Graduate Work in the Visual Arts: Professionalism and University Education
N K O YOUNG man or woman with the ambition to become an artist in the United States needs credentials from a university graduate school to achieve the goal. He may have earned a Bachelor's degree in art or even a Master's, but the degree as such is of slight value to the prospective artist who is attempting to establish a reputation either as an independent fine artist or as a commercial artist. The work completed in college or university courses may have been the determining factor in the art student's decision to make his way as an artist. He may have some respect for the faculty with whom he worked, and perhaps a conviction that some teacher gave him a start on his way. He will find, however, that professionals in art have merely a passing interest in his possession of an advanced degree, and even that much concern only if the work he embarks upon shows quality in the opinion of colleagues, art directors, or gallery impresarios. Bureaucratization of the arts, with the corresponding requirement of a professional union card, has not yet begun except in architecture, a field in which it has developed to a considerable extent. Industrial design, the near neighbor of architecture, is perhaps next closest to becoming a profession requiring minimal professional-school preparation signified by the baccalaureate and the Master's degree. The relation of the practice of the arts to the advanced study of the arts and to advanced academic degrees in art is not, then, at all like that which prevails in such professions as law, medicine, and most of the sciences. An independent artist may have had no formal education at all after high school; indeed, he may not even possess a high-school diploma. Consequently, advanced college work in art is useful to the student merely to the extent that his later experience as an artist proves it to have been. Only the prospective teacher of art needs an advanced degree as a symbol of formal educational preparation making him eligible for teaching positions. The positions open to him will depend partly on the worth of the degree he holds and partly on the prestige of the school which granted it. In the field of art, unfortunately, the disparity between the