HISTORIES - The Idea of the Art School in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
Malcolm Quinn, ‘The Disambiguation of the Royal Academy of Arts’, History of European Ideas, 37:1 (2011), pp. 53-62.
This article uses Jeremy Bentham's notion of disambiguation, which links language to power and ‘sinister interest’, to analyse criticisms of the Royal Academy of Arts by Benthamites and Philosophic Radicals at the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835/6. This practice of disambiguation aimed to produce a distinction between the Royal Academy of Arts and the publicly funded art school. I situate this activity within the linguistic turn taken by Bentham's ethics, and its relevance to a dilemma of pedagogy in commercial society framed by Adam Smith. Smith's dilemma turns on the conflict between the requirement for a pedagogy that conforms to the principle of free trade, and an equally binding requirement for a virtue ethical model of pedagogy that offers a remedy for the corrupting effects of commerce on character. Adam Smith's support for private academies of art asserted a hierarchy of virtue ethics over utility, thus safeguarding autonomous ethical reasoning within capitalist forms of social life. Bentham's thought, in contrast, eschews the link between ethics and character, and places ethics itself within normative rules of language and cognition.
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Malcolm Quinn ‘The political economic necessity of the art school 1835-1852’, The International Journal of Art and Design Education, 30:1, (2011), pp. 62-70.
This article examines the political economic theories that informed the development of the first publicly funded art school in Britain, by the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835/6. It begins by assessing these origins in the context of some recent experiments in art school pedagogy. It then responds to the challenge offered by Mervyn Romans in IJADE, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2004) to the argument that economic necessity was the motive for the establishment of publicly funded art education in Britain. I argue that in this instance, economic necessity should be defined according to the terms of political economic theories that offered ‘scientific’ reasons for the economic benefits of political change. I analyse this political economic discourse with reference to the examination of Martin Archer Shee, then President of the Royal Academy of Arts, at the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures in 1836. I conclude by suggesting that the establishment of the first publicly funded art school in Britain in 1837, as it was distinguished from the Royal Academy of Arts, can be understood as part of a political economic experiment that was realised only when Henry Cole took charge of the School of Design as ‘The Department of Practical Art’ in 1852. This experiment depended on risking the models of professionalism in art that existed at that time, in order to advance new combinations of politics, economics and public pedagogy under capital, in ways that are no longer readily recognisable.
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Malcolm Quinn ‘Critique Conscious and Unconscious: Listening to the Barbarous Language of Art and Design’, Journal of Visual Arts Practice, 7: 3, (2009) pp. 225-240.
This article addresses two linked questions. The first question is, ‘Is there an art school critique?’ The second question is, ‘How is the possibility of an art school critique bound up with the characteristics of art and design speech?’ In addressing these questions, I identify a ‘barbarous’ aspect to speech in art and design that produces the persistent problem of a division of language, manifest in current divisions of theory and practice. I trace the origins of this barbarism to the historical inclusion of art and design within the signifying structure of an educational metaphor, which bound the utilitarian wish for a bourgeois ‘revolution’ in pedagogy to the social relations of nineteenth-century capital. One of the radical possibilities introduced by this wish for a pedagogical revolution, was the potential for a specific form of ‘art school critique’. It is the failure to sustain this critical position within the contract between the art school and commodity capital, that has determined the subsequent fate of art school critique. I locate the high watermark and the fall of a specifically art school critique to the same moment, namely the brief and antagonistic encounter with capital and commerce adopted by Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave in their so-called ‘Chamber of Horrors’ exhibiting ‘Correct Principles of Taste’ at Marlborough House in 1852. The significance of Cole’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’ is that of a moment of critical antagonism that was not repeated, because the relationship of the art school to commerce, capital and the commodity evolved differently from that moment on. Precisely because it was not repeated, we are compelled to remember this critical moment in a dissimulated form, through the inertia and deadlock of theory and practice.
See also: www.nafae.org.uk/journals/jvap-7-3/Critique-Conscious-and-Unconscious