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‘Bologna’ gets blamed for all sorts of things, especially the growth of a huge bureaucracy in art education. But that mindset ignores the critical experiment currently taking place in many master’s programmes. Their activities are sharpening our thinking on art education within the academy and art production outside of it.

There is a strange currency to the name ‘Bologna’ in discussions of art education. It is used to summarise every kind of change in higher education, from new degree structures to new bureaucracies of quality assurance; from colonization by managerialism to privatization; from neoliberalism to instrumentalism. That the name of one of Europe’s ancient universities should become the synonym of all things bad in higher arts education demonstrates just how treacherous a good reputation can become. This kind of shorthand use of ‘Bologna’ names but obscures the complicated dynamics of change at work in the cultural institutional landscape of Europe. If we look more closely at the unfolding of new institutional practices across Europe, we do see dramatic changes, but these are more complicated and multivalent than initially appears when we simply cry, ‘Bologna!’

Old School or New SchoolIf we take the introduction of the Bachelor/Master distinction and the restructuring of the education of artists, we see a network of different responses at different levels of educational policy and practice in the various national contexts. In the 20th century, most of Europe (both Soviet and non-Soviet) had elaborated a form of academy-based art education that was built upon 18th- and 19th-century precedents of the master-apprentice atelier system. That is to say, in spite of the tremendous rhetorical force of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and other experimental art education within the imaginary of modern art, the vast majority of actual educational programmes for artists were largely based on an early-modern institutional form, a hybrid of formal and informal aspects of the academy, the university and the atelier.

In the United Kingdom, where regulation and reform of arts and design education in the 19th century had been determined by imperial industrial and economic planning, a divergence from the rest of Europe was already taking place (although some European nations copied aspects of these reforms, the Hungarian system for example). But the decisive divergence came with the Coldstream Report and the reform of higher arts education in the UK in the 1960s, which relegated 20 percent of the undergraduate syllabus to art history and other humanities courses, and more fully adopted the Bachelor model of the university. In the rest of Europe, the most common model continued to be a Diploma or Magister, based on a period of study, typically from five to eight years, with no defined curriculum as such, but rather with the standard model of attaching oneself to different professors’ studios within the academy.

While individual educators and professors continued to have significant power within the institutional practices of the UK, the introduction of formal curriculum documentation, along with an examination process specific to the 20-percent component of art history and critical studies began to reduce the autonomy of professors. The adoption of the Bachelor’s and Master’s distinction in Europe as part of Bologna has not meant that this post-Coldstream model has been transferred to Europe (nor should it be). What has happened is that each national context has interpreted Bologna in different ways, with different priorities. Across Europe, one sees revisions of existing institutional forms, which necessarily carry forward differences from the local and national cultural milieu. Thus, it is still a common feature of many European art educational programmes that student artists do not study the history of art, but rather have very little formal pre-specified curricula; and where forms of ‘theory’ are indeed introduced, they differ greatly, depending on the local construction of what exactly ‘art theory’ might be (from biopolitics to workerism; from Oedipus to object-oriented ontology). While in the UK the application of the post-Coldstream 20/80 percent split between ‘academic’ and ‘studio’ studies has been changed by the development of a more fully modularized system of studies, we are not seeing a convergence on a standard model, but rather a re-working of the existing differences responding to the different national contexts. The rhetoric sounds the same – ‘learning outcomes’, ‘flexibility’ – but the national cultural differences persist, mediated through the new formal arrangements.

Economies of TimeIt seems to be especially the case at the bachelor’s level that the education of artists is shaped by the attempt to fit the older way of doing things into the newer form, with lots of different hybrid systems emerging as a consequence. In some European countries, the emphasis is placed on the different modules and course units that a student artist follows, while in other countries the priority is the overarching construction of a coherent bachelor’s programme. The former often reinforces the autonomy of the professor, and the later tends to subordinate the professor to the logic of the curriculum and programme system. The key change happening in both cases is that art education is becoming specified in a way that it previously was not. This formal documenting of art education is of course a major institutional change, and one that is experienced as an incursion of bureaucracy or as the colonization of art by a systematizing discourse of management and educational science. From the student’s perspective, this often simply means different flavours of chaotic half-organisation.

However, one of the key things that is changing here, and is perhaps not properly thematized in the debate yet, is the regulation of economies of time. There are new institutional regimes of time management being elaborated here, and this is not just ‘Bologna’. This is a particular conjunction of: (1) the flexibilization and precaritization of public and private labour; (2) the global orchestration of always ‘on’ and everywhere ‘reachable’ communications; and (3) the continuing infantilization of twenty-somethings in an ever-extending period of adolescence that undermines the emergence of personal agency (now aggravated by disproportionate unemployment levels in this demographic).

What we have seen in the last ten years is a wide range of new experiments in formulating the master’s level of study, and here the experiments are really exciting. These offer hope that what we see emerging is not the homogenization of practices but a diversification of models, like in the Netherlands. Each of these produces different organizational tactics and pedagogical approaches rather than simply copying an established example from elsewhere. But more than this, each constructs a clear mode of public address and activation in their event programmes, serving to create art milieus, art scenes and networks in their orbit rather than just focusing exclusively on the internal dialogue with the current student cohort.

While the Bachelor (considered as foundational education in a discipline) and the Doctorate (understood as certification in research) seemed relatively well-established paradigms across the majority of university subject areas, the Master award was not the subject of this kind of broad consensus. The current lively culture of experimentation at the master’s level is in part a reflection of the latitude of the master’s level as neither a foundation nor a finalization of education – making it a space that allows invention rather than requiring respect for the established standardized formula. Arguably, the master’s currently is the space where the auto-critique of higher art education is being enacted. Often there is an implicit and (occasionally) explicit critique of nearby bachelor’s programmes on offer in the same or in neighbouring institutions, but there is also a clearer sense of the external art system paying attention to what is happening in these master’s programmes.

Interaction

It is interesting to consider the interaction of these new programmes with the contemporary art system beyond the academy. These master’s often function as the entry pathways for students who have received bachelor-level education elsewhere in the world, often from beyond the European hinterland. As well as promising some kind of entrée into that larger art system, these programmes also draw upon the part-time labour and the star appearances of different personnel drawn from within the larger art system. In that sense, these educations become subject to another kind of homogenizing force – that of the art market, which shifts with the short-term fluctuations of reputations and trends. While this can enhance the dynamic, critical working-through that characterizes the most interesting education, it can also serve to subordinate the educational task to the imperatives of a market system that trades on the rise and fall of reputational and financial capital.

It may be that what we really need to consider is the critical agency and desire that is currently creating extended communities of practice in the orbits of the best of these master’s programmes. This indicates the radical potential of these open, albeit temporarily, institutional sites and their shadow spaces of conviviality. While the question of art and education played a very prominent role in the first decade of the 21st century, it seems that the question we now face in this decade is that of sustainable counter-economies and counter-scenes that will sustain art practices over lifetimes. While art education may have found its home outside the academy for the last decade, it seems probable that for this decade, art and its enabling socialities may find a new home (or an old home in a new way) in the orbit of these experimental master’s programmes.

Mick Wilson is dean at GradCAM, Dublin