Conventional wisdom situates the artist as both the quintessential outsider and the keeper of the heart of the matter. In his nineteenth century poem Ode, a tribute to music makers whose stories shape the course of humankind, OâShaughnessy describes poets in one breath as âworld losers and world forsakers,â and in another as âworld movers and world shakersâ (1874). This curious dichotomy endures. Twenty-first century literature and media portray artists on the one hand as dark, troubled, and child-like (Walker, 1993); and on the other as visionary, creative, and socially responsible. In OâShaugnessyâs time, genius and apprenticeship fueled the artistâs soul; todayâs artists seek legitimacy through undergraduate and graduate degrees.
How, we ask here, is the work of artists regarded in the hallowed halls of higher education? Are artistic productions cherished as academic treasures from which we all can learn? Or are they set aside for extra-curricular enrichment after the hard work of learning is done? Is preparation for a career in the arts respected by the academy or discounted as non-academic? And how should we train those who will teach art to our children? Are future arts educators revered or demeaned and by whom? The authors in this volume address various faces, extensions, and resolutions of these postsecondary queries. Our reach includes fine arts, music, studio art, contemporary art, arts education, interdisciplinarity, redefinition, and redesign. In what follows, drawing on relevant voices and themes, I lay some contextual ground.
Roots of Disjuncture
The middle of the nineteenth century marked a period in which the citizenry of the United States was beginning or wanting to recognize itself as artistic. Rejecting the arts and culture as the privilege and prowess of Europe, the developing nation had considered itself both inadequate to the challenge of fine arts and dismissive of artâs association with religion and/or aristocracy. By the late-nineteenth century, however, Americans were beginning to acquire for themselves the skills and aesthetic to enhance industry and to explore possibilities for their own artistic expression (Korzenik, 1987).
A Drawing Act (1870) mandated the teaching of drawing for students in the public schools of Massachusetts and free drawing lessons for the general public. Advocates today argue for art education by citing outcomes as diverse as redirecting negative behaviors, inspiring social responsibility, and raising IQ or SAT scores (Davis, 2008). The rationales for the installation of the Drawing Act were similarly diverse and extended from personal to public benefit. Justifications included an increase in intellectual and moral development and the acquisition of design techniques that would make the country less dependent on Europe for marketable goods (Bolin, 1990).
Europe of course provided the models and the mentors. Museums were being built that looked like Londonâs Victoria and Albert and universities were constructed with Oxford in mind. American Renaissance painters like John Singer Sargent and Abbott Henderson Thayer were going to Paris for their training and applying their skills to a burgeoning attention to portraiture and nature in the United States (Davis, 2005). The American Academy of Dramatic Arts was founded in New York to train actors in realist methods derived from Konstantin Stanislavsky, founder of the Moscow Art Theater (Bartow, 2006); and the earliest version of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, founded by a North American conductor, Ureli Corelli Hill, was advancing awareness of instrumental music by performing great works of European origins (The New York Philarmonic n.d.). The possibility of the United States having the skills and products to generate its own artistic cultureâan idea that had seemed out of reach or low on the list of priorities for a developing nationâwas gaining traction.
It was a hundred years before this rush to culture that President John Adams wrote famously to his wife Abigail from Paris that it was not the fine arts but the âuseful mechanic artsâ that our young country required. Adams explained in that letter that his generation would study politics and war so that their children could study mathematics and philosophy so that their children could study painting, poetry, and music (1780). The rise in arts training, performance, and display in the mid- to late-nineteenth century proved Adamsâ prediction to be true.
In higher education, at that time, Princeton sponsored lectures on architecture given by scientist Joseph Henry; and at New York University, inventor of the electric telegraph Samuel F. B. Morse taught the Literature of the Arts of Design. At the University of Michigan (1852) and the University of Vermont (1858), there were courses in the Theory, Principles, and Practice of the Fine Arts (Morey, 1943). Withal, the arts, architecture, and design were providing the media and methods for the realization of a more aesthetic national self-image.
In the same year that OâShaugnessy was writing his ode to the poets (1874), Harvard Universityâthe setting for three of the chapters in this textâwas appointing its first Professor of Fine Arts, Charles Eliot Norton. Nortonâs educational objective was to refine the sensibilities of the young men of Harvard. His art history course, which focused on the golden ages of art (Greek, Venetian, Florentineâall up to 1600), was enormously popular. But Nortonâs idea to add a practice-based studio art course componentâa structure that would be embraced at other collegesâwas at Harvard, less than successful. It was not Harvardâs intention to âturn out finished artistsâ or to encourage a student âto think of himself as an [artistic] genius.â The student was meant to approach his exercises in drawing and painting in the same way that he approached âparagraphs and themes in English compositionâ (Elfand, 1990, p. 66). Harvard students would study art; they would not make it. The disjuncture between a connoisseur vs. practitioner approach was drawing disciplinary lines.
Harvard may have eschewed the idea of a professional art school, but a decade earlier (1863) Yale had accepted a gift of $200,000 (equivalent to about six million today) to start a school of fine arts. Its objectives would be first to train âthose proposing to follow art professionally as painters, sculptors, or architectsâ; second, to teach art history and criticism âin all its branchesâ; and last, to make the broader community more arts savvy with âloan-exhibitions and permanent collectionsâ (Elfand, 1990, p. 66).
Harvard was also amassing collections and founding a museum, the William Hayes Fogg Museum that similarly would be open to, if not cater especially for, the greater community. According to former Director of the Harvard Art Museums James Cuno, an academic art museum invariably ranks the service of faculty and students over the interests of the general public (Cuno, 1994). While Cuno does not suggest that the academic art museum function without awareness of or attachment to the immediate world outside, its primary purpose is to inform scholarship and train future museum professionals.
The disjuncture between collections of fine art and the interests of the general public perpetually vexes administrators of municipal museums. Unlike their colleagues in higher education, these arbitrators of content and display actively seek to broaden audiences by emphasizing access and education that will perpetuate art museum attendance. Their missions speak to the demolition of elite barriers and a dedication to diverse understandings of culture and of visual art (Davis & Gardner, 1993). Overall, the disjuncture between academic art museums and the general public seems similar if not related to the tension between academic/historical vs. hands-on/practical training in the arts.
Current media sources rank Yaleâone of the countryâs oldest art schoolsâfirst or among the top colleges and graduate schools for advanced study in a range of practical visual art specialties including photography, graphic design, painting, sculpture, and film/video/interdisciplinary (U.S. News and World Report, 2012, 2015). Along with Julliardâa professional school that offers artistic training to talented musicians, dancers, and actorsâthe Yale School of Drama is considered one of the âbest in the worldâ (Acting in London, 2015). Interestingly, one of its founders, George Pierce Baker, began teaching a course in playwriting (entitled English 47) at Harvard in 1905 and a few years later established a lab theater for plays written in the course (Workshop 47). But Baker left for Yale in 1925 to head its first Department of Drama presumably because he could not convince Harvard to establish one (Banham, 1995; Kindelan, 2012; Walsh, 2015).
Half a century later (1963), likening artistic discovery to scientific research, Harvard installed an undergraduate program in studio art (Singerman, 1999). The program was given the science-sounding if arts-lacking title of âDepartment of Visual and Environmental Studiesâ (VES). Another half a century later, in 2015 (fixed attitudes change slowly), Harvard announced the inception of a concentration in theater, dance and media that will include, beyond the expected historical and theoretical aspects, several practice-based courses and attendant opportunities in which students can, âproduce, act, direct, stageâ (Walsh, 2015).
But a lack of reverence for arts making as a serious intellectual endeavor persists. An outraged contributor to a 2005 edition of the college newspaper, the Harvard Crimsonâa student concentrating in biologyâdismissed VES as âVery Easy Stuffâ and said simply, âWeâre not at a vocational school for learning how to paintâ (Kreicher, 2005). One of the chapters in this volume addresses the challenges faced by Harvard undergraduates who select a VES concentration amidst attitudes like this. Certainly traditional boundaries are rewritten when the academy makes room for art-making, but we must also ask how the content of art production is affected by inclusion in a world of research and theoryâall negotiated through words (Singerman, 1999). Though both rooted in the Latin word studium, the terms studio and studyâmaking and doing vs. analyzing and critiquing artâcontinue to challenge the legislators of a liberal arts curriculum.
Current Climate
We have travelled far from the âfiguring it outâ days of the nineteenth century when select colleges were wrestling with measured commitmentsâconsidering whether the arts should be studied to enrich the repertoire of cultured citizens or to build the skills of professional artists. By the 1920s, Masterâs of Fine Arts in studio art would be awarded by the Universities of Washington, Oregon, Syracuse, and Yale. Today, there are over 180 universities and degree granting art schools awarding masterâs degrees in studio art (Singerman, 1999).
Across art forms, the student applying to college in the twenty-first century has an enormous roster of schools to choose from. Options in the fine and performing arts range from non-credit electives at the undergraduate level to advanced degrees in particular art forms at the graduate level. In most mainstream colleges, there are majors, minors, programs, or concentrations in particular arts arenas. And there are colleges and universities that are entirely devoted to the arts. As random examples, art schools affiliated with large universities include the Rhode Island School of Design (Brown), the Tisch School of the Arts (NYU), and Carnegie Mellon Universityâs School of Drama.
The majority of smaller private colleges including Oberlin, Bennington, Marlboro, and Muhlenberg offer majors in music, dance, or theater; and independent specialized schools such as the Berklee College of Music (contemporary music) and the Massachusetts College of Art (visual arts) are dedicated to pre-professional arts training. Founded in 1893, the Massachusetts College of Art is the first independent, and to this day the only free standing, publicly funded college of art in the country. It is also the site of another of this volumeâs essays that explores, in that setting, the disjuncture between art and non-art disciplines.
In sum, at this time, choices for arts learning and participation are available at almost, if not all higher education campuses in the United States. Further, within and across first-hand training in the various artistic domains, there is undergraduate and graduate study in related fields such as arts therapy, arts administration, museum education, and the repeatedly self-justifying and self-defining realm of arts education. The playing field has expanded, but opportunity has not obliterated the lines and strain between the arts and academics.
When it comes to higher education degrees, a Bachelor of Fine Arts is considered importantly alternative if not plainly less academic than a Bachelor of Arts or Sciences. And at the presentâwhen the integrity of a liberal arts degree endures broad debateâthe uninvited voices of arts faculty are conspicuously absent from the fray. Even when imagination and innovation are featured as educational goals, the arts are not immediately invoked. No matter how their content is repackaged or renamed, arts courses are not generally considered apt prerequisites for the college graduate facing the rigorous demands of todayâs workplace. OâShaughnessy reminds us that it is the poets who shape and record the course of civilization; but twenty-first century movers and shakers are looking more to science than to art.
Advocacy
Arts education advocates insist that the arts are essential to the development of enlightened adults and to a thriving society. But mainstream school administrators can hardly find time for arts learning in their already overcrowded schedules. âEverybody loves the arts,â a higher education dean explained to me, âbut not instead of something else.â This is as true for the first grader who learns that writing trumps drawing as it is for the college student whose requirements (the sheer number of courses) for the major in engineering preclude consideration of a minor in theater. While the image of the outsider is not without romance or power, conventional wisdom sets a dreary stage for arts education adv...