School: A Recent History of Self-Organized Art Education

by Sam Thorne

Sam Thorne's A Recent History of Self-Organized Art Education is a chronicle of self-organized art schools and artist-run education platforms that have emerged since 2000. Comprising a series of twenty conversations conducted by Thorne with the artists, curators, and educators behind these schools, the book maps a territory at once fertile and contested. Spanning projects in London, Lagos, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Ramallah, Berlin, and Saint Petersburg, among other locations, these critical dialogues respond to spiraling student debt, the MFA system, and the “pedagogical turn,” while offering proposals for the future of art education. Contributors
Bik Van der Pol, Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Tania Bruguera, Chto Delat?, Sean Dockray, Olafur Eliasson, Ryan Gander, Piero Golia, Fritz Haeg, Pablo Helguera, Jakob Jakobsen, Ahmet Öğüt, Yoshua Okón, Open School East, Rupert, Wael Shawky, Tina Sherwell, Bisi Silva, Christine Tohme, Anton Vidokle

Genres: Design, Art

384 pages, Paperback

Published September 2, 2016

Reviews

[Jin Darvek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Q: What is a work of art in the age of $120,000 art degrees?
A: A form of debt repayment
-BFAMFAPhD

I don't have tens of thousands of dollars lying around to throw at administrative middlemen to do a bad job of telling me what to study and how to practice art.
I can educate myself better for a fraction of the cost, and I will benefit others in the process.
I'm starting my own art school, and this book is full of inspiration.