<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { padding-top: 0 ; padding-bottom: 0 }
--></style><title>4 Demands for Economically Responsible Art
Education by Se</title></head><body>
<div><a
href=
"https://networkcultures.org/ourcreativereset/2021/11/13/4-demands-for-economically-responsible-art-education/"><span
></span
>https://networkcultures.org/ourcreativereset/2021/11/13/4-demands-fo<span
></span>r-economically-responsible-art-education/</a></div>
<div><br>
4 Demands for Economically Responsible Art Education<br>
</div>
<div>By Sepp Eckenhaussen (sepp@networkcultures.org)<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.<br>
</div>
<div>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:<br>
</div>
<div><b>1. Implement post-precarity courses in the curriculum.</b>
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.<br>
</div>
<div><b>2. Support social engagement and self-organization.</b>
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.<br>
</div>
<div><b>3. Inform students about what to expect after graduation.</b>
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.<br>
</div>
<div><b>4. Involve students in institution-building</b>. 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.<br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.<br>
</div>
<div>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.<br>
</div>
<div>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.<br>
</div>
<div>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.<br>
</div>
<div><i>This text is an outcome of the</i> <a
href=
"https://networkcultures.org/ourcreativereset/2021/09/16/post-precarity-autumn-camp-how-to-survive-as-an-artists/"><i><span
></span>Post-Precarity Autumn Camp: How to Survive as an
Artist?</i></a><i>, 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.</i><br>
</div>
<div><i>Read more about our ideas around post-precarity and the INC
research strand Our Creative Reset</i> <a
href="https://networkcultures.org/ourcreativereset/"><i>here</i></a><i
>.</i><br>
</div>
<div><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab></div>
<div><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab></div>
<div><x-tab> </x-tab></div>
</body>
</html>