Further to this article from The Observer, The Case magazine would like to devote an issue to the nature of morale in today’s Art Schools and Art Colleges.
Art School should be the best place in the world to work… Surrounded by like minded people, teaching those who are desperate to learn and desperately interested in their subject. What could be better?
Is this really the case? The University is fundamentally about writing and the Art School fundamentally about drawing – can these two distinct approaches to education ever be easy bedfellows?
Are Art Schools still the places your mother warned you about? Will the designers of tomorrow live up to the standards set by British Art School education at its best, or has that best been and gone? Do we need to stop banging on about the past, let The Bauhaus go, and re-invent our Art School education for the new millennium.
Or is it simply that academics like to feel hard done by and it was always better before, whether before was 5 years ago or 50 years ago?
The Case magazine welcomes all contributions. The Morale issue will be published in Summer 2008.
The article is taken from The Guardian website:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2255311,00.html
• Issue 01 – Flush
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Comments
‘The people that ran Art Schools used to have faith in Design... now they have faith in marketing.’
‘The future is The University. That’s what we are, that’s what we are a part of, that’s the template we have to work to. Our ‘morale‘ will only improve when we learn to teach to this new structure... perhaps we - the lecturers - need to go and have ourselves a true University experience (a second degree?), then come back to our courses and teach the way we will have learned.’
‘My morale is so low, this is about as much as I can manage to write.’
‘WE SHOULD FIGHT THE ADMINSTRATORS WITH DRAWING, NOT WORDS.’
‘In the public sector we now live in a world riddled with inept, ineffectual middle management and elevated admin staff. A world, Orwelian in nature, where mediocrity is championed and success almost ridiculed. A world of department management teams and repetitive meetings that lead nowhere and resolve nothing.’
‘There can be no such thing as low morale in art schools, because the art school is already dead. There may well be small groups of lecturers sticking electrodes in the corpse to keep it moving.... but it’s already too late. And all this hand wringing about it is simply to do with our guilt. It died on our watch. We did it. When future generations look back and point their fingers at the moment in time when it all went wrong, they‘ll be pointing at us.’
‘I always get upset, though, when someone who has comparatively peripheral involvement blithely cites ‘falling standards’ because I don’t actually think that’s the case – the best students leaving now are as good as anyone I’ve taught. But widening standards - yes – and they verge on/exceed the unacceptable at the bottom of the range... And that, of course, revolves around numbers, and the Government’s – successive governments’ - obsession with the world and his wife and his mistress and his fucking dog and the fucking dog’s fucking fleas all Doing a Degree. And around a substandard quality of secondary and earlier education that will maybe stand as one of the great social catastrophes in this country’s history: WE have problems, but I can only imagine how school teachers feel...’
‘Radicals, activists, free thinkers, refuseniks, rebels and mavericks... occupying buildings, sitting-in, demonstrating, agitating, challenging, frightening... If you don't recognise yourself in any of these, then what else do you expect but low morale and the complete surrender to admin culture?’
‘The only way a magazine is going to help is if we wrap it around a brick.’
‘I can't help but feel that if we spent as much time looking at the positives as we do wallowing our sense of injustice, then we would all be teaching at the greatest institutions in the world. I teach some fantastic students. Their ideas, energy and excitement for the subject constantly knock me for six. That's what's important. That's what the discussion should be about.’
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Britain’s creative future is under threat from the admin culture
that is wrecking our best schools, claims artist
Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
Sunday February 10, 2008
The Observer
The art colleges that gave modern Britain many of its most influential figures - from Antony Gormley to Terence Conran - are riven by low levels of morale that will stop the contemporary art renaissance in its tracks, claims the acclaimed landscape artist Graham Crowley, a former painting tutor at the Royal College of Art.
His views, supported this weekend by art experts and teachers working with undergraduates, are reflected in recent low scores in student satisfaction surveys. ‘Once there were about 10 independent and very distinct art schools in London; we‘ve ended up with the educational equivalent of British Leyland,’ said Crowley.
Crowley, who says he is speaking for many fearful art lecturers, believes the staffing problem inside some the most famous colleges threatens the future of the art world and the wider creative economy.
‘Tutors and course leaders work under conditions that are both stressful and unsustainable,‘ he said. ‘They are undervalued and feel intimidated. Dissent, whether it’s from students, parents or tutors, is unwelcome. A culture of contempt has developed.’
Most of Crowley’s criticisms are aimed at the University of Arts, London, the new joint name for a collection of formerly independent art colleges that each enjoyed a strong reputation. These are Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where Gormley, Conran, Lucian Freud and Gilbert and George trained; Chelsea College of Art and Design, where illustrator Quentin Blake, painter Chris Ofili, and sculptor Anish Kapoor were all students; Camberwell College of Arts, former stamping ground of portraitist Maggi Hambling and painter Howard Hodgkin; and Wimbledon College of Art, where children’s illustrator and author Raymond Briggs and artist Peter Doig honed their skills. The London College of Fashion, a powerhouse of the British couture industry, is now also part of the university.
Crowley points to a lack of teachers and to the fact that film and video students at one college called for their fees to be refunded last year due to alleged ’staff shortages and lack of organisation‘. In several establishments students no longer have a dedicated work space for themselves, he claims, while some have only six tutorials during an entire three-year undergraduate course. The university is bottom of the most recently published National Student Satisfaction Survey, with respondents rating its overall performance at 65 per cent.
A spokesman for the university, which is undergoing radical change and awaits the arrival later this year of a new rector, Nigel Carrington, a lawyer from the world of business, said they were aware of low student satisfaction levels, but had already moved to answer the complaints. ‘I don‘t think the comparison with British Leyland is helpful. We have put in place a number of improvements. It is going to take a bit of time for that to be reflected in the student survey. Arts students are by their nature iconoclastic,‘ he said.
Facilities will improve still further, he added, when Central St Martins moves to a £170m building in Kings Cross, north London. The spokesman also pointed out that all the university’s art colleges are run by artists, but that such a large organisation also needs managers. Recent success was reflected in the fact that a third of all designers showing at the London Fashion Show this month will come from Central St Martins and that all five winners of the trendspotting Jerwood photography prize were from the university.
Crowley’s criticisms are not confined to the University of Arts, London. He sees the institution as a symptom of a general problem that is leading to falling standards while the country relies more and more heavily on producing creative talent. The painter goes on to point out that many stars in other fields, such as entertainment and design, began their careers in the inspirational atmosphere of a good art college.
Camberwell, for example, produced actor Tim Roth and designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, Chelsea gave us actors Ralph Fiennes and Alan Rickman and the comedian and writer Alexei Sayle. The film director Mike Leigh, the actor John Hurt and the fashion designers, John Galliano, Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen are all alumni of St Martins.
Martin Holman, an art critic, curator and a former governor of Wimbledon Art College, supports many of Crowley’s arguments. ‘The sector is certainly under pressure,' he confirmed. ‘It is like a square peg being forced through a round academic hole.’
Holman bemoans the dwindling numbers of top calibre artists involved in teaching and the pressure to produce academic research rather than concentrate on artistic experimentation. ‘Graham is right to say there is a problem with the kind of administration taking hold. There is a damp duvet of administration over the whole thing now.’