Art, Design, Media

This article is about changes in fine art pedagogy that took place at two North American institutions: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design from 1967 and California Institute of the Arts from 1970. At these, a radical, new paradigm of art pedagogy came to be developed, which has had widespread ramifications. This placed an emphasis on criticality, information and interdisciplinary practice rather than self-expression, formalism and media-specific instruction. It began as an onslaught on modernism, commodification and traditional art practice and discourse. However, through bringing process and enquiry to the fore, this paradigm came to accommodate work in any medium, whether traditional or not, provided it could be explained and justified.  Although some aspects of these institution’s pedagogy, such as their formal assessment regimes, would seem very unfamiliar today, in general the pedagogy they developed has come to dominate fine art courses throughout the world. By providing this historical account, it is intended that the present day context is brought into sharper focus.

ABSTRACT
This article reports historical research which sought to understand the pre- sent-day post-secondary art curriculum through analysing its history in terms of changes in conceptions of art. It found that there have been six distinctive curricula: Apprentice, Academic, Formalist, Expressive, Conceptual and Profes- sional. As a new curriculum has been introduced, it has co-existed with much contained in a previous one. Most of the curriculum changes have taken place in the last 65 years. During this time, there has been a massive expan- sion in the education of artists and at the same time art schools accommo- dated first modernism and then post-Duchampian aesthetics. A conclusion is that this has made for a very crowded curriculum. Moreover, despite there being an ever increasing choice of things a student might learn, it appears that there is nothing which all students have to learn. It can be problematic that one part of the curriculum is in contradiction to another part, and more- over this lack of a core raises fundamental, ontological questions about what art as a discipline is.