Prohibitively high art school tuition operates on two primary levels, one impacting those who somehow matriculate, and the other affecting those who are essentially excluded. I will begin with the former. Setting aside the narrow sliver of the population whose parents can actually afford to pay full art school tuition, the dream of making art involves the reality of massive student loans. If your retort is “So what, I had to take out student loans, too,” recall that the art student’s loans will necessarily be the highest, and their post-graduate earning power the lowest. If you took out student loans you took out less, and you came away with the power to earn more. This is true for even the financially humble professions of teaching, social work, and nursing, and even more so for law, business, and medicine. Art school students fall prey to a quintessential double bind, their cash flow bringing to mind the old Black Flag Roach Motel tag line, “Roaches check in, but they don’t check out.”
This analysis is just a longer version of the obvious irony initially noted above. We don’t really get anywhere unless and until we are willing to stipulate that the price tag on art school is no accident, nor is it because it is just plain more expensive to teach art. Last I checked, pastels and clay don’t cost anymore than books or beakers, art history profs no more than their counterparts in engineering, and the computers used to make graphic designs would seem to carry roughly the same price tag as those used for typing senior theses about Proust. The price of art school doesn’t come into focus without the recognition that art school graduates, saddled with enormous debt, become the vanguard of paying the bills. Seen in this light, art school costs the most precisely because theirs is the most dangerous profession. Dangerous because the bulk of an artist’s raison d’etre is the imagining of other possible worlds, except in those cases when the artist instead exists in order to pay back six figures of debt (plus interest!). Art isn’t inherently revolutionary, just potentially so. Really existing art school exists to quell that potential.
Art school’s suppression of that revolutionary potential is reinforced by its clientele. If you are fortunate enough to attend art school, college loan debt notwithstanding, can you reasonably be expected to turn your art against the very system that upholds your privileges, since these very privileges enable your emergence as an (official) artist? Could you turn your back on the only form of externally granted status that could ever align with your deepest sense of who you are at your core, the only institution that has ever said “Yes, art is important, and yes so are you,”? (All of these things, by the bye, apply in varying degrees to liberal arts higher education, which doesn’t cost quite as much, and which allows you to make a little more, but which doesn’t change the fact that folk like yours truly are implicated by pretty much all of this. It takes one to know one.) Which makes the second level on which art school tuition operates, the exclusion of entire swaths of society from art school, equally as important as the first in the neutering of art. Because those who have the most to gain from social change, from making art that opens up new possible worlds, are those effectively excluded from making professional art. In a society where credentials are everything, art school is the keeper of cred. Street cred may help with sales of your first rap album, but it won’t help you open a gallery in SoHo. For that you need a blurb in the Times, i.e. you need to go to art school.
Many of the teachers and students in art schools would likely describe their work as exactly that imagining of new worlds which I am, a priori, denying them. I would respond that by describing their work as such they are making a sales pitch, that they actually believe it to be the truth and not a sales pitch, and that this in turn makes it a more effective sales pitch. I am, of course, accusing them of inhabiting a false consciousness, which is not in any way a new critique, but is, I would argue, no worse for the wear. Again, the reader is welcome to disagree. But if one disagrees one takes on the burden of explaining how one can make art that is both a commodity and transformational. It says here that the two are mutually exclusive.
I don’t know about your burg, but everyone I’ve ever met in Baltimore who went to MICA (the local art school), now works at MICA. And I would hazard a guess that all the rest of MICA’s alumni work at other art schools. There is an old word for toiling away one’s years in debt bondage: indentured servitude. Art school grads have simply updated it for modern times, making it permanent instead of temporary. (To get a sense of MICA qua institution, consider the following report from the current edition of Baltimore’s weekly City Paper: “In response to efforts of the art school’s adjunct faculty to form a union, outgoing MICA president Fred Lazarus and other administration officials have sent out letters urging adjuncts to vote ‘no’ and consider ‘whether you want to turn over important rights to a union.’” (http://citypaper.com/news/baltimore-city-power-rankings-1.1661057) That these “important rights” are left unspecified is no surprise, given that the only rights the adjuncts could possibly lose in forming a union are the rights to continue giving away all of their power; the aforementioned indentured servitude clearly ain’t just a rhetorical device. But the cover-up is always worse than the crime, and in covering their tracks with a bald faced lie, “The union will hurt you as much if not more than us,” MICA is no longer merely exploiting its workers, it is operating in bad faith. This is an exponentially graver sin.)
My solution: Everyone makes (free) art and no one goes to art school. It’s often said that after the revolution comes, the first thing to do is to empty the prisons. But to start the revolution, let’s try emptying the art schools. And, crucially, filling the streets with art.
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