About his thesis paper “The Naked School”: With the appearance of COVID-19, the appeal of Art Schools might collapse alongside the global economy. This pandemic has generated a series of social restrictions that led schools to an immediate transition to online education.
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Faced with the loss of technical resources, workspaces, and exhibition spaces, as well as the impossibility of an in-person education, students from YALE, TISCH, RISSD, SVA, Columbia, and my own institution, MICA, have asked for a partial tuition refund that reflects the mutilated Spring semester of 2020.
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It would be easy to brand art students as blind egoists during a global crisis that demands human solidarity. But their response is consistent with what our school has promoted as the backbone of our education: from the studios and labs to fabricate the works, to the artist dinners and the curated exhibitions—all of which complete the closed circuit of a self-absorbed practice divorced from the miseries of the world out there.
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To wit, this is art education defined as the simulation of a certain exercise of the artistic profession, education that superimposes the idea of success over the construction of knowledge, one that collapses upon itself like a perfect tautology.
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In order to discover what is truly substantial, education must be naked. Its spaces can only be open places, empty spaces that are inhabited and sustained by the possibilities of learning. Art schools must depurate education, to find the autonomy[1] necessary to create new possible systems; and in turn, go outside to approach reality from this transformation. We speak of learning structures that can affect and nurture its contexts without collapsing, as well as generating a contribution to those contexts in return.
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Downloadable PDF
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www.miguelbraceli.com/the-naked-school
