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

For art professors whose cup of tea isn't hard-core philosophy, why not teach fiction that puts artists in real predicaments about their purpose? For example, in Balzac's allegorical short story "The Unknown Masterpiece," the lead character, Frenhofer—a character who loomed large in the imaginations of Cézanne, Picasso, and de Kooning—gets sucked into the black hole of artistic self-absorption. In John Fowles's The Ebony Tower, two artists clash over the meaning of abstract art in what is clearly a metaphor for the meaning of artistic freedom.

Readings from outside the modern and postmodern box would shake up art students who have learned bromides in high school such as "Art is a form of communication," only to have them replaced by gaseous pseudosociological truisms along the lines of "Art derives from myriad socially constructed 'truths' based on the repression of the Other," or "Global nomadism produces hybridized cultures." Wrestling with perennial questions about how art fits into a good society, or how it might function differently in a bad society, would inject an intellectual and moral rigor into art education.

A new reading curriculum such as the one I am suggesting could prove stronger at salvaging hands-on arts such as drawing and painting than the head-in-the-sand, keep-on-trucking attitude now favored by professors who believe in the centrality of drawing and painting. For it was art itself that inspired Leonardo, Lessing, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Balzac to think so deeply in the first place.

In any event, the most crucial job at hand is to steer art students away from the self-congratulatory, self-indulgent deconstructionesque platitudes that increasingly guide their educations. After all, why major in art just to become a half-baked social scientist? When things get this messed up, it's time to go back to the future.

Laurie Fendrich
3 June 2005

Laurie Fendrich is a painter who lives and works in New York. She is a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University, and a frequent contributer to The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has had several one-person exhibitions of her paintings, and her work has been reviewed in such publications as The New York Times, Art in America, ArtNews, and Art Forum Magazine. Several of her essays can be found on her website.