Most Fine Art BA courses are currently in a quandary: a kind of provisional holding position tensed between different concepts of what an art education should now constitute at this level and how it should be resourced and taught. Many Fine Art BA courses still struggle to maintain a residual, liberal notion of art education. Centred on the precept of personal development as the premium activity, speculative development is supported and challenged by a particular kind of tutorial attention, unfinished and investigative aspects of the work are likely to be encouraged and valued, and expected outcomes are very loosely defined at the outset.

However, the realities of delivering a higher education in Fine Art within Institutions run as corporate structures dependent on attracting maximum numbers of student- consumers in a competitive market, is increasingly submerging such an approach. BA Education is becoming positioned as a commodity system of prioritised inputs, projects or modules which students take, or consume, as the material of an "autonomous learning". Autonomous learning, with pre-configured outputs and towards set goals, which can be monitored and assessed within pre-set general boundaries, allows the return of a standard qualification to as many of the investing customers as possible. The trajectories of personal development, through education, on the other hand, tend to be less predictable or generally quantifiable, they have an un-timetabled timescale and the potential to critically confront, if not overturn, prevailing standards.

Inevitably, the intentions of the one approach, personified by the commitment of individual tutors and the aspirations of students, often conflicts with what have become the driving objectives of the Institution. The one sphere is motivated by artistic endeavour and the immediacies of cultural enquiry and production. For the bureaucratic sphere which contains this educational activity, keeping it within the limits of specific practices and pre-set levels of achievement and the directing of any new developments towards the service of short term economic imperatives is pre-eminent.

Slowly, the current system is coming apart, flattening out, de-valuing. Ironically, in it's pre-occupation with managing cost effective mass production, the institutional bureaucracy may find that all it has "quality assured" is it's own potential for obsolescence.

It may be worth recalling here that, in Britain, the expansion of Art and Design education beyond the preserves of the Academy to the artisan classes was in direct relation to the demands of the last Industrial Revolution. The technological revolution we are currently negotiating is creating similar far reaching demands. However, not only is this complex revolution far from over, it is happening at a much faster rate than it's predecessor.

On the one hand, very few Fine Art BA Courses are any longer equipped with the resources, teachers or technical staff to teach traditional skills in the standard disciplines of painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking or film and video to a depth which offers equality and excellence of opportunity to every student who enrols. Where access to such skills is available, technically it is often a superficial experience or one that is de- contextualised from the appropriate critical , historical or contemporary frameworks of it's practice. On the other hand, innovation in un-prescribed areas or new modes of practice is often not so much treated as a welcome and necessary development to the contemporary curriculum, as a financial threat to the contained objectives of the budget.

Meanwhile, student grants for Higher Education have become discretionary and the student loan scheme has been introduced. Hence many full time students are studying on a basis formerly more characteristic of part time students; their participation fitted around paid employment and their work limited by the unsupported costs of producing it. The frame of a 3 year Degree course, with it's shortened terms, reduced levels of teaching and resources, is beginning to look both socially, economically and academically less viable.

Many courses have recruited large numbers of overseas students to finance themselves. Curriculum content, the qualification level, has shifted, largely in unacknowledged ways, to accommodate this. Although not often in the enriching directions which were characteristic of many multi-cultural educational initiatives advocated in the 1980's. The shift of commitment to something referred to , in course documents and the Teaching Quality Assurance process, as excellence, has followed funding. The qualities of in depth study, of rigour, of criticality, of absorption in the subject, have largely shifted into an expectation only of MA courses and Higher Degrees whose proliferation attracts research funding to the Institutions together with students who can afford to pay direct fees.

This is not to say that some Fine Art BA courses are not still managing to deliver programmes of worth and worth the financial hardship that students often undergo to study on them. But it is to say that time for the current model of the Fine BA course, and it's limited provision, may well be running out.
Quite soon, there may be less and less reason for attending undergraduate courses of this kind. ( Indeed, either through disaffection or economic difficulty, there are already plenty of students who go through them hardly attending at all.)

Today's young people are both the most sophisticated consumers of all time and the pre-eminent negotiators of our complex techno society. Prospective, current and post graduate students can already exercise these faculties more critically in order to more strategically navigate a system which situates them as consumers yet can no longer always provide them, in one educational unit, with the flexible access to learning opportunities and knowledge's they need, and deserve, to reach their full potential.

The trajectory of an education which can meet contemporary learning needs and aspirations, in an ever changing socio-economic context, needs to exceed the goal of just attaining a relatively hollow academic degree from an aging institution, no matter how glorious it's past or current connections to the artworld.

Beyond the rigidity of the institutional frame, the green shoots of what may become the usual means of acquiring an advanced education in the 21st century are already germinating, just beginning to spring up.

This summer head hunters from Sun Valley trawled the Fine Art BA Degree shows in London, looking not primarily for computer literacy, but for the creative and conceptual risk taking ability that was once a characteristic of Fine Art Education and is now at a premium in the New Media industries. New Media companies are developing in house training programmes and sponsoring BA and MA equivalents of study for young and prospective employees who are visually, culturally and technologically aware. Numerous independent organisations offer efficient courses in video, photography, animation and computer skills. Galleries and organisations like the Architectural Association offer excellent free lecture programmes. Artists Continuing Professional Development Schemes, some offering intensive, one to one studio mentoring, together with self optioning courses, are being pioneered and developed to meet the gaps left by Art Education and to address the specifically expressed needs of graduate artists in the contemporary climate. The Open University has led the way in providing flexible non institutionally based interactive learning programmes which provide for both personal development and academic achievement in timescales which are adaptive to students social, economic and cultural circumstance. Widespread developments of this model , together with new interpretations of how virtual and terrestrial learning experiences, distant and local provision, can complement each other are already discernible and underway in some aspects of Higher Education. The internet offers, and will increasingly, unprecedented access to learning opportunities and resources. A site such as www. the shuttle, for example, probably represents as effective a route into contemporary and historical cultural studies as those many impoverished departments currently struggle to offer. The art schools of the European Community still provide for the study of drawing, painting and sculpture, in the in -depth, traditional way. During the last decade many students from the EEC have come to study at British Artschools, adding their study on to 2 or 3 years at a European School. Very few British students seem to realise that they too can navigate the EEC's educational resources and study in Germany, Italy, France or Holland where courses are longer and less costly, studio space may be more generous, and that their student grants, or loans, like dole and health cover, are transferable.

These factors, together with the collective studio initiatives of artists, the Independent Art School, which has organised this conference, and the Sunday School group in London, are signals of imminent and necessary forms of change.
What we think of now as alternatives are more than likely to develop into the flexible, self directed, adaptive and interactive learning environments of the future. These learning environments are as likely to be based in the home, the studio, the workplace, within shared cultural networks and those of small, specifically focused organisations as in larger institutions. Specialist mentoring and the sharing of expertise may well replace the hierarchical mass modes of institutional teaching. Interdisciplinarity and specialisation will become normal features of art education in a complex society. Increased modes of access will diffuse notions of ' centres of excellence' just as, in the nineteenth century, the increased number of regional and independent art and design schools gradually dislodged the authority of the exclusive Academy.

Students are in a position to question whether the only educational route for an artist is the current Fine Art BA/MA model. After all, it is their fees which are shoring up a failing system which seems to have the monopoly on educating and evaluating them. Their funds might be better spent elsewhere. The potential already exists for students to search out and navigate both traditional and new modes of provision in order to access, design and construct different trajectories which might better meet their specific educational requirements and provoke the necessary developments which will supersede current notions of the course, of modularity.

Most of our Fine Art institutions have become too cumbersome , too bureaucratic, too remote from the exigencies of art practice, to respond with either enough speed or informed wisdom to the educational imperatives that current social, economic and technological change demands. They will no doubt bustle about their institutional business for a while to come. Some will realise that the new environment still needs traditional subjects such as drawing and painting to be properly taught and will eventually have to re-establish and critically re-contextualise such specialisms in an open dialogue with the new learning environment. Other courses, some of which are already operating, may not be called Fine Art Courses. They will survive because of their timely interaction with the agencies and modus operandi of change, perhaps because they will be working in partnership with the newer, flexible organisations and networks currently considered to be low status or provisional alternatives.

The assumption that the only education for a contemporary artist is that premised on the convention of the Fine Art BA/MA route is up for radical questioning. Underlying an address to questions of appropriate content, student navigable systems and flexible educational modes is the issue of creating different possibilities for equal opportunities and increased access to art education. The proportion of black and Asian students on these courses is unrepresentatively low. The majority of secure teaching and managerial posts are still occupied by a male, white, middle class who are often the remote decision takers and policy directors. Much essential teaching is being done by part time staff, a large proportion of whom are women, on insecure temporary contracts. Doubting whether the BA courses and the education of artists are still in anyway synonymous, also begs the question of whether these outdated course structures can reflect a wider social reality beyond that of the limited social and economic interest groups they currently tend to serve. (1) (2)

© Monica Ross.October 2000.

Monica Ross is an artist. She established Critical Fine Art Practice as a studio subject on the BA Fine Art Course at Central Saint Martins in 1990 and was Subject Leader until 1998. Amongst other things, she currently works as a freelance Mentor for the Network aspect of an Artists Professional Development Scheme which has been pioneered by Education Through Art in East Sussex.

1. see " Walk On By". Guardian. Education Section. page.9. 24.10.2000. describing the findings in a recent report by the Association of University Teachers with reference to the: " socially divisive student support arrangements established for the whole of the U.K" and which concludes that: " demand for Degree's is affected by the income, socio- economic background, and academic achievement of students, but also by the " net price" of courses- the combination of tuition fees discounted by financial aid " and " there is growing international evidence that economic factors such as tuition costs are significant barriers to Higher Education". full report: www.educationunlimited.co.uk/higher/
2. As above page 52: " Women in Research ",Dr. Louise Morley, Assistant Dean of Professional Development, University of London Institute of Education, describes " the gendered distribution of labour in the Academy, with women more likely to be involved in teaching, administration and student support. Women are frequently responsible for organisational "housework" that consumes their time and creativity." and that " the fear of failure" on the part of women suggested in another report ( " Risky Business" Guardian Education. October 17th ) " is not an irrational phobia, but based on negative lived experiences- nepotism and sexism in peer review for example."