[artinfo] 4 Demands for Economically Responsible Art Education by Sepp Eckenhaussen

[Geert Lovink]

<https://networkcultures.org/ourcreativereset/2021/11/13/4-demands-for-economically-responsible-art-education/>https://networkcultures.org/ourcreativereset/2021/11/13/4-demands-for-economically-responsible-art-education/

4 Demands for Economically Responsible Art Education

By Sepp Eckenhaussen (sepp at networkcultures.org)


Our future generations of artists deserve to be 
prepared for the unruly reality of the labor 
market of the cultural sector. We therefore find 
it hard to understand why many art students 
graduate without knowledge of the Fair Practice 
Code or the Guideline for Artists' Fees; have no 
idea about the trade unions and professional 
organizations that represent them; hardly dare 
say 'no' to underpaid labor; have not thought 
about whether and how they want to sell their 
work; have no experience with funding 
applications, (salary) negotiations, or filing 
their tax returns; have never heard of bread 
funds or cooperatives; not know the mores of 
patronage; are unaware of the fact that many 
artists live on income from side jobs; do not 
know what (public and private) money flows exist 
in the cultural sector or even what the average 
income of an artist in the Netherlands is.

We know that art academies have long since lost 
the status of progressive, avant-gardist 
institutions, and that the opposite it true today 
- that society is changing, and academies have a 
hard time catching up. We see the reports are 
appearing around social unsafety at academies. We 
support the efforts of students politicizing 
institutional spaces, and the teachers who take 
action against false self-employment, revolving 
door contracts and the excessive workload. To 
this list of demands for change, we add: art 
schools should adjust their curriculum to prepare 
students for their professional future. 
Post-precarity starts in education, and art 
schools should take their responsibility. In 
order to do so, art schools must:

1. Implement post-precarity courses in the 
curriculum. Alumni feel the current gap in art 
school curriculums every day. Programs should be 
expanded to include real-life budget simulation 
role-plays; collaborative application-writing; 
experiments with the establishment of bread funds 
and NFT banks; and other explorations into 
solidarity and survival mechanisms.

2. Support social engagement and 
self-organization. Students deserve support in 
strategizing, petitioning, organizing, squatting, 
reading groups, and community kitchens. Art 
academies should embrace initiatives like 
Cultural Workers Unite and No More Later, and 
foster the discussions they bring up around 
labor, gentrification, internationalization and 
marketization.

3. Inform students about what to expect after 
graduation. Academies should inform students of 
the existing funding structures, the housing 
market, and the kinds of jobs that alumni 
typically have - and the possible alternatives to 
all of those. Invite organizers of self-organized 
studio spaces; hold Q&As with gallery owners and 
philanthropists; pay group visits to alumni; 
discuss how to divide time between art and 
side-jobs; explore gig-working platforms and how 
(not) to use them.

4. Involve students in institution-building. 
Precarity, in the end, is a political and 
ideological problem, which needs political 
solutions. Art academies should acknowledge and 
support this political struggle. They should 
encourage and financially support participation 
councils to get in touch with students and 
include them in discussions with the unions; 
improve the position of student councils; involve 
students in the development of policy planning; 
and other forms of political and institutional 
involvement.

It's a lot, but it's the least art academies can 
do. Because these topics are urgent, especially 
after two years of corona. Continuing negligence 
of professional competences is detrimental to the 
whole cultural sector. Right now, the only alumni 
able to sustain being an artist, are the market 
darlings and the ones with a strong (financial) 
support structures. Those with less privilege, 
unsurprisingly, choose a different career path. 
This is especially true for the growing number of 
international students, who pay very high tuition 
fees and often face problems around visas, 
housing and limited income opportunities. The 
fact that the management of art academies are so 
full of ideals around equality and inclusion, 
should lead them to a very simple conclusion. If 
we do not want art to be an elitist bastion, art 
educations should put more care into the future 
careers of all students - with or without 
privilege, with or without market success.

Even though this urgency is so obvious, we see 
that art academies still find justification to 
neglect labor conditions in their curriculum. 
There are two different excuses in sway.

Some art academies believe they are already 
fighting precarity by stimulating 'cultural 
entrepreneurship'. They are wrong. The concept of 
'cultural entrepreneurship' is too limited to 
capture the reality of working conditions in the 
cultural sector. It is true that the percentage 
of freelancers - technically all entrepreneurs - 
in the cultural sector is extremely high: 70%, 
and in the visual arts even 90%. But this is not 
the result of artists' desire to be 
entrepreneurs. This is simply how labor it the 
art world works. Artists and cultural workers 
almost always work on a project basis, with many 
small institutions, relatively small teams and 
(extremely) small budgets. In this situation, 
wage employment at cultural institutions 
sometimes undesirable (because artists like the 
flexibility), but nearly always impossible. So 
instead of entrepreneurship, what we have here is 
the fragmented and flexible character of labor in 
the cultural sector, which lacks social security.

Whereas some art academies have an unhealthy 
focus on cultural entrepreneurship and therefore 
forget to address actual issues of labor, other 
academies refrain from discussing the reality of 
work altogether, so as to not infringe on the 
students' autonomy. We emphasize that the above 
has nothing to do with the tricky discussion 
around autonomy. We subscribe to the idea that 
freedom is essential in art education, but so are 
basic survival skills. To those who argue that 
focusing on professional competencies undermines 
the artistic freedom of students is undermined, 
we answer: the opposite is true. But professional 
ignorance does not lead to artistic freedom. 
Freedom comes from social awareness of one's own 
position and the ability to control it. An 
academy with a heart for autonomous art must 
therefore pay attention to professionalism.

We demand that art academies take better 
responsibility for the future of their students. 
 They must devote time and attention to 
professionalization. They may not lapse into 
clichés about cultural entrepreneurship or 
autonomy but should be honest about labor 
conditions in the art world. Only then can 
graduates autonomously determine their social 
position.

This text is an outcome of the 
<https://networkcultures.org/ourcreativereset/2021/09/16/post-precarity-autumn-camp-how-to-survive-as-an-artists/>Post-Precarity 
Autumn Camp: How to Survive as an Artist?, that 
the HvA Institute of Network Cultures organized 
with Hotel Maria Kapel and Platform BK in Hoorn 
(The Netherlands) in the fall of 2021. It was 
fantastic and inspiring to explore the 
professional aspects of being an artist together 
with 20 recent alumni for during five intensive 
days of workshops and activities. Still, we were 
left with a bitter aftertaste. With hardly any 
exception, participants wondered: 'Why did we 
never learn this during art school?' We truly 
hope that art academies will pick up on this 
responsibility in the near future - it's urgent.

Read more about our ideas around post-precarity 
and the INC research strand Our Creative Reset 
<https://networkcultures.org/ourcreativereset/>here.