The history of Postmodernism is a history of willful indebtedness. This has been playing out between the art market and the institutions of art education over the last forty years. The institutions of art education, by being willfully indebted to the art market, have limited art’s agency within the market and, by extension, its potential to educate.
Visual art has, throughout history, had an educational dimension; it intends to communicate something so that its subject and its presentation may transform its audience. Think of religious scene painting for example. The Baroque academies ranked the genres of painting based on their supposed educational value. History painting tops the list, followed by portraits, with landscape and still life at the bottom of the list.
Clement Greenberg described the project of Modernism as an inward turn, a move toward self-consciousness. It’s tempting to describe the abstract painting that Greenberg championed as a shift away from the educational imperatives of art. But even he admitted otherwise. He said: “Modernism provides a critical commentary constantly adapting to kitsch pseudo-culture.”
The paintings of Ad Reinhardt make the point. We can understand his work as a polemic against rote learning, against the narrative build up of knowledge. But they are still actively educational. His work may fly in the face of monkey-see-monkey-do pedagogy, but in doing so it promotes an auto-didactic model of learning, the model now advertised by most art schools.
Reinhardt was himself a professor at Brooklyn College. His lectures, or “un-happenings” as he called them, consisted of slides compiled across cultures and historical eras, drawing out a history of ideas without recourse to narrative progress. In his drawing class students were asked to draw a self-portrait each day, on the same piece of paper, erasing the previous drawing before each class.
Reinhardt’s ideas finish off Modernism and anticipate the Postmodern era. This new era, one that will be defined by willful indebtedness both culturally and economically, if we can still make the distinction, begins in 1958 with the advent of the credit card.
In the arts, this willful indebtedness is first characterized in 1953 when Robert Rauschenberg creates Erased de Kooning. Reinhardt’s drawing program of self-erasure is replaced by the erasure of a “master.” There is no drawing, past or present, only indebtedness. The age-old training program of copying the Old Masters is not so much reversed as distilled to its essence.
The Scull Sale at Parke-Bernet, now Sotheby’s, on October 18, 1973 marks the beginning of the contemporary art market. The sale went forward for the same reasons they always had: death, divorce, or disaster – in this case divorce. But in the wake of the record $2,242,900 take for the evening, all fears for the viability of the contemporary art market vanished.
Christie’s head auctioneer, Christopher Burge, described the new market paradigm this way: “We are running out of earlier material, so our market is being pushed closer to the present day. We are turning from being a wholesale second hand shop into something that is effectively retail. The shortage of older goods is thrusting newer work into the limelight.”
As opposed to the work of dead artists, the value of works created by living artists has an uncertain future. There is an inherent risk built into this market. Much more so than works by the dead, contemporary art is a futures market, a concept democratized by the introduction of the credit card.
One of the chief ingredients that makes corruption possible is naïveté on the part of the artists. Take Mark Rothko: The Marlborough Gallery was able to hide his real sales numbers from him through a few simple bank transactions. They effectively swindled hundreds of thousands of dollars from him in his lifetime. It wasn’t until after his death, and after they tried to swindle his family out of their inheritance, that any of it came to light.
Artists’ financial naïveté didn’t change with the advent of a market for the contemporary. At the conclusion of the Scull Sale in ‘73, Rauschenberg allegedly punched Robert Scull telling him, “I’ve been working my ass off just for you to make that profit.”
There were warnings. Allan Kaprow, in his 1961 essay “Happenings in the New York Scene” wrote:
Julian Schnabel’s career began in 1978. His first one-man show with Mary Boone in 1979 sold out before the opening. By ‘82 he had a retrospective of four years of work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and by ‘87 he had a retrospective at the Whitney, a month after the stock market collapse.
Despite a plummeting Dow, the art market seemed invincible. In 1990, John Baldessari commented on the collapse of time between exhibition and auction resale.
In 1987 Hans Haacke’s On Social Grease came up for auction at Christie’s. It was the first work of his to appear for resale. Next to the work, displayed on a pedestal, was the contract for the piece. The work went for $90,000, more than double the Christie’s estimate or, for that matter, any previously sold works by the artist.
Allan Kaprow wrote this essay while teaching at Rutgers from 1953 to 1961. The Department of Fine Arts at Rutgers, like many schools across the country, benefited from the 1944 G.I. Bill, which subsidized higher education for veterans. The Bill required schools to offer “professional” degrees (the BFA and MFA), regulated by accrediting agencies.
Norman Rice, Chairman of the National Association of Schools of Design said in 1963:
“The pressures on the independent schools have made them all conscious of the competition of the colleges. The substantial reasons for this transformation are not hard to find: after the war and during the flood of subsidized students, “being on a list” was a passport to G.I. Bill participation and hence survival. The lists were lists of schools the office of education had heard about; and its sources were the accrediting agencies, state, regional, and professional.”
A professional degree, with the magnitude of its tuition and its organization around professional taxonomies, assumes that a career path exists after graduation. In the case of MFA graduates, the two markets advertised are the teaching market and the exhibition market, but the great majority of graduates will not find success in either.
These new professional degrees have risen in cost along virtually identical lines to those of other professional degrees. Would-be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and architects take on upwards of $200,000 in debt with the expectation that they will be able to pay it off by working in their chosen fields. Today, the professionally degreed artist does the same despite the low pay of teaching jobs and the low probability of equivalent success in the contemporary art market.
But the anti-professional affectation of art schools is more deeply embedded than that. It arises in the early ’70s from a shift in art-pedagogical strategies newly emphasizing language in the mode discussed above in the work of teachers.
In 1967, Hans Haacke began teaching at the Cooper Union. He is largely responsible for the school’s emphasis on critique and its general abstention from “professional practices” or discussions of the market. His approach has been taken up across the country by the generations of faculty following him.
On the West Coast in 1970, CalArts began the Post-Studio Class, a class developed by Allan Kaprow and John Baldessari and now taught by Michael Asher. These artists, strongly associated with the more recent consideration of the dematerialization of the art object, developed the Post-Studio Class out of this originating anti-market strategy, despite its proven amenability to the contemporary art market. This class is far and away the most legendary aspect of the school’s curriculum.
This attitude has the ironic effect of creating the illusion that the contemporary art school is a free space, unaffected by the market (unlike the Parsons approach which admits it is), while the fact is that these pedagogical methods are, at the root, a response to the rapid expansion of the contemporary art market beginning in the ’70s and persisting to this day. Art pedagogy remains willfully indebted to the contemporary art market as it was understood at its inception.
The work of Joseph Beuys is perhaps the best example of how indistinguishable arts education and the art market can be. By setting up a system whereby his discrete works are understood as relics of his activities as an educator, the collapse is made complete.
In 1969 Beuys said: “To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to explain yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren’t very important to me anymore.”
By 1979 Beuys mounted a retrospective at the Guggenheim. His waste products and not-very-important objects have become historic documents collected privately and by museums across the world.
Why? When as Kaprow said: “There is no overt pressure anywhere. The patrons of art are the nicest people in the world. They neither wish to corrupt nor actually do so. The whole situation is corrosive, for neither patrons nor artists comprehend their role…”
At its best, the pedagogical tradition started in the 1970s can help lay a critical groundwork that may help artists respond with agency to the market. But the professionalization of schools has effectively propagated the opposite. Schools have defined a debt-ridden path whereby artists are not encouraged to forge a productive engagement with the market, but rather to assume a predefined role within it.
If we believe that art has important things to teach us about the vastness of humanity, then we must seek an approach to the education of artists that does not conscript them to the status quo of indebtedness. We should eliminate accreditation and professional degrees from our existing art schools and forge new unprofessional models of art education.
Some portions of this text are unattributed, but come from the following sources: