HISTORIES - The Idea of the Art School in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
(2 March 2011) Malcolm Quinn ‘Reading Reynolds With Bentham: The Idea of the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ Bentham Project Seminars, Bentham Project University College London.
Programme of Bentham Project Seminars March 2011: Bentham Seminars 4
(1 March 2010) Malcolm Quinn ‘The education of the eyes of the people by our own government” public pedagogy and the art school 1835 -1852’ UAL Pedagogic Research Network CSM Innovation Centre.
(28 February 2009) Malcolm Quinn ‘The Chamber of Horrors: Art Education and Mass Culture’, Cambridge University Faculty of Education.
See abstract here
(12 September 2008) Malcolm Quinn ‘Art Schools and the Pedagogy of Capital’, Doctoring Practice Conference, Bath Spa University.
Extract from the lecture : ‘Doctoral research in art and design has developed out of the art school idea, although these days art and design research is contained within the spaces and structures of the university. Locating the idea of research within the idea of the art school, may prompt idle questions, such as - is an art school more like an academy of art or more like a university? Is research in art and design closer to the studio or the library? While I do not think that these are the right questions to ask, they haunt the doctoral student in art and design as part of a preoccupation with finding the perfect alignment of practice and theory. I think that if we want to really move beyond this preoccupation with theory and practice, we have to look again at the art school idea – where did it come from? What kind of world produced an art school, given that academies of art already existed? In this paper, I claim that the art school is founded on an investigation, a piece of research. This government-sponsored research project, initiated by the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835/6, developed an empirical reading of capital, with the aim of effecting a cultural redistribution within the visual field. This reading of capital produced a pedagogical experiment that significantly, made the art school unlike an academy of art and unlike a university. It is the quality of this ‘unlikeness’, and its relationship to an original project of research, that requires definition.’