A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess Laurie Fendrich	1/6

For centuries, aspiring artists got their starts by observing and practicing what professional artists did inside their workshops. After mastering enough skills, they would then head off on their own. Modern art, starting in the middle of the 19th century, changed all that by calling into question what constitutes a work of art. Art began manifesting two things in tandem—radicality for its own sake and self-expression. Aspiring artists no longer needed to go to workshops or studios to become artists because being avant-garde and self-expressive did not depend on learning crafts, techniques, or studio methods.

For 100 years, from the mid-19th century up to World War II, artists flocked to Paris in droves, absorbing the spirit of the avant-garde in bars, cabarets, theaters, and salons, and developing their styles either as loners in their ateliers or as members of various bohemian groups convening over absinthe. But after World War II, when the center of the modern art world shifted to New York, the education of artists began to take place more and more in colleges and universities. In the United States, part of that was due to an influx of government money, much of it disseminated through the GI Bill. Many artists who were perceived as avantgarde, and who therefore couldn't support themselves through their work, found that they could support themselves by teaching in academe. Ambitious young art students gravitated college art departments where these avant-garde artists were teaching, if only to hang around other artists and pick up their bohemian attitudes.

Although plenty of solid teaching and learning has gone on in art schools and in colleges and universities, by the 1990s, as Howard Singerman argues in Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999), art education no longer demanded the acquisition of specific skills, but instead became simply a shortcut to an artistic identity. Now, however, a tug of war is going on over what exactly constitutes an artistic identity.

The result is that art education (by which I mean the education of artists for the professional contemporary art world, as opposed to the education of high-school art teachers, which is an entirely separate matter) has become a hodgepodge of attitudes, selfexpression, news bulletins from hot galleries, and an almost random selection of technical skills that cannot help but leave most art students confused about their ultimate purpose as artists.

This mishmash approach has been going on for so long that it amounts to an orthodoxy. It dominates the education of artists both in colleges like my own and in such art schools as the Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles, and the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn. In this aleatory orthodoxy, it falls to first- and second- year "foundation" courses to provide any meaningful link to art of the past. Those courses—"Basic Design," "Beginning Drawing," and so on—teach line, tone, shape, form, proportion, color, and some fundamental "hand skills."