ABSTRACT
Artists were once trained by apprenticeship and later by specialized art schools; understanding of the short-and long-term behaviour of materials was usually included in the training. In the second half of the twentieth century, college and university art departments increasingly ignored materials education, usually in favour of the teaching of intellectual theory at the expense of practical skills. Howard Singerman wrote in 1999, ‘Although I hold a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture, I do not have the traditional skills of the sculptor; I cannot carve or cast or weld or model in clay.’ He answered the question, ‘Why not?’ in Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Singerman, 1999). Mark Gottsegen also discussed this issue in The Decline of the Visual Education of Artists (1999-2005), published at https://www.amien.org. In his 2001 convocation speech to the College Art Association (the national association of artists and art historians in the USA), American artist Kerry James Marshall said that in the schools he had visited, he found ‘students at every level with limited production skills, a shallow sense of history, and weak analytical skills’. This decline has continued through three generations of artists to the early years of the twenty-first century.
