“Anything Goes” and “Creating New Knowledge” — about Doctoral Degrees in Fine Arts for Hong Kong

Teaching art when art is everywhere, what happens in art education when “anything goes” ?

In the context of higher art education, the knowledge of the developments in art making over the last fifty years, and in remarkably vast geographical and cultural areas, has allowed students in fine arts departments to experiment in directions that are so varied that they have become nearly impossible to map efficiently when it comes to grading. Although it is not often acknowledged, as we always like to believe that what happens in the studios and classrooms of art departments is already art, but there is a real difference between a professional art practice and an educational art practice. The most visible difference is made explicit at the end of the semester when studio art teachers have to grade their students’ works. How can one grade an artwork, when all the old criteria of aesthetic quality – like composition, colour, etc. – are increasingly often irrelevant in an evaluation?

I am not a studio art teacher and, in spite of the kindness of my colleagues who are not opposed to me giving an opinion on the work of our students, I am not involved in the marking process of students’ works in the studio. I understand that it is possible to teach art making without any art history courses (or with just the bare minimum, which is to say almost nothing), but it is my opinion that studio art and art history are living together in a marriage of convenience, but that this arranged marriage is also the proverbial “match made in heaven.” My job description is that I teach “courses on the History of Western Art, the theories of Modernism and Postmodernism, and on Chinese and Western Comparative Aesthetics.” And, of course, that is what I do – the description was in fact provided by me. But there might be some misunderstandings on what is meant by History of Western Art.

As far as I am concerned, it is not really “Western art history” fine arts students have to study. Although it is not possible to do so as it would not only require far too many hours of lecturing but also many more lecturers than it is possible to hire; ideally, the study of art history in the context of a studio art course should be about how art is being made around the world today. Of course, in the Fine Arts Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, we still study European and Chinese art and its theory at least from the 15th to the 21st century, but in my mind the knowledge of this history is only a preparation to better understand contemporary art. Whether they specialize in studio art or art history, our students are all part of this world and the only thing we can do to make them understand it better is to provide them with knowledge of the past, or at least facilitate their access to that vast reserve of information, and in fact, an understanding of the present or the future is something they can only do for themselves.

Frank Vigneron was Associate Professor, Department of Fine Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (2011).