Concepts and Problems in the Visual Arts, Lecture H27: History ofthe BFA

This is one of series of 70+ short videos introducing ideas of art theory, history, criticism, practice, and teaching. They are intended for visual art students, from the first year through the MFA. Together they introduce a coherent, cross-referenced vocabulary of some of the central ideas of both history and practice, such as the sublime, religion, criticism, politics, media, science, skill, and representation. Each video is free-standing, and can be viewed on its own; some also form sequences. A fairly full list of the lectures is given at the beginning of each video.
Are these for everyone?
Nothing is presupposed in any of these videos. If you're new to art, you should be able to watch all of them. At the same time, they are intended to raise the bar in undergraduate art education. The full set includes much more art theory than is normal in BA and BFA programs, and the videos are self-reflexive and self-critical throughout. Every judgment I discuss is open to question. There are videos here that ask whether art students should study art history at all, and videos that suggest reasons not to learn theory or concepts of art. There is also material here that is seldom taught even at graduate level, for example some remarks on how the traces of earlier kinds of teaching survive into the present, and material on the lack of good definitions of the BFA and MFA degrees. The idea is to let students understand all the conditions of their own education: how art is taught now, how it's taught in other places, how books of art history have nationalist perspectives, how masterpieces haven't always been valued, and where studio prompts and exercises come from (which are modernist, which are premodern).
Comments please
Please leave comments and questions here. I'd especially like to hear about texts that you might assign to go with these lectures, class exercises (including drawing execerises) that could accompany them, and projects that arise from them. Please don't post on errors, unless they're major. It took a lot of work to make these, and I won't be revising them.
I am contemplating a teacher's guide, in print form, to go with these. If anyone is interested in that, or has ideas for it, let me know.
Collaboration
I hope these can be a resource for teaching and learning, but I also hope this series can grow, both in the comments here and also with the addition of videos made by other people. If you have made a video that introduces a subject not covered here, or if you have a video with a different approach, please link it in the comments so it can become part of the community.
Philosophic issues
It has been said that contemporary art is sufficiently pluralist so that it is effectively impossible to find a common vocabulary, or to define what counts as pertinent art theory.
Personally speaking, I found it fascinating to choose the topics for this series, because it became necessary to make decisions about the number of topics, which topics can be usefully sketched in 20 minutes, and which topics are related to which others. (Initially there were exactly 56-two sets of 28-because at the School of the Art Institute, where these were made, the semesters are 14 weeks long, so the entire run of Concepts or History lectures could be done in a year. The current number of lectures is over 70.) It's relatively easy to name a couple dozen concepts and critics, but it is exceptionally difficult to figure out what shape the whole should take. It was a salutary exercise, because it helped me see that contemporary art is not a trackless domain of interrelated voices, but a language, or a language family, with patterns and affinities.
A brief history
I composed, researched, wrote, and recorded these during the Covid pandemic. In 2020 they were used by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in paid online seminars to raise money for African-American students. In 2020-21, SAIC began experimenting with requiring them in its first-year program. At that point I decided they should be open and free for everyone.

[@Fatzers]

Thanks for another wonderful upload, these lectures are great. I remembered the name Ives Gammell for his painting "Garden of Proserpine" which I wouldn't mind at all having on my wall; he was apparently also thinking about art education decades ago: "A former president of the Guild of Boston Artists, Robert Hale Ives Gammell is often credited with preserving the “Classical Realist” and Boston School traditions of painting in America... As both a writer and teacher, Gammell sought to counteract the erosion of painting standards and the diminished quality of art education that he decried in his seminal work, “The Twilight of Painting,” published in 1946."

[@JamesElkins]

Thanks! I had no idea about him.

[@FrankKrasicki]

I think there are a multiplicity of definitions for all these degrees and the first rule is that they are served up cafeteria style for a host of good [as in inevitable] reasons. Degrees themselves now belong to the professional tautology that is the education business itself. In almost all cases, a public school teacher needs a BA and teaching certification to teach. One would think that the art courses leading to a BA teaching track would emphasize familiarity with art skills, communication, and compassionate critique. Parallel to that is the BA track that emphasizes Art "history", curation, and so on. And parallel to those are studio art practice trajectory courses. Chances are this stuff is mix and match based on the whim and limited wisdom of the student. To "teach" at the University level, the MFA degree is pretty much a defacto necessity (no matter who defines it or what merit it may have). The system self-sustains the system. The orphan BFA simply provides yet more University level positions to supply credential advancement courses used by public school teachers to advance earnings. By sheer volume, the system itself is overloaded with credentialed art degree holders with no inter-system landing spots. Even poor paying adjunct positions require absurd system investment by the candidate. There's a degree of intellectual cannibalization that's required to play. So, how to make the paper mill worth printing? In my observation, academia has co-opted the government funded Arts programs to monopolize access to commercial galleries. For the fortunate or connected MFA holder who lands a faculty position, making art, attending junkets in foreign lands, expense accounts, and access to sophisticated equipment are huge advantages. As for the content of the cafeteria styled course offerings, that is being driven by the winds of technological singularity and its explosion of information and emand for -cough- "diversity".