Art world strategies: neoliberalism and the politics of professional practice in fine art education

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how the expansion of professional practice on fine art courses in the UK could be detrimentally impacting on the critical and political ambitions of art education. I argue that the current student fees-debt regime institutes a neoliberal model of higher education with a focus on ‘enterprise’, directing student subjectivity towards competitive opportunity seeking market strategies. I examine the case of fine art professional practice through an analysis of two examples of expert advice directed to the would-be artist: the first which utilises a generic language of business management, recommending art students adopt an ‘entrepreneurial mindset’ in order to gain competitive advantage; the second which utilises the specific language of art world networking as a behavioural strategy for career success. I go on to identify problems with these strategic investor models, both at the level of contemporary art’s critical values, and also with regard to whether the entrepreneurial model offers more and better opportunities overall. I propose a critical professional practice capable of transcending the ‘reality’ of individualist, market competition whilst addressing real world issues of work, career and finance, and conclude with a discussion of where ethical responsibility lies for fine art educators.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• fine art education
• professional practice
• entrepreneurial mindset
• art networking
• art market

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dean Kenning is an artist and writer. His art practice ranges from kinetic sculptures to video works and diagrams, and often engages with political subject matter such as the housing market and Marxist value theory. He has exhibited internationally including at the ICA, Greene Naftali and BAK and has published articles in journals such as Third Text, Art Monthly and Mute, including on the politics of art and art education. He is currently Research Fellow at Kingston School of Art and also teaches Fine Art at Central St Martins.

ORCID

Dean Kenning http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8504-025X

Notes

1 In searching for the ‘core’ principles that underpin fine art teaching, Frances Corner (2005) emphasises, alongside material and conceptual skills and methods, precisely the public context by means of which inherited cultural traditions are subjectively extended by students. However, the rather generic and ‘transferrable’ set of personal skills upon which she concludes (in the context of subject ‘benchmarks’) – ‘boundary pushing, problem solving and learning through failure’ (341) – points to the production of adaptable, ‘flexible' capitalist subjects once fine art education floats free from its more antagonistic cultural inheritance.

2 Young, a businessman and David Cameron’s ‘enterprise Tsar’, began his political career in 1979 as advisor to Keith Joseph working on the implementation of the Thatcher government’s privatisation programme. It was in this 2014 report that an explicit recommendation was first made to publish detailed graduate employment and earnings data as a way to shake up the culture of HE.

3 Examples from places where I have taught: 1. Students can attend extra-curricula classes to learn about ‘workplace etiquette’; 2. Students are assessed for studio and critical studies units according to how well their work ‘displays appropriate behaviour [for a] professional context.’

4 I will return to the concept of ‘winner-take-all’ markets in a later section.

5 Surprisingly perhaps, given the quasi-democratic and ‘disruptive’ claims around entrepreneurial start-ups, Thom does not mention possibilities new technologies offer for direct selling of art, e.g. through web-based platforms. The traditional gatekeepers prevail. For an indication, however, see Vebrist (2017).

6 Thom at one point does seem to entirely collapse the distinction between artistic and business ideas: ‘The prerequisite for a successful entrepreneurial development is […] to work out an outstanding art concept or business model’ (71).