[artinfo] 4 Demands for Economically Responsible Art Education by Sepp Eckenhaussen
Geert Lovink
geert at xs4all.nl
Tue Nov 16 14:04:24 CET 2021
<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.
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