A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess, cont.	3/6

Because much of the de facto curriculum at the Art Institute is determined by what individual instructors decide to teach under the loose rubric of course descriptions, there is no way of knowing for sure exactly how much development of studio skills goes on. But by using such terms as "creative production" instead of "creativity" and "critical skills" instead of "skills," and in citing drawing as just one among several "notational systems," the catalog descriptions make the practice of skills appear to be a very low priority. The first-year curriculum seems to promote a Web-oriented workplace full of computers, where students work antiseptically and collaboratively with others, behave like wannabe public intellectuals, and develop "concepts" that borrow heavily from the vocabularies of sociology, computer science, and government bureaucracy. Within this matrix, artists develop "research methods" for their "studio practice." Whatever odd tool is deemed necessary for their "practice" (formerly known as "work of art")—whether it is colored plastic bags, city-sewage-system diagrams, LCD displays, Webcams, or, however unlikely, a piece of drawing charcoal—is picked up and used without benefit of prerequisite courses that teach specific skills with a specific tool.

Instead of students individually observing art and life, steadily focusing within an art discipline, and working toward developing a signature style marked by self-expression, the "studio practice" has its practitioner busily collecting data, working in groups, constructing theoretical systems, and participating in interdisciplinary projects. "Studio practice" and "creative production" are conveniently nebulous terms—it is unclear, in fact, if they even need to culminate in a work of art.

As uncomfortable as I am with this sort of curriculum and "practice" of art making, I recognize how attractive it probably is to 18-year-olds who have grown up with the ubiquitousness of computers and an industrial-strength popular culture. By patting their most facile drawing protégés reassuringly on the back, art professors cannot really protect the foundation-skills courses that they profess to love. There are, after all, some aspects of the new programs that will prove useful to the next generation of artists, who will grapple with an even more digitized world than our present one. Besides, in a short time many of the same fine arts students nurtured in the foundation courses offering traditional art skills will invariably turn around and metaphorically slay their old teachers by making their professional debuts not with tenderly painted easel paintings but with sexy video installations or cool interactive Web sites.

On the other hand, educators who love traditional art but who, out of fear of being left behind, are jumping onto a theory-driven bandwagon are marching off to a land ruled by dilettante sociology, bogus community activism, and unrigorous science and philosophy. The notion that there could be a fusion of "studio practice" with old-fashioned artistic skills that would yield a wondrous hybrid in the same way that African and Western music together produced jazz hasn't panned out, at least not yet. The reason? Whereas African and Western music, for all their differences, were both about how things sound, theory-driven art and traditional visual art are not both about how things look. In art, the fusion merely strips the traditional art object (that is, one well-crafted physical object) of meaning while replacing it with a jumble of fatuous words.