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Talking Art

The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education

Talking Art

The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education

In Talking Art, acclaimed ethnographer Gary Alan Fine gives us an eye-opening look at the contemporary university-based master’s-level art program. Through an in-depth analysis of the practice of the critique and other aspects of the curriculum, Fine reveals how MFA programs have shifted the goal of creating art away from beauty and toward theory. Contemporary visual art, Fine argues, is no longer a calling or a passion—it’s a discipline, with an academic culture that requires its practitioners to be verbally skilled in the presentation of their intentions. Talking Art offers a remarkable and disconcerting view into the crucial role that universities play in creating that culture.

288 pages | 32 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2018

Art: American Art, Art--General Studies

Education: Higher Education

Sociology: Social Psychology--Small Groups, Sociology of Arts--Leisure, Sports

Reviews

“Alternately engrossing, distressing, and hilarious—a must-read for anyone interested in learning more about the inner machinations of cultural production in the United States.”

The New Criterion

“Sure to be recognized as an essential text in the sociology of art and the sociology of higher education. But its implications for thinking about contemporary work and culture reach far beyond its specific focus. . . . Fine’s book offers more than a reflective description and analysis of a new site of art patronage and occupational socialization. . . This book should stimulate thinking on aspects of contemporary culture whose import reaches far beyond art and higher education.”

American Journal of Sociology

“Valuable for its description of how the art world and the university have grown entangled. . . . Talking Art offers us an ethnography of visual-arts education: a dispatch from MFA island. Art school, Fine finds, is a subculture, with an austere patois and peculiar rites of praise and humiliation.”

Chronicle of Higher Education

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue

Introduction: The Brave New World of the MFA

Chapter One: Producing Practice
Chapter Two: Sharp Genres and Blurred Boundaries           
Chapter Three: Painted Words
Chapter Four: The Reason of Pure Critique
Chapter Five: Community as Praxis
Chapter Six: Preparing for a Hostile World
Chapter Seven: Disciplined Genius

Notes
Index
 

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