If the glory, freneticism, excess, and sunny evanescence of the current contemporary-art boom has a symbolic home, it’s Miami Beach. Thanks to the appearance of an exponentially more fabulous Art Basel Miami Beach fair each December since 2002, the once-tattered resort town has gained a new sense of itself as an aesthetic destination that goes beyond the mere appreciation of a set of well-wrought silicone implants. Now members of the local Establishment, enamored with their smart new friends—collectors, artists, and curators from around the world—want to see if they can get them to stick around. It’s partly about wishing to be taken seriously as a cultural alternative to New York and Los Angeles. But it’s also a bet that fertilizing the creative class is good economic-development policy—especially in a city hit hard by the real-estate meltdown. Which is why a local developer and collector, Craig Robins, is starting a free postgraduate art program in Miami. Continue reading »
Roland Young is an often lauded and very well respected member of the design faculty of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Art and Design.
A few years ago a “You Tube” video made its way around to the younger faculty at the art schools across America. The clip was called “Roland is God” and showed (via hidden camera) a particularly brutal critique given by Young to a group of students at Art Center. Now the video (in expanded form) can be seen on a site called (surprisingly) “Roland is God.” It has been accompanied by the release of an all new “You Tube” video displaying Professor Young’s unorthodox critical stylings.
The Ultimate Art School Building wasn’t built in NYC of course (space issues) or Chicago (would have to be built with cut stone) or Kansas City even (doesn’t have fountains in the design) no the Ultimate Art School building was built in none other then the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
The School of Art, Design and Media a 5-story facility nestled in the corner of the campus with a forest to it’s back blends the heart shaped grass and glass building amazingly with the surroundings, gives a relaxing cool demeanor and most importantly is now the best place in the world to play hacky sack (aka footbag).
Feel free to post photos of your Art & Design building (or barracks as the case may be). Continue reading »
Duncan and Terri talk to Carol Becker about the School of the Art Institute, the future of arts education, and her new position at Columbia University.
ALSO: THE INCREDIBLE RETURN OF MIKE AND THE 30 SECONDS MOVIE REVIEWS with bonus seconds.
Dean of Faculty and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
She is the author of numerous articles and several books with many foreign editors. Her book publications include: The Invisible Drama: Women and The Anxiety of Change; The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety; and most recently, Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art.
Prelude to published interview taken from the book, Conversations Before the End of Time by Suzi Gablik.
“In 1994, Carol Becker was appointed dean and vice-president for academic affairs of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, having been a former chair of the graduate division before that. She received her Ph.D. in literature at the University of San Diego, where she was a protégé of Herbert Marcuse. A lecturer in women’s studies since the late 1960s, and a writer on psychoanalytic theory and cultural politics, she has been mulling over the obsolete attitudes and strategies of the art world for a long time, particularly the issue of the artist’s responsibility to society, which she claims is a sensitive issue that makes everyone uncomfortable, defensive and insecure. Becker feels that many artists simply refuse to address the issue at all. Artists often choose rebellion, which alienates them from their audience, and then become angry at the degree to which they are unappreciated. In part this is a consequence of the way we educate students in art schools, envisioning the artist as a marginalized and romantic figure who, she claims, operates “out of what Freud calls the Pleasure Principle while the rest of us struggle within the Reality Principle.” Students need to think about their work, she feels, not in isolation, but in relationship to the public and to an audience that has not been addressed in art school pedagogical situations. American art students, like most American college students, Becker claims, have not been trained to think globally or politically about their position in society. In a sense, art has seceded from American culture so completely that it has lost its effectiveness and become a subsidized bureaucracy of self-serving specialists.” Continue reading »
This week’s show is an f-ing masterpiece, miss this one at your peril.
This week we talk to in turn professors: James Elkins, Sarah Kreep (organizer of the New InSight exhibition), and Lane Relyea about the future of art education, art students, and the future of the art business among many other topics!
Mike and Richard have dueling reviews of Frank Miller’s 300!
BUT FIRST: In the expanded intro; There is a lot of talk about what Scott Speh can do with his opinion of how we do things.
As a BONUS this week we have for direct download…
Our Art School Confidential…
Meg Onli - bfa 2008, Jerome Acks - mfa 2008, Carrie Schneider - mfa 2007, Tim Ridlen - bfa 2007, and Duncan MacKenzie - mfa 2002 sit down to talk a little about why art school and how they see their futures.
