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Jean-François Lyotard’s famous text, The Postmodern Condition, published in 1979 — famous as a manifesto of the new spirit of the times, even though it originated as a research paper commissioned by the Quebec government — hypothesised that knowledge was changing status, as western societies “enter what is known as the post-industrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age”.[1] Following this trail, but adopting an anthropological point of view combined with the hypotheses of the so-called Toronto School[2] (relating to the structural relationship said to unite the forms of knowledge with the means through which we come into contact with reality), here we will try to outline a very brief analysis of contemporary education, particularly in the artistic sphere, insisting on the need for its radical reform.
Let’s take our cue from Walter J. Ong now-classic book Orality and Literacy,[3] which tells us that first the invention of writing, and then Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type, radically transformed the consciousness and cognitive structure of human beings, bringing about an epochal transition from the previous oral civilisation (that is, the one, recounted by the authorless epic, as exemplified by the poems of Homer). If this is indeed true and — as also analysed in the 1960s by the classical philologist Eric A. Havelock[4] — this inextricably linked knowledge to writing, from Plato onwards, then it is possible to think, adopting the depth of the anthropological gaze we mentioned earlier, that today Western civilisations are undergoing another great transformation. This is a ‘geological’ transformation, which is slowly but inexorably transporting us from the centuries-old civilisation of writing into a post-literate world, in which our relationship with the world (and thus also the elaboration of knowledge and its transmission to subsequent generations) does not primarily pass through the written word, but rather through the images and sounds of multimedia hypertexts.
In the sixteenth century, it was the pedagogy invented by Jesuits and built around the absolute centrality of the printed book that made ‘new’ men, capable of inhabiting a world essentially made of written words. On reflection the traces of that most modern pedagogy, which was absolutely revolutionary at the time, can still be found today in the structure of our educational system: reading, writing and arithmetic are taught in all schools of all types and levels, privileging the abstraction of a logical thought whose birth was determined precisely by the invention of writing. The other forms of expression, on the other hand, such as drawing, music or dance, suffer from a marginalisation that relegates them to an exceptional dimension of individual choice, which is never deemed essential to the formation of the contemporary citizen. That is, artistic knowledge is not considered fundamental — in the way that writing and abstract-logical thinking are — but rather accessory and quaint.
If we try to focus on Italy, and on its highest level of education, i.e. the university level, this discrimination is evident. We need only consider the ‘limbo’ of the institutions of higher artistic and musical education, that is, the Academies of Fine Arts, the Conservatoires, the ISIA (Higher Institutes for Artistic Industries), the National Academy of Dance and the National Academy of Dramatic Art, which — although recognised as university institutions by the 1999 reform law 508 — continue to live in a suspended condition, in a world that is neither a school nor a university and rather resembles a ‘ghetto’. It is a status that confirms the suspicion for this knowledge and those forms of expression that are not necessarily transmitted through the written word, and thus a status that alarms the custodians of the modern. Giovanni Gentile must also have been alarmed and suspicious: although he was attentive to an aesthetic education — albeit conveyed via a conception which subordinates concrete doing to the rarefaction of thinking — in the 1920s he marked out the ‘exceptional’ space of these institutions and, specifically, of the Academies of Fine Arts. He uprooted these latter’s architecture courses (which had originally been one of the courses, together with Painting, Sculpture and Scenography, in which a student could enrol) and transferred them to the universities, thus prompting the long struggle for recognition that the Academies are still today fighting.
To turn back to what we said earlier about modern pedagogy and an education entirely centred on the structural division between manual and intellectual knowledge: Today, it is, indeed, the Academies of Fine Arts and the other institutions we have mentioned that have always been characterised by an idea of education that is based on the close connection between these two dimensions. In this sense, they seem to be more in step with the times than other institutions (and it is no coincidence that the universities have begun to organise the workshop dimension of study within them) even though they cannot enjoy the same financial resources and curricular possibilities as this older ‘twin’. For instance, in AFAM (Higher Education for Art, Music and Dance), institutions for example, the third training cycle that could offer artists, critics and curators practice-based PhDs, has not yet been given a full normative framework, as has already been the case in other European countries for some time now.[5]
That said, it must also be emphasised that these institutions, in the limbo in which they have been trapped for too long, have ended up developing bad habits that are not easily defensible. For instance — to give one telling example — a recruitment of teaching staff that has often betrayed the indispensable link between research and teaching (i.e. precisely what distinguishes the university cycle of education), leading to an unbridgeable distance between the art world and the world of the academy. Of course, it is true that these institutions — where artists and critics such as Cesare Vivaldi, Alberto Boatto, Roberto Sanesi, Francesco Leonetti, Fabio Mauri, Giulio Turcato, Toti Scialoja, Luciano Fabro, Sergio Lombardo, Alberto Garutti and many others have taught in the past — can now count on significant figures such as Federico Ferrari, Tommaso Ariemma, Lucrezia Ercoli, Anselm Jappe, Elena Bellantoni, Giuseppe Stampone, Bruna Esposito, and Mario Airò, among many others. But there is also an indispensable, indeed urgent need to introduce a virtuous recruitment system that constantly guarantees the quality of teaching and research. This is about making these institutions — which in the past have too often been culturally insignificant and absolutely marginal — the cutting edge of university education in a world, as we said at the beginning, that is now post-literate. The same applies to access to economic resources, which are indispensable for developing spaces adequate for educational needs, for the restructuring of the educational plan and disciplinary sectors, as well as for an effective and commensurate educational co-participation between practice and theory. Indeed, it must be acknowledged that if the universities have for too long subordinated doing to thinking, it is equally true that the Academies have been the offspring of this same discrimination, proposing — in reverse — practical training with a little theory on the side, worse, as an ornament.
Nothing could be more mistaken. In a world undergoing rapid transformation, where the nature of knowledge and understanding is undergoing structural changes, the institutions we are talking about, if suitably reformed and put in a position to be genuinely attractive to students from all over the world, could truly become Universities of Art that would provide a starting point for restructuring the entire educational system. That would mean a system that no longer discriminates against that knowledge and those forms of expression which today, more than ever, are fundamental for being suitably prepared to inhabit the world ahead of us. In this sense, only a twenty-first century pedagogy, which brings together artistic, philosophical and scientific knowledge, allows us to conceive Polytechnics of the Arts that set themselves the primary objective of training not only artists, but also, more generally, the citizens of tomorrow. Much has been done already, in this sense, but much still remains to be done. For this, it is necessary to have an ambitious, robust and articulate cultural project, and at the same time a political will capable of concretely translating this idea and thus grasping a great opportunity that is already within reach. As always in these cases, we need to seize the moment.
Bibliographical references
A. Bisaccia, Fabbriche di bello. Per un’università delle arti come infrastrutture della creatività, Sossella Editore, 2023
L. Caramel, F. Poli, L’arte bella. La questione delle Accademie di Belle Arti in Italia, Feltrinelli, 1979
E.A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present, Yale University Press, 1986
J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, 1984
W.J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, Routledge, 2002.
[1] J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 3.
[2] This name refers to the research of a series of scholars — Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter J. Ong — who from the mid-twentieth century focused their attention on the relationship between technologies, communication and cultural forms, giving rise to a school of mass media studies that continues to this day, for instance with the work of Derrick de Kerckhove.
[3] W. Ong, Orality and Literacy, Routledge, 2002.
[4] E.A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present, Yale University Press, 1986.
[5] On this, and in general on the reform process in Academies and Higher Education institutions for Art, Music and Dance (in Italian, AFAM), see the recent book by A. Bisaccia, Fabbriche di bello. Per un’università delle arti come infrastrutture della creatività, Sossella, 2023. Another more dated work, equally interesting for reconstructing the long struggle for recognition mentioned above is L. Caramel, F. Poli, L’arte bella. La questione delle Accademie di Belle Arti in Italia, Feltrinelli, 1979.
