These days, a young artist can barely get arrested, never mind launch a career, without having gone to art school. And usually not just undergraduate art school either. Art, after a century of flourishing on the margins, is now a mature mainstream profession. The MFA--the master of fine arts--is its professional emblem.
"Public Offerings," the sprawling exhibition in the middle of its run at the Museum of Contemporary Art, got started as a curatorial attempt at taking stock of exactly what the art school phenomenon has meant for art in the 1990s and beyond. And I do mean "taking stock." The show's cheeky title invokes the boom in IPOs--initial public offerings--that characterized dot-com stock in the Clinton years.
The original working title for the exhibition had been "Global Academy," to highlight the art school underpinning that characterizes most art and artists today. All 25 artists in the show graduated from prestigious art programs in Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, and all 25 have high profiles today. "Their success," the show's bulky catalog declares, "has raised the profile of art schools and the issue of the programs' increasingly important role."
Greater Los Angeles claims more significant art schools than any other urban area in America--and, in fact, probably more than any other on the planet. Young artists who graduated from L.A. art schools dominate "Snapshot," a current survey at the UCLA Hammer Museum of young artists working here. The show includes six graduates from UCLA, six from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, six from CalArts in Valencia, three from Otis College of Art and Design in West L.A. and one from down the 405 Freeway at UC Irvine. Only four of the 25 didn't go to art school here, and all of those studied someplace else.
In America this phenomenon has been building for 50 years, ever since the GI Bill sent thousands of ex-soldiers into higher education programs after World War II. Before the war, college was the exception for young Americans; after, it became the norm. A lot of those who took advantage of the GI Bill ended up studying art, and a lot of those who studied art ended up becoming important artists.
As with the influx of European expatriate artists who were fleeing fascism in the 1930s--and who presented a model of seriousness and prestige that had always eluded our young nation's art world--it's not too much to say that the GI Bill was instrumental in the maturing of American modern art. Before 1950, commercial illustration was a likely avenue to fine art; after 1950, the route was school.
