Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

The Australian Research Council funding model condemns art schools to a bleak future

By Brad Buckley and John Conomos - posted Tuesday, 7 September 2004


The lack of research income is therefore having a serious and debilitating effect on the core activities of art schools: to produce visual artists steeped in a self-critical contemporary art. It is forcing many to mutate into faculties of creative industries that produce graduates who are mute as visual artists in the free market of global capitalism. Some are being coerced into offering fee-paying courses that produce, paradoxically, graduates who merely service the corporate design and economic needs of globalisation.

If universities house, as George Steiner claims in his elegant memoir Errata (1997), “diverse, often rival parishes”, where do art schools situate themselves in this more competitive pedagogic ethos? Are art schools better off being independent of the university system? Is this scenario even possible today in light of what is happening in our universities in terms of their structures and commercialised research? It is interesting to note the recent comments by associate professor Su Baker of the Victorian College of the Arts, the only Australian art school not amalgamated with a university.

The VCA is arguably Australia's most successful art school, having produced the 2003 and 2005 Australian representatives to the Venice Biennale (sculptors Patricia Piccinini and Ricky Swallow), which is regarded as the most respected exhibition of contemporary international art. At the Biennale of Sydney this year, Baker argued that students at art schools should be encouraged to go beyond the (post)modernist canon of the visual arts, to follow their own creative instincts so that they produce new forms of art.

Advertisement

Art schools at the best of times are sites of experimentation, innovation, learning and the development of professional networks. All of this is invaluable creative and social capital that universities and society could tap into if they were more open to new cross-disciplinary research and pedagogic approaches.

It is no surprise, then, that in the February 2004 issue of the Harvard Business Review, an article about the creativity index, which uses measures of technology, talent and tolerance combined as an indicator of a country's ability to achieve growth, rated Australia outside the top 15 countries.

In the same issue, the author of A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink, argues that the master of fine arts is the new MBA, with big business looking for fine artists. Arts graduates can give companies advantage because “the only way to differentiate their goods and services in an overstocked, materially abundant marketplace is to make their offerings transcendent - physically beautiful and emotionally compelling”, he writes.

These are all signs of a changing world in which creative work and artists play a vital and complex role, and where that role is acknowledged in universities in terms of funded research. If we accept poet and writer Ezra Pound's idea that artists are the antennas of the human race, we cannot afford to ignore the important role that artists play in the creative, economic and social life of our post-industrial society.

Until the universities and the ARC change their ill-informed views about the funding of creative work and allow artists to come out from the shadows, Australia will remain a significantly lesser society.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. Page 2
  4. All

This article was first published in The Australian on August 25, 2004.



Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Authors

Brad Buckley is an Associate professor in the Sydney College of the Arts at The University of Sydney.

John Conomos is a media artist, critic and writer who works in the Sydney college of the Arts at the University of Sydney.

Related Links
Australian Research Council
Brad Buckley's Home Page
John Conomos's Home Page
Sydney School of Arts
Article Tools
Comment Comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy