are their and not necessarily from formally trained artists.  So where does that leave us?  Professor James Elkins tries to explain or at least begin the conversation.

Prof. Elkins began with a very brief history of art education, starting with atelier Method, he went through the French Academy, the Bauhaus, and finally the nameless post-war era. Describing the different educational theories and styles tinged with humor and candor.  Going through each of the different levels of art education from art high schools to the Ph.D., Prof. Elkins compared schools in Asia, Europe, and North America.  He stated that art education is rife with polar conflict between teaching skill and fostering concepts.  This lack of agreement means there is a lack of standards from the first year programs to the newly minted Ph.D programs in Europe and the United States.  The more seasoned MFA, still considered a terminal degree in the U.S., has such a poor description, that he seemed embarrassed to point that he poked fun at it.  Prof. Elkins wants to make sure the inevitability of the Ph.D. programs doesn’t follow the same fate.  Drafted in the 1970s the knowledge of the “MFA Description and Purpose” existence is almost nill.  It is an extremely nebulous and very brief description and in Prof. Elkins’s opinion has little meaning.  Prof. Elkins presentation was about an hour, and he succinctly put his questions and concerns into context.  He seems to be extremely knowledgeable; he should be he as a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Chicago and has written several books on art education.  He wasn’t pompous at all.  He laced his lecture with an accessible humor that equally appeals to artists and non-artists.

His aim over the next week is to work through some of the art education conflicts issues and better understand what art education means, and what standards can be put in place. Though he didn’t think the development of an fine art Ph.D. necessary, he stated that it was inevitable and wanted to make sure these programs were developed thoughtfully. It’s a tall order, but it needs to be done, or at least discussed.

Prof. James Elkins gave the School of the Art Institute’s Stone Summer Theory Institute opening lecture today at the Art Institute of Chicago. An overview of all the lectures that will occur over the next week, the title of today’s lecture was What Do Artists Know?, which also happens to be the title of the whole lecture series that runs from today, September 20 through Saturday, September 26.  The series will discuss, debate, and attempt to define art education.