Hi, Willy,

An analogy is the "I-search" (student's own interests, not assigned topic) research essay in writing classes in freshman year of college.  However, the course still gives a view of broader issues and this is a single unit.  Sort of a compromise between old style and new style of teaching.

I am attaching a PowerPoint slide show I made for the Tuscon, Tucson's fan-run science fiction and fantasy convention. It is called "What Science Fiction Art owes to Fine Art."  This deals with the fact that most SF devotees have little background in art and scarcely recognize the strong influences on popular SF and fantasy illustrators.

How much emphasis should there be on originality?  Is it better to know or not know whom we are "stealing'"from?  How does this debt that SF/fantasy artists owe to their sources change our view or them--does it change?

The "atomic" curriculum" will lead to the same outcome as the SF fans who know little about the broader field of art but this can be viewed as having both costs and benefits.

Thanks for bring this up, since I can incorporate these questions of originality valuation in the slide show remarks in a couple of weeks.  All the slides show only the "old masters" and those influenced with a few captions and remarks.  You have to imagine most of my remarks...

Gloria

Totally agree with Gloria. More than a atomic curriculum or an I-search, we should think us, professors, as the old kind of craftsman master. Less "big courses", more "small projects" with few students and more imersion.

Thanks Gloria,

Was it Roland Barthes who said that science fictions are the last show of the big stories?

They go back to Ovid (metamorphosis), Homer ( Iliad and the Odyssey) even Shakespeare : the Tempest stood as model for the movie "forbidden planet"

Kitsch always has been the old stories coming back. Same for SF.

And indeed - your examples are very well chosen! -  but also the opposite occurs:

There is a work by Illya Kabakov coming straight out of the first Star Trek movie. 

An atomic curriculum is not possible without art history - nobody starts from scratch.

Willy

My former professor will always say that atomic curriculum is embedded into art and design history they can not be separated for they  go together

What you are talking about seems to be the model that I see in the UK, Germany & Austria. I would have thought it would be what you do in Belgium too. To me its weakness can be that the student doesn't get enough technical education, while the North American style’s weakness is that they students aren't given enough freedom. Personally I have been teaching a art programs that have high technical demands and try to find a compromise where the technical is emphasised towards strong self expression.

Kenneth

Thanks for your help.

An atomic curriculum doesn't exclude high technical demands in training - it only directs them.

The personal project can give a technical exploration its sense and direction.

greetings

Willy

I quote: Nicholas Houghton:

"Art school types in Europe: 

- apprenticeship,

- traditional academic, 

- formalist, 

- romantic, 

- conceptual and 

- professional.

The mixture of the six curricula as now taught is riddled with contradictions. 

It often includes a core it does not believe in. 

It encourages a Romantic adoption of an autonomous, artistic persona, but also stuffs students full of theory which contradicts this. 

It has become the last resting place of an exhausted avant-garde, which, loaded with postmodern baggage, has turned into exactly what it once opposed: an academic discourse.

It seems happily to accommodate students working in traditional media and processes such as painting, etching or modelling beside those who work in an array of new media – or none. 

It encourages students to learn how to market themselves, but with the risk that their quality of promotion will exceed the quality of the work they promote."

HOUGHTON 111

iJADE 35.1 (2016)

ª 2016 The Author. iJADE ª 2016 NSEAD/John Wiley & Sons Ltd110 HOUGHTON

iJADE 35.1 (2016)

ª 2016 The Author. iJADE ª 2016 NSEAD/John Wiley & Sons Ltd

We certainly see that here in the US...that, as you say,  "their quality of promotion will exceed the quality of the work they promote." We have become as a culture so prone to tweets by those on high and social media meme-flogging of everyone else, that true ability to just sit back and reflect may soon be extinct.

Partly this is a logical outcome of the emphasis ion salesmanship here in the US.  The product has become tertiary, not just secondary, to the various kinds of hype surrounding it.

The sociology of art is important to recognize. Art is partially always 'instrumental' for other goals than something admired for itself.  I am not arguing that some art is more "political" than other art, but asserting that the audience for art "wears" their art to impress and to achieve standing. 

Formalist appreciation

Social approbation of audience/patrons

As long as this dual purpose of art remains, then the artist will struggle between various factions who choose to use her or him one way or another.  The struggle is intensifying just now, so the world holds its breath and we will see how it goes from here.

I agree that what you are calling "the atomic curriculum" doesn't have to ignore high technical training. I also feel that students have to find their own voice within the discipline they choose. What I have found in some UK schools is that the technical training is either given to the staff to take care of or abandoned all together. It sends the message that the craft of art is beneath the consideration of the teacher. The message is sent.

Which does get us to what Gloria is talking about. Although I think that the marketing of the artist or the artistic movement is a key to how art has developed since at least  New York became the centre of the art world. The valorisation of artist as brand is not new. It does go back to the Romantic model mentioned by Houghton and the myth of genius. That a 18th century model of art is still useful does say much about the art world and the greater culture. 

As someone trained in post modern theory, I feel the problem of theory in art school is two fold. First, I agree there can be too much. Second, it is taught by people who don't always have a proper background in theory. Philosophers are not artists and vis-a-versa. I see people who have read a little Foucault or Deleuze, don't understand them in the context of their entire oeuvre, and teach it to students in a haphazard way. It becomes a language used to sound important, but very little is communicated.