The essay entitled "A love affair with the Academy: a plea for collectivity." Was originally published on IdealenFabriek and in Anderland 03 - Art and Society in November 2020.
Part 1: "I love you, but..”
“How the hell did we get into this mess?”
Carrie Bradshaw, Sex and the City, Ep. 1
In 2019 a friend of mine, a young visual artist, got excited about applying for and potentially starting a new course of study within the Netherlands, as an EU national. She had her eye on a master's program within the arts, an MFA. She was also, in parallel, going through a personal and emotional transition. She was having to reconsider a relationship with a man she had been in love with for years, but which didn’t seem to rise to her expectations, increasingly less so. They had ups and downs. She wanted this to work so much that she had made herself invisible at times, had made her wishes almost non-existent, which triggered some explosive bouts of uncontrollable anger towards him. These spiraled into guilt. There didn’t seem to be an amicable way out or a way to make things work.
It was, at the time, close to February 14th, Valentine«s Day, and everything was imbued with this deep and dark romantic desperation. So somehow love and professional drive overlapped and as she was prepping her portfolio for admissions she ended up titling her motivation letter “Would you be my MFA?” and sending this to the educational institution that she was courting.
This proposal of sorts, this love letter, this pick-up line, got her an interview and eventually got her into her master’s. While her romantic relationship ebbed and flowed until it fell apart. She got dumped, to her surprise, even if she should have been the one dumping. And she couldn’t contain her heartbreak, but somewhere along with the wreckage she also wondered what precisely was she trying to save?
One year later, during the corona crisis, she decided to be the one doing the dumping after having been ignored, gaslit and mistreated as a student. Her MFA experience turned into a case of expectations versus reality and while it would be easy to blame unrealistic expectations, or the wide-eyed and wonderful experience of falling for something that you don’t yet fully understand and then living through the disappointment of that something, things didn’t follow this pattern. My friend ended up not having the proper teaching support, access to workshops, she ended up traveling and needing to readjust before she even started studying and new information kept being sprung upon her. This all led to her feeling she had no control and no guidance during her studies. She waited in vain for some sort of resolution, which never came.
She eventually got the courage to quit her course of study after seeing the collaborative effort of the students of Yale MFA, a US-based art school. They had gathered their reflections in a document published in July of 2020. Entitled “Are you in an abusive relationship with your school?” and meant to be a checklist for institutional accountability the list went on to touch on several crucial aspects that art educational institutions had failed to account for during the corona crisis, but also before it. Among these: financial transparency, race and inclusivity, unpaid labor, Western-centric art pedagogy and curriculum, failure to provide adequate emergency response in times of crisis, and poor communication. (The list https://www.instagram.com/p/CCWrv-flM58/)
Things like: “You do not have access to an itemized tuition bill”, “The Institution prioritizes the accumulation and preservation of profits over the well-being of students, faculty and frontline workers”, “The Institution presents times of crisis as a «learning opportunity, avoiding responsibility towards students, perpetuating the narrative that artists must be resilient.” and “Your institution avoids presenting concrete plans of action until close to, or the day of, major billing and matriculation deadlines.” especially struck a chord. Unraveling these, one by one, had led my friend to realize that, just as in love, it seemed the object of her affection had fallen short. And just like in love she found it equally hard to let go even as things were lacking.
Part 2: “I love me too..”
The parallel to romantic relationships is not that far of a stretch when talking about the art world and the educational institutions within it. It’s a parallel that one very often discovers within the field of work at large. Nevertheless, it also tends to be a pretty good excuse within the field of the arts where the boundaries of what can be considered work are unclear.
In the article “In the Name of Love” (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/) from Jacobin’s January 2014 issue, Miya Tokumitsu went in search of the author of the concept of “do what you love” as applied to the field of work and ended up with, while not the origin story itself, a very strong precursor of why the phrase spread the way it did. She quoted Steve Jobs’s by now worldwide known graduation speech to the Stanford University class of 2005, viewed over 34 million times and counting and translated in various languages, which goes a little something like this:
"You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do."
The issue which Tokumitsu highlights in her piece has to do with the individualization of the working process (the repetition of the 'you’s in Jobs’s text hints to that) by associating it with the most individual of present-day emotions - romantic love - which is viewed as a precursor to monogamous relationships and later on the framework of marriage, within which reproductive labor is demanded, but never compensated, as it's above all a labor of love.
Romantic love demands a subsuming of the individual to a higher cause, but it’s not always generous, or fair, or even baseline healthy for that matter, and in its normative formulation it can and does lead to disappointments that cannot be bridged. When asked to treat one's education and later on one's profession in the “do what you love” mantra, there is the danger that those that cannot find satisfaction in the way education is carried out and cannot find love for what they’re doing, might be viewed as not worthy, as failing. There is also the danger that, out of love, one might ignore the injustices that the object of their affection perpetrates. Steve Jobs, after all, was more than known for being a brash, highly demanding, and downright abusive boss.
In this equation taking advantage of the “do what you love” mantra, artistic education in the Netherlands, following the greater theme of worldwide neoliberal developments in education, managed in the last few decades to go down a slippery slope. Tuition fees have risen every year with around 10%, while funding cuts and an increased feeling of competition have been applied in tandem to the art field. The joyful opening up of the country to international students, the increased push for diversity and inclusivity have met their match in a backlash in the new academic year 2020-2021, when tuition fees for non-EU students, already double the EU students tuition fees, will be doubled once more, to explicitly reduce the number of students coming into the country. (https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/12/universities-should-be-able-to-limit-non-eu-student-numbers-vvd-mp/).
Taking into account that most students that sign up to get an education within the arts are not particularly making the wisest of financial choices, it became easy to instrumentalize their hopes and ideals in the service of simply getting bodies in seats and getting them out the door, holding on to a diploma as soon as it’s legally possible while making a profit. When this mechanism no longer works it seems to be equally easy to dismiss students and their demands, counting on the fact that they don’t hold any collective power.
And students themselves are not the only ones that fall short. Young teachers, the ones that supply the veneer of credibility to an art educational institution, have also been treated to freelance "one-day-a-week" employment arrangements. They have experienced overwork at an unchanging hourly rate for years, but they agreed to said overwork knowing full well that teaching in an art educational institution is not just a matter of gaining an income, but a matter of individual prestige and the joys of shaping young minds over which you end up claiming some sort of credit is priceless. So, being mistreated as an employee doesn’t hang as heavy in balance when satisfaction can also be deeply spiritual. You still gain satisfaction. You still “do what you love”. You just end up doing it for a ridiculous hourly fee with no benefits, that’s it, but you also do it, as a teacher, while knowing the school’s administration is on a stable contract with benefits, you do it while knowing museums have a stable staff comprised of curators, secretarial workers, and directors, with, if not always a high salary, at the very least a stable one. You know, as a teacher, you fit alongside the janitorial staff rather than the school or museum directors, but you’re blinded to your position.
I got a refresher of the twisted logic of the market while following an online graduation ceremony which was live-streamed during July, as per corona restrictions. The art school in question was The Royal Academy of the Arts in The Hague. The school has a quite coherent focus on professionalization. The myth of the starving artist is something they are trying to avoid so there is an emphasis on how young creatives can fit into the professional field upon graduation. But seeing how the world in which these young creatives will be fitting into is a typically neoliberal one, market-focused, it was interesting to see how the institution approached the pandemic.
Courses, as for most Dutch academies, were reshaped at speed by all teachers and continued online rather than in person after the quarantine was announced mid-March. And now, come July, students started receiving their diplomas. It wasn’t the act itself that was interesting to witness, made public to the world via a Zoom transmission, but rather the type of discourse the ceremony was garnished with. The following phrases were uttered as diplomas were about to be handed over:
"The many limitations posed by the corona measurements are barely visible in the work of the students.
How you can turn setbacks into success.
Nothing can stop you. Nothing will stop you from pursuing your professional goals.”
I wrote these down, incredulous. For me it sounded like a strange approach that allowed one to ignore a global pandemic and be praised for it, this being the equivalent of having a go-getter attitude and just what the world needs right now.
And what of the ones that didn’t graduate? Were there any? What speeches would have framed their refusal or impossibility to gain a diploma in a pandemic year?
The problem that appears in this sort of displays is that, due to the individualized nature of artistic education, the student, while facing the institution, can be made to feel alone in their plight and they can be made to feel that they’re the problem. If they refuse to “to let anything stop them" are they asking for too much? If they feel that something is lacking, will they be categorized as trouble makers? Are they being a nuisance in a time of crisis when the institution is scrambling to reorganize? Should they just shut up and accept the sub-par solutions, the poor communication, the antiquated teaching methods, the lack of mutual respect that the institution offers? Are all these things happening, did students just live through a historical and emotionally draining event or are they just imagining things?
Part 3: “Love is not scarcity, love is an overflowing.”
It’s clear. The failure of students to act in the face of injustice has been exacerbated during the past few decades of art school and art field commodification in the Netherlands by the individualized nature of how they are guided through the system.
There’s a push from within the educational system towards seeing the object of one's affections - a potential career in the arts - as a journey each one takes as an individual. This is in contrast to what it is: an attempt to add one's voice to an arts ecosystem in which artists support each other, share space, have agency and are empowered to shape their education and professionalization in close dialogue with educational institutions and later on funding bodies and institutions dedicated to the display of art.
It’s no wonder young artists feel alone and fall into a black hole once they graduate, with or without the exacerbated stress of a global pandemic. The institutions they’re a part of have been taking them by the hand and dragging them in the direction of that very hole during three to four to how many years of instruction telling them how to set themselves apart from their peers rather than build alliances. From a focus on individualized assessments to an obscuring of personal economic conditions of themselves and of their teachers, to an erasing of diversity by following a Western-centric curriculum, these are all ways in which students are divided and made to fit into an ever more bland variation of the art world once they finish their studies. But these are also mechanisms that obscure the fact that not everyone can make it into this version of the art world, even if they truly madly and deeply wanted to. And deep in their hearts truth is, if the actual conditions of the art world were to be revealed to them early on, most young artists would refuse to participate in it. It’s the gradual creeping in of conditions that trap them, a variation on “sunken costs fallacy”, where a student has already invested too much before realizing what they are being put through and therefore find it difficult to let go.
In light of all this, changing things around is never clearcut, but it begins by understanding one's context, looking towards one's colleagues, and towards historical examples of how this can be done better and building up from there.
Let«s take as one seed of hope the concept of collective organizing.
Started in April of 2020, during quarantine, the No.More.Later initiative took Instagram as a platform to collectively talk about issues art students face within the Netherlands. They have tackled since then such topics as the housing shortage, the rising tuition fees, online teaching, and the corona response of art institutions. Their overall goal is to organize and form a national student union for art students and their first online mobilized gathering managed to bring together representatives from HKU, KABK, WdKA, Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts, Piet Zwart Institute, ArtEZ Arnhem, ArtEZ Enschede, Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Institute, half the fine art educational institutions in the Netherlands, which is a very promising start.
A further seed of hope comes from knowing one's history . In the mid to late '70s, Zerowork Collective, an autonomist Marxist-influenced magazine based in the US, created a series of publications and pamphlets that circulated small scale. Part of their output was the 1975 pamphlet entitled “Wages for students”. In it, they aimed to define what schoolwork is and how this can relate to the definition of work in general.
The classical definition of work ties it to receiving a wage, in short: "to perform work or fulfill duties regularly for wages or salary”. Within this definition, which sits at the top of Merriam Webster dictionary even in 2020, your work is work only if paid. Ideally properly paid, allowing you to fulfill your basic needs and beyond, but that’s not automatically implied in the definition. However, the ‘70s were defined as a period in which work was also increasingly associated with the labor of women in and around the home. These activities were and still are unjustly unremunerated activities, and they find themselves under the umbrella of “housework”. In 1972, American activist Selma James, to counter this injustice, founded “Wages for Housework”. This was an initiative that pushed for the recognition and payment of all caring work, in and around the home.
Students placed lower on the labor ladder - not yet fully embedded into the working field, but not excluded from it either, just getting ready to enter it - have also always carried out work. What “Wages for students” argues for is a more systemic approach in understanding what students are doing. And this systemic approach reveals to us that what happens during schoolwork is not just the student absorbing knowledge and self-expressing, but also the student learning to listen attentively, memorize what is being said, learn the language of their trade, respect the authority of teachers and pick up skills which allow for them to be more productive later on. Whether they would end up with MBA’s or MFA’s, “Wages for Students” demanded that students get paid for their time as they worked to gain the competencies associated with these degrees.
In this line of thought, rather than advocate for lower tuition fees, which is something art students have been doing, it becomes obvious that what they should be advocating for is getting paid to study. So there’s not just the need for free education, but a full 180 switch in demanding to be paid to perpetuate an art field and after that switch is applied, one needs to also step up and demand to get the chance to reshape what that art field can be, after decades of it having failed to rise to expectations of support and inclusivity.
Ultimately, if all else fails, another seed of hope comes from simply refusing to engage with an uncaring institution and an uncaring art world , the same way one should exit a romantic relationship that has run its course.
And this comes from accepting that love is not finite, but multiple. Influences can come from everywhere and shape one's practice as an artist. A single institution does not hold the key to artistic fulfillment, just as a monogamous relationship does not hold the key to personal fulfillment, even when it«s harmonious, but must be supplemented with the love of friends, crushes, neighbors, family, all valued equally, to allow for a full and rich life experience.
In order to thrive, one needs to look beyond institutional monogamy and towards building multiple relationships with other communities that better reflect one's ideals , communities that rely on the principles of transparency, horizontality, prioritizing wellbeing rather than profit and thinking collectively. Its only once accepting love as an overflowing principle that one can refuse to become trapped.