AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

A very interesting article by Marjorie Garber.

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Higher art
Universities should become society's great patrons of the arts
By Marjorie Garber | October 5, 2008

WHEN THE SCULPTOR and pop artist Jeff Koons came to Harvard
University's Carpenter Center last semester for an advertised
lecture, the hall where he spoke was jammed to overflowing, and
people had to be turned away at the door. When Spanish cinema
director Pedro Almod€ ¦óvar spoke at Harvard a few years ago, a crowding
crisis was averted by the decision to hold the event twice. Similar
turnouts have greeted the artist Ed Ruscha and architect Maya Lin.

A decade or two ago, it might have been the celebrity philosopher
Jacques Derrida who was the big draw on campus, and before that, say,
a poet like T. S. Eliot. Today it is more likely to be someone like
Almod€ ¦óvar, or choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, or Christo
and Jeanne-Claude, or Art Spiegelman.

This is an era of what could be called the "visual intellectual."
Students on college campuses and members of the general public flock
to hear - and see - addresses by filmmakers, artists, and performers.
Cultural attention, and cultural primacy, have shifted to encompass
art installations, the moving image, technology, and performance.
Phrases like "visual literacy," "aural literacy," "digital literacy,"
and "media literacy" are increasingly common.

But although artists and performers are highly prized as visitors to
colleges and universities, the kind of work they do has not reached a
comparable importance in the curriculum.

Art and higher education might seem a natural fit in many ways, but
they have a long and uneasy relationship. The arts are often still
consigned to a secondary role within universities, sometimes viewed
as not intrinsically intellectual, or not intrinsically academic.
Even when a university invests significantly in the creative arts,
and offers an array of courses in painting, sculpture, creative
writing, and performance, many scholars and academic administrators
remain unconvinced: Arts do not seem to lend themselves easily to
the "tenurable" standards of other university subjects.

What should the role of art be in the modern university? Today, art
often serves as what business calls a "loss leader" - an appealing
product offered at a nonprofit-making price in order to attract
buyers. A college or university can advertise its dance or theater or
musical groups, or its art classes and galleries, with handsome
photos on the website and in the brochure, while at the same time
reserving its major fund-raising efforts - and major donors - for
science laboratories, international affairs, or sports teams.

It may be that the time has come for the university to become a
patron of the arts, embracing and funding the actual making of art on
a new scale, and bringing to bear all its institutional traditions of
judgment, peer review, and freedom of ideas. An open-minded
patronage, providing courses taught by the most talented artists - in
the same way that the university seeks the most talented
philosophers, psychologists, and physicists - could change both the
way we learn, and the way we encounter the world.

What would it mean for the university to be a "patron of the arts"?
For one thing, it would mean raising and channeling funds, from
individual donors as well as from national and independent
foundations, to enable creative artists to teach and work within the
context of the university. It would mean providing appropriate
spaces, budgets, and materials. It would mean building instructional
staffs with the rank and clout of professors (whether their
appointments are renewable or tenured), rather than largely adjuncts
or visitors. And it would mean having the institutional confidence to
assess creative work as work: admirable, difficult, challenging,
controversial, field-changing.

To make the arts a significant part of the standard university and
college curriculum would require new and expensive spaces and
materials, and - equally challenging - a rethinking of what
constitutes academic work. But of course, this was once true also of
training in the applied sciences, which were relegated to specialized
institutions. Many "applied" fields, from computer science to applied
math, were once not thought of as part of a general education. Today,
excellence in the sciences is the proudest boast of many liberal arts
institutions - and backed by substantial funding for professors,
laboratories, space, and graduate students. Whether art practice is
considered as "pure" or as "applied," its relevance to a broad
general culture will depend, as do all other fields, upon how well,
and how seriously, it is taught and learned.

The making of art, as well as its history and criticism, belongs in
the university. Art gives pleasure, and it provokes thought. It is
both sensory and intellectual; it intersects with history and with
culture. Nothing could be more central to the life of the university.
If universities become art patrons, boosting their spending and
integrating the arts into the main intellectual mission of the
school, they would dramatically improve the educational experience
for all students. The cross-disciplinary collaboration embodied in
much contemporary art is good preparation for the interlinked world
of knowledge and work that they are about to enter. And unlike some
other kinds of work produced in and by the university - scholarly
monographs, databases, certain kinds of experiments or equations -
works of art can be seen and heard, experienced and discussed, and
sometimes even joined or inhabited by all students, faculty, and
members of the public.

In the "arts and sciences" that form the basis of a broad general
education, the word "arts" is a shortening of "liberal arts," the
traditional academic curriculum that includes literature, philosophy,
history, languages, mathematics, and art history. Art-making, by
contrast, was long considered a craft, or recreation, rather than
part of the intellectual core of instruction. Creative and performing
arts were studied in liberal arts colleges and universities as part
of history and culture, but not as practices that in and of
themselves opened up the mind to new ideas.

Students interested in training as professional artists often elect
to attend conservatories and art schools, like Juilliard, Berklee,
CalArts, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Increasingly,
universities and colleges have developed partnerships with
conservatory programs, as both Tufts and Harvard have done with the
New England Conservatory of Music, offering programs that combine
dedicated training in the arts with some elements of a broad general
education. While terrific for those students who choose them, in
effect these programs still outsource advanced work in the arts,
rather than integrating it into the central life of the university.

Creative arts deserve a central place in the university curriculum,
along with the traditional humanities and sciences. Like liberal arts
scholars, artists are deeply engaged in the world of ideas, in
breaking new ground, presenting, disputing, and vivifying new ideas
in visual, aural, and tactile form. And as with scientists, artists'
work is theory in practice, marked by repetition, experiment, the
exploration and testing of materials and technology, and the
imaginative as well as the actual configuration of time and space.
Because of the kind of work they produce, artists today often know,
and need to know, a good deal about the full spectrum of the academic
work done at universities, fields from physics and chemistry to
history, philosophy, and literary theory.

In thinking about how universities can take a more ambitious approach
to the arts, we can find a useful model in how society approaches
science. The rise of what is often called "Big Science" during and
after World War II changed how science was done - and changed human
knowledge with it. Ambitious new machines and tools, international
collaboration among teams of scientists, and the urgency of problem-
solving led to the development of new creative paradigms in research.
Big science was marked by big staffs, big budgets, big priorities,
and a big place within the intellectual and fiscal economy of the
university.

Art, too, is poised for this kind of change. Art today is often
collaborative, costly, and ambitious. Whether for an installation, a
film, a theater or dance production, or some combination of these,
art requires large and flexible spaces, and large and flexible
budgets. There is more need than ever for connections, global and
local, and for expensive, delicate, and complicated tools and
equipment. When the need for high-end equipment and money is combined
with the need for more space and the acknowledgment of the importance
of collaborative work, the result is a blueprint for something I will
call "Big Art."

Big Art would create a home for artistic work on campus on a scale
now rarely possible. Universities would create open spaces for art-
making, with natural light, high ceilings, flexible flooring (for
dance and other performance activities), and acoustic sophistication,
furnished with state-of-the-art technology, staffed by skilled
technicians, and providing spaces for encounters and improvisation
across art practices. With augmented funding and a new vision of
art's centrality, universities might set up endowed centers that
bring together international practitioners, begin directing major
donations toward art centers, and recruit major working artists and
give them a home during the prime of their careers.

Working in teams, improvising and experimenting round the clock,
creative artists could undertake large, world-changing projects, from
architecture to environmental and public art. And like Big Science,
Big Art would be international, bringing together key players from
all over the globe. But I should underscore here that by "Big Art" I
mean to propose an institutional vision. Artists who work alone, who
do not require large spaces or expensive tools and materials, could
benefit as much from this change as those who work collaboratively or
on a large scale.

Universities already possess many of the capabilities they'd need to
set up such programs. They are accustomed to managing grants from
government, industry, and private sources. With relatively little
adjustment, federal and state funding for the arts, and funding
offered by foundations and private individuals, could be channeled -
still competitively - through the university, just as with funding in
the sciences. Professors, administrators, and curators already assess
proposals in the creative and performing arts competitively. So
routing outside arts funding through institutions of higher learning
is making use of the evaluative systems that are already in place:
the same people, the same kinds of reports, and in many cases,
presumably, the same outcomes.

The universities can, and should, become patrons not only of art but
also of that far more problematic and volatile category, artists. All
too often public funding agencies have found it more comfortable to
underwrite arts institutions than individuals, whose projects have
sometimes been subject to political as well as aesthetic review. The
university, the home of academic freedom, is a natural partner for
artistic experimentation on the part of both students and teachers.
It is only in an atmosphere of freedom that the best work - in
research, scholarship, and the arts - can be produced and tested.

The idea that universities should house makers of art is as
reasonable, natural, and logical as the idea that the university
should contain and nurture other makers: engineers, or chemists, or
applied mathematicians. And like those other makers, artists, no
matter what arts they practice, need space, materials, training, and
assessment, as well as a tolerance of imagination, "genius," stubborn
dedication, or eccentricity.

A number of academic institutions, spurred by inventive leaders,
committed faculty, and farsighted donors, have already moved in
visionary new directions in their approach to the arts. Yale, with
graduate schools in art, drama, music, and architecture, has long
been a visible player. The University of Michigan has brought the
Royal Shakespeare Company to Ann Arbor for three-week residencies in
which members of the company not only perform, but also work with the
university community and the wider Detroit area.

At Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton, new energies - and funding - are
making a difference. Princeton and Stanford both have major
universitywide initiatives to create new homes for creative arts and
bring them closer into the curriculum. At Harvard, president Drew
Faust appointed a universitywide task force to undertake "an
expansive inquiry into the role of the arts in liberal education and
in the life of the University." The task force is expected to report
its recommendations this fall.

Throughout history, the arts have depended on committed patrons. And
all the forces that have gone into the story of arts patronage
through the ages - wealthy individuals, passionately concerned
mentors, national pride, rising arts consciousness among the middle
class and across ethnic, social, and gender lines - find a natural
and powerful home in the university, where freedom of expression, the
toleration of difference, and the high value placed on originality
and imagination have defined the very purpose and essence of the
institution.

A university is not a paradise devoid of influence from donors,
political factions, and prejudicial or interested beliefs. But the
lively debates of the art world are really not so very different from
those that animate discussion in other lively and contestatory
fields, from government to economics to science. These fields too
have non-academic institutions with which the university is in
constant dialogue. The commerce between and among such institutions
(museums and galleries; government agencies and NGOs; laboratories
and think tanks) strengthens the university, while also allowing for
theorizing and fact-finding in the context of academic freedom.

The world sometimes known as "academia" has rules, practices,
expectations, and standards that make it hospitable to
experimentation and risk-taking in the service of intellectual,
scientific, and artistic progress. Artists have, in fact, been
thinking outside the box - the white box of the museum gallery, the
black box of the cinema - for a long time now. Perhaps it's time for
universities to meet them there.

Marjorie Garber is chair of the department of visual and
environmental Studies at Harvard University, and director of the
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. This article is adapted from
her new book, "Patronizing the Arts" (Princeton University Press).