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André de Avillez

The rise of Indigenous art speaks volumes about class in Australia - 0 views

theconversation.com/about-class-in-australia-23032

art politics education

shared by André de Avillez on 24 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The great story of recent Australian art has been the resurgence of Indigenous culture and its recognition as a major art form. But in a country increasingly divided by class and wealth, the rise of Indigenous art has had consequences undreamed of by those who first projected it onto the international exhibiting stage.
  • The continuing success of both traditional and western influenced art forms has led to one of the great paradoxes in Australian culture. At a time when art schools have subjugated themselves to the metrics-driven culture of the modern university system, when creative courses are more and more dominated by the children of privilege, some of the most interesting students and graduates are Indigenous.
  • Because Indigenous students were seen as a special case they managed to avoid the metrification of merit.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Not all Indigenous art students become artists. Some use the project-management skills inherent in making any creative endeavour to move onwards and upwards elsewhere
  • But because there are so many successful Indigenous artists, art remains both readily understood as a pathway out of poverty and a way to argue the cause
  • The poor see things differently
  • The children of the wealthy, who now dominate undergraduate arts education, know that mainstream culture belongs to them. There is no message of self-belief presented to those working-class students who may wish to take their art further because it was the one school subject that made sense to them.
  • n Australia the sense of freedom to choose a career seems to have been lost at about the same time as the introduction of HECS in 1989
  • There is a disconnect between the class of people who make and administer the rules and the lived experience of the many. Those who run the world see debt as a tool, a means to a well-considered end, a way to access working capital, a pathway to future wealth.
  • In the distant past, when tertiary study was less formalised, less measured than today, visually-talented working-class kids often gravitated to art schools.
  • my parents were not prepared to be guarantors for me to take a teaching scholarship
  • Accelerating divisions of class and wealth have seen a dramatic reduction in the number of bright, edgy students from the unfashionable suburbs studying the arts
  • André de Avillez on 24 Feb 14
     
    Article on the impact of a metrics-based university curriculum on arts programs in Australia, which is used to explain the disproportionate success of indigenous students, who are exempt from most metrics at the time of admission.
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