Professor, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts
Message to Students:I am greatly honored to have the opportunity to be part of the founding faculty of University of California in Merced. I am also excited to be part of the process of creating an interdisciplinary curriculum in the Arts.
Both the Goodman School of Drama and the Yale School of Drama where I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a Master of Fine Arts degree respectively, are professional training programs. Their aim is to prepare their graduates for professional careers in theater. In the past twenty years professional training programs in the arts have been considered to be great advancement in higher education. Art has had a place at most American universities from the beginning of their existence. Art was present as form of enrichment for students desiring extracurricular activity. Art history was taught as well as dramatic literature. Training for art as a profession tended to be reserved for academies and conservatories. (The Goodman School of Drama was just such a conservatory. It was part of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Goodman School of Drama's entire curriculum was focused on theatre. Students took their general education courses at either University of Chicago or Northwestern University.)
Human activity has a tendency to a pendulum –like movement, swinging from one extreme to another. There are two major aspects of this tendency, one is each generation's desire to throw out the sacred cows of the previous generation, and another is the real or false necessity, while doing that, to wipe the slate completely clear. There is a positive quality to the desire that each generation has to re-assess the values and beliefs of their parents. However, it is sad how often we throw away good things with the bad. Thus, in the nineteen sixties when my generation threw out what was then believed to be a destructively stifling and uncreative approach to teaching art, we also got rid of things of value. The former insistence on mastering a technique before attempting to develop one's style was deemed to be a waste of time. What did one need technique for if one was a genius? Further, the reason to throw out the old was that it was elitist, that it excluded many forms of art and those who practiced it. A prejudiced establishment was running the arts, telling the public what was and was not art. This was absolutely true and throwing the elitist establishment out was a good idea. Unfortunately we have replaced it with just the same sort of an elite, sneering just in the same way as the former did. The only thing that has changed is what they sneer at.
I still prefer things as they are now. I would not want to go back to the bad old days. This is primarily because the really positive things about the change my generation instigated in the arts are very important. It is very important that all people, whatever their race or their sexuality, whether they believe in God or they do not, whether they have serious things to express or they plant their tongues firmly in their cheeks, whether they are proud to be Americans or they are not, whether they want to make a lot of money or couldn't care less, whether they create “high” art or “low” art, are all allowed and given the opportunity to create art. At the same time it is very important that art be accessible to people of all kinds, rich or poor, sophisticated or not, educated or not, young and old.
These laudable populist beliefs about art and its value in our lives have been partly responsible for integration of professional art training into university education. This was a very positive change in arts education. Unfortunately it had some unexpected less positive consequences.
Professional art training costs a lot money. This is because the creation of art needs more than classrooms and libraries, more than computers. It requires studios and exhibition spaces, theatres and scene shops, orchestras and recording studios, budgets for cameramen and money for advertising. It requires a very small student to professor ration. It is true that teaching medicine or biology requires operating rooms and laboratories. However, products of medical or scientific research have enormous monetary value. Consequently, funding to support the study of science or medicine is much easier to obtain. Though the image of the starving artist is not entirely accurate, art is rarely more than modestly profitable. (Hollywood block-busters and television being exceptions but even their profits rarely reach the levels of the profits of the average pharmaceutical company.)
The advent of serious professional art training programs at universities has made it harder for students who are not interested in pursuing art as a profession, to have the opportunity to learn something about art. The view is that art is serious matter, as serious as medicine or engineering. I agree that art addresses the most serious aspects of human experience. Artists need serious training. I also believe that art is a necessity for human existence. In many ways it is as important as medicine or engineering. However, unlike medicine it has many levels at which it can be experienced. Art appears in many forms and has many meanings. I am as a person capable of living a very rich life without ever having had the opportunity to learn about the principles of modern medicine, but can I live a rich life without knowing anything about the principles of art?
I am going into all of this in such detail because I would like those of you reading this statement (presumably reading it because you are interested in studying art at the new University of California campus in Merced) to understand the motivation behind the planned curriculum for the Arts at UC Merced. I invite you to e-mail me at dramicova@ucmerced.edu with questions and reactions.