HISTORIES - The Idea of the Art School in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
Malcolm Quinn, “Art Schools and ‘The Pedagogical Impulse’: an Historical Perspective” sole authored paper at the International Journal of Art and Design Education conference ‘Art and Design Education and Contemporary Culture’ on 8 October 2010.
The idea of a ‘pedagogical impulse’ in contemporary fine art practice has been gathering momentum since 2006. In Art Review March 2010, Jonathan T.D. Neil claimed that the pedagogical impulse marks the aestheticisation of the academic sphere and is simply the logical next stage in contemporary art’s colonisation of new cultural landscapes. These developments are taking place at a time when the balance is shifting away from public funding in British art and design education. The only new public money for experimental ventures in art and design pedagogy, is for temporary private academies supported by TV licence fees, or Arts Council funded micro-ateliers that have positioned themselves as alternatives to the ‘over-subscribed’ mainstream. The aestheticisation of the art school as a combination of atelier and salon sees the administration of culture not as a set of problems to be addressed, so much as an obstacle to be removed. I claim that this opposition between aestheticisation and administration in art school culture is rooted in a set of conditions for pedagogy in commercial society outlined by Adam Smith in the second half of the eighteenth century, that are now undergoing a new set of transformations in the early twenty first century.
Read the conference programme here
Malcolm Quinn, ‘The education of the eyes of the people by our own Government: Utilitarianism and Sublimation in Public Space 1832 -52’ sole authored paper at History of Education Society UK Annual Conference on 6 December 2009.
This paper addresses the development of the utilitarian notion of ‘the education of the eyes of the people’ expressed in the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835/6, into the public and pedagogical reality of the so-called ‘Chamber of Horrors’ established by Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave within the government-funded ‘Department of Practical Art’ at Marlborough House in 1852. The catalogue of Cole and Redgrave’s exhibition made its lineage and purpose explicit; ‘The Department of Practical Art was formed in February 1852, for the purpose of increasing the efficiency of the Schools of Design which had been established in 1837, upon the recommendation of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, appointed in 1835’. ‘The Chamber of Horrors’ was experimental pedagogy in action, in which the subject was commodity culture, the pupils were visitors to an art school-cum-museum and the lesson was conducted by exhibiting examples of poor design. My argument in this paper is that Cole’s exhibition demonstrated the problems of sublimation and mastery inherent in the utilitarian cultural project, one in which a happiness that is seen to depend on the other, becomes an issue of political management, expressed through public education. I claim that ‘The Chamber of Horrors’ shows that one of the pedagogic foundations of the publicly funded art school resides in a reading of capital that established a pedagogic experiment in the visual field.
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Malcolm Quinn, ‘On Liberty and Art’, Liberty, Human Values and Utilitarianism: Bicentenary Conference of John Stuart Mill, September 9-11 2006 Yokohama Japan.
While artists continue to be celebrated as icons of creative freedom, critical discourse on liberty through art is often accused of being naive, politically suspect, or socially irrelevant. Artworks that have aligned the languages and practices of liberty with those of totalitarianism, coercion and violence, such as Ian Hamilton Finlay’s touring show ‘Liberty, Terror and Virtue’ of 1984-6, have been regarded as culturally insensitive and aesthetically dubious. The cultural understanding of liberty in Britain continues to be dominated by the neo-utilitarian framework provided by J.S Mill’s On Liberty of 1859. In Mill’s view, there need be no disputes over the language of liberty nor any historical reflection upon it, just a multitude of expressions of creative individuality which are supposed to construct the social value of liberty as such. Mill’s bicentennial in 2006 is an occasion to re-examine how artists are promoted by the state and media as exemplars of personal liberty, creative individualism and the pursuit of happiness. In contrast, the aesthetic actualisation of a language of liberty by artists can reveal how liberty as a self-evident and universal value is grounded in historical contingency, social pragmatism and cultural prohibitions.
See the conference programme at: www.econ.ynu.ac.jp/news2006/papers.htm
Malcolm Quinn, ‘The Phantoms of Liberty: Mill and the Knowledge Economy’, The John Stuart Mill Bicentennial Conference, University College London 5-7 April 2006.
We live in an era when academia, the creative industries and technocratic government are all united under the umbrella definition of ‘the knowledge economy’. Many discourses on the knowledge economy celebrate of the proliferation of knowledge-intensive activity beyond traditional spheres, and the enhancement of individual agency. My contention in this paper is that the key to understanding the contemporary characteristics of knowledge generation is to be found in its ostensibly most elevated form, the Millian notion of liberty and the apparition of creative potential offered by a ‘marketplace of ideas’ in which free exchange finds its justification in truth. The commitment to an idealised ‘end-state truth’, produced by the exchange of ideas, has ensured that state regulation of the free trade in goods has not been matched by a corresponding regulation of free speech. Rather than freedom guaranteeing truth, the pursuit of truth has become the exceptional condition for the free exchange of ideas. Marx’s arguments with J S Mill in Capital, provide the starting point for an analysis of how the ‘Phantoms of Liberty’ developed from Mill’s ideas have been used to sustain the current hierarchies of knowledge labour.
See the conference programme at: www.politicalthought.org.uk/conference/papers.php