Art into life

摘要

Five years ago, the painter Stephen Farthing and I responded to a provocative statement put out by the selectors of New Contemporaries, the annual exhibition of work by finalists and recent graduates of British art schools. On that occasion, the selectors were academic Sarat Maharaj, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artist Gillian Wearing. The challenge they posed to art teachers, critics, historians and others went as follows: 'The art school closes in 1997 ― imagine its reinvention'. This supple conceit ― half serious-minded, half tongue-in-cheek ― generated a wide array of published replies, from lacklustre justifications as to why the teaching of art should remain as it was to surreal, image-based retorts. For our part, Farthing and I suggested that the practice of art should be restricted exclusively to postgraduate study, and that students should be urged to apply from a broad spectrum of non-art backgrounds. Art schools, we said, should become centres of teaching and research, in which knowledgeable, nonconformist graduates in other disciplines would apply themselves to the production of original creative output.