Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University

by Howard Singerman

Nearly every artist under the age of fifty in the United States today has a Master of Fine Arts degree. Howard Singerman's thoughtful study is the first to place that degree in its proper historical framework and ideological context. Arguing that where artists are trained makes a difference in the forms and meanings they produce, he shows how the university, with its disciplined organization of knowledge and demand for language, played a critical role in the production of modernism in the visual arts. Now it is shaping what we call like postmodernist art, the graduate university stresses theory and research over manual skills and traditional techniques of representation.

Singerman, who holds an M.F.A. in sculpture as well as a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies, is interested in the question of the artist as a "professional" and what that word means for and about the fashioning of artists. He begins by examining the first campus-based art schools in the 1870s and goes on to consider the structuring role of women art educators and women students; the shift from the "fine arts" to the "visual arts"; the fundamental grammar of art laid down in the schoolroom; and the development of professional art training in the American university. Singerman's book reveals the ways we have conceived of art in the past hundred years and have institutionalized that conception as atelier activity, as craft, and finally as theory and performance.

Genres: Art

306 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1999

Reviews

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book might be considered a more scholarly treatment of what James Elkins addresses in his book, Why Art CAnnot Be Taught, which relies on anecdotes and personal analysis. Singerman, instead, traces the history of visual art education with particular emphasis on the Masters in Fine Arts degree. Dense and a bit jargonated for the uninitiated, Singerman seeks to find out the reason he graduated with a MFA in sculpture and did not know how to sculpt. Peculiar indeed, but all too common among graduates of elite art institutions.

I read this book the summer I completed my MFA in painting, wondering how in the world my professors managed to evade the responsibility of teaching me anything for two years. I cannot think of how this work could better answer such puzzling questions. If you are an art student, give this a go.

[Michael Endo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that answers the questions that you never thought you had about Art education. "What is an MFA?", "What is the goal of the MFA?"
I had never considered just how strange the idea of the MFA is.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting discussion of the making of the artist via the MFA

[Kate]

Be prepared for an intellectual de-flowering.

[Scott Rodger · Rating 3 out of 5]

THEORY.