Another Emergency Staff Meeting: Artistic Responses to Instabilities in the Art School Ian Brown

Abstract

This research draws upon the experience of three art school lecturers who, together, work as Common Culture. All have witnessed the transformation of the art school from a relatively free educational space for creative exploration and experimentation into a highly structured provision, centered on a commercial transaction between the student-client and the institution. The paper will explore the use of autoethnographic methods within our artistic practice to investigate the impact of various changes that have been taking place within Higher Education in the UK.
In response, Common Culture has developed a series of narratives, set within a fictional art school, based on their collective experience. This has been developed into a comic/graphic novel for publication.

Keywords:

Autoethnography, contemporary artist practice, practice research, marketisation, neoliberalism, institutional critique, generative AI