Art for art’s sake
Is time running out for freethinking art schools and art students? The warnings have been given, and while some commercial sponsorship and bursaries are in place, they can have serious strings attached, says Veronica Simpson
What's the point of art school? Many art and design colleges will undoubtedly be asking themselves this as the new student intake files in this month, signing up to be saddled with debts higher than most arts graduates could reasonably hope to pay back within the first decade of their professional lives, if indeed ever.
It was also the theme of a day-long feast of perspectives served up at Central Saint Martins earlier this year, as part of the college's aim to engage arts students and supporters in the implications of the UK Government's education strategies - in particular its vicious pincer movement to choke off arts education in secondary schools (by deprioritising arts subjects in its quest to drive up grades for 'classic' subjects) while pricing it beyond the means of most ordinary people at higher education level.
At the event, we were given two glorious examples of where an art school education can take you (or could have taken you, if you'd been lucky enough to enroll between the 1962 Education Act and 1999, when tuition fees kicked in), in the form of guest speakers Dr Kim Howells and Johnny Vegas.
Howells was one of the leaders of the legendary sit-in at Hornsey College of Art in 1968 - a protest against the narrow and elitist gallery system. Via a later career fighting for the rights of Welsh miners, he became a Labour politician and minister under both Blair and Brown, and was chair of the government's committee that oversaw MI5 and MI6. Johnny Vegas's career trajectory wasn't quite so astonishing, though surprising in its own way. There are many art students turned rock stars. Not so many comedians. He considers himself a 'failed' art student (third-class (hons), ceramics) but he knew the value of the training he received: to strive for originality in his work, honing ideas until they become something genuinely new and good. Most vitally for his comedy, he says, 'It taught me to question politics - everything that I see goes through a process because I was encouraged at art school to question.'
Let's face it, our arts schools are not perfect. There's much criticism (pre and post the current crisis) of how little regard is paid to the student experience; I've heard many complaints of tutors being inaccessible, rarely sighted, and incapable of constructive criticism. And there's little training for the real world beyond college either - many design business managers moan of how slow graduates are to get up to a viable commercial speed with their professional work.
Challenge also creates opportunity - as someone helpfully pointed out from the floor at the CSM event: there's no point in shoring up our Victorian arts institutes as they are. We need to reinvent them to be relevant to the new, digital age. But even with its flaws, our art college system is still the best place to develop lateral and critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative and communication skills - the perfect education, you would think, for creating the kind of socially and environmentally aware individuals we're going to need to help steer us through a resource-poor, economically challenging, multidisciplinary, technology-saturated future.
This makes the current government's efforts to kill off the very institutions that can help nurture such highly useful individuals all the more baffling.
Neville Brody, the graphics guru and dean of the Royal College of Art's communication design department, recently shared some new and worrying developments in the education department's attack on arts education. Not only is the Government talking of putting up the interest rate on student loans - a move which Brody described as 'neanderthal' - but they are also beginning to refuse students visas to come and study art in the UK.
Let's face it, anyone who has been to the recent graduate shows of any of London's leading arts colleges knows that the intake - especially at MA level - can be as high as 80 per cent international. Quite apart from what this means for our own home-grown talent pool, if foreign students can no longer come here to hone their fashion/design skills, and fill the university's coffers with their triple-loaded fees, then how many art colleges will be left in five years?
What's more, foreign art students already here are starting to be refused permission to stay for longer than three months after they graduate. This means no more (lucrative) foreign MA students. It also means that all the international talent that gets siphoned into our best art schools will be going straight back to where they came from, rather than enriching our own design and architecture firms with their linguistic and cultural skills. The long-term implications for the UK creative sector's ability to compete with - and in - the rest of the world hardly needs spelling out.
But like a true designer, Brody has already cooked up a potent antidote. He is using his position as president of D&AD to help consolidate the D&AD Foundation as a funder of potentially hundreds of future art students, through bursaries. He's taking the battle to the bigwigs of advertising and film-making and hopefully getting them to fork out a few million to ensure that talented youngsters from all over the UK - especially those who aren't financially advantaged - might also be able to consider an education in film, graphics, photography, art or architecture.
There is now more emphasis within his RCA department on critical thinking and research-based subjects, with courses tailored to the digital age, including 'information experience design'. 'My remit at the RCA is not to create artefacts. It's to create skilled, dangerous minds,' says Brody. Likewise, at other leading art schools, we see the emergence of new courses in 'innovation management' (CSM) or - in response to the emerging cross-disciplinary landscape - an art and science MA (also CSM).
An interesting austerity-era development is the degree to which design-led manufacturers have been stepping forward to boost art school finances, with bursaries and sponsorship. On the one hand, it's fantastic that mobile phone companies (Orange, Nokia), car manufacturers, and jewellery designers (Swarovski) are happy to fund their future design directors in this way. But the future of art schools can't just be about tying students in to industry - or sponsor-funded placements and projects. I talked with one disgruntled MA student who was utterly disenchanted with the project she'd been handed as a first-year student, entirely dictated by sponsor Nokia. That's not what she went to this course, and this college, for, she said.
At the aforementioned What's the Point of Art School event, RCA fine arts professor Uta Meta Bauer reminisced about her days at MIT, when the science boffins in the adjacent building waxed enviously lyrical to her about what a fantastic remit the arts department had, to be able to dream and experiment and create without being tied down to the brief (and expected outcomes) that a commercial sponsor has dictated.
Nigel Carrington, vice chancellor of CSM, said: 'A creative education must be more important than the economic outcome. The creativity of our art schools is the single most important factor that allows us to discover, imagine... and improve our world.
'The overriding point of art schools is inviting our students to discover and celebrate their own creativity. Without that creativity we are less - less inspired, less resourceful, less fulfilled, less socially aware and ultimately less of a society. Without creativity...we are ultimately less human. In that for me lies the answer to the question what's the point of art schools.'
So come on all you furniture manufacturers, textile designers, materials innovators, it's time to get your wallets out: dig deep, tick that corporate social responsibility box and make sure that you keep our art schools and art students afloat - and that anyone who happens to get a bursary from you doesn't then spend three years doing work that serves you well but really doesn't give them any room for self-expression.
We've got five years, says Brody. That's all. And if we can't find another way of funding and inspiring creativity, then there may not be any design schools left to train your next generation of creative thinkers.
