Talking Art is a rich and insightful ethnography of university-based art training in the United States. In it, sociologist and folklorist Gary Alan Fine focuses on the enculturational and educational experiences of Masters of Fine Art (MFA) students in visual arts graduate programs. Addressing the contemporary circumstances of such students, their academic programs generally, and the state of contemporary art and art education, the study is based on qualitative research pursued primarily in the author’s home region—at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and at Illinois State University. In common with much folkloristic ethnography, Fine’s work provides a great deal by way of holistic ethnographic reporting, but he centers his account on a keystone cultural performance event known as a critique. As scholars interested in both culture and metaculture, talk about objects as well as objects that talk, folklorists have much to gain from Fine’s lively, thoughtful, provocative, and humane study.
I asked the JFRR editors for this review assignment in the wake of a very favorable experience discussing the book in a graduate material culture course. Readers of this review—and Professor Fine himself—may find interest in the fact that my course included a significant number of MFA students working in studio art disciplines. While I cannot claim to know all that they—or any of the students—thought about the book, the discussion was very generative and the MFA students testified to the goodness of fit between Fine’s account of the studio art MFA experience in general and their own personal experiences in particular. They agreed with, rather than contested, his analysis. While I anticipate that the book will be widely read in courses related to the sociology of culture, I may be unique as an early adopter teaching it to mixed audiences of folklorists, anthropologists, and studio artists gathered under the banner of material culture studies. I recommend the book for this purpose, and for folklore studies readers in general, because the volume is a compelling contribution to a broader literature—one now experiencing a period of renewal—in which talk about objects is considered closely alongside consideration of the objects at the center of this talk and the social interactions in which the objects and talk are co-presented. Other recent examples of such work pursued in the United States include Jon Kay’s 2016 Folk Art and Aging: Life-Story Objects and Their Makers and Danille Christensen’s three studies (2011, 2016, 2017) of contemporary scrapbooking. In addition to addressing this key concern of performance-oriented folklore studies, the book is also an excellent source for thinking about the nature of art worlds and about scenes as a social matrix for expressive life. For those interested in reflecting on the nature of graduate education in the United States, the book also offers a lot of food for thought.
In this instance, for the first time in my career, I digitally crumpled up a “completed” book review and threw it in the digital trash. This is through no fault of the author or his valuable book. In my first attempt, I devoted too much attention to my own increasingly painful and frustrating incorporation into the world that he describes carefully, generously, and well in Talking Art. Over the past few years, I have not only taught a growing number of MFA studio art students in my courses, I have been coaxed by a some of them into serving on their committees. In that role, I now find myself participating the critique genre that Fine explicates so well. That experience has been hard for me for reasons that readers of Fine’s book may come to understand. I withhold my full personal experience narrative for another day, but I want to flag one of the many trends of broader relevance that get noted and considered in Talking Art. MFA studio arts students are finding their way to my material culture and curatorship courses, and to the courses of my colleagues in the social sciences and humanities, because, as Fine observes, art history—at least as taught by art historians—holds very little interest or relevance for such students. This relates to larger trends in elite art worlds and to the history and ideology of such art in contemporary contexts, but it also relates to the centrality of the critique as a keystone genre for MFA art training. Students take courses such as my material culture course, in part at least, because it provides a kind of raw material (about society, about culture, about materials, etc.) out of which the conceptualization of art works and the narrative performances that communicate those conceptualizations can be fashioned. As Fine reveals and as my experiences confirm for me, the most pressing issue within critique events has to do with students saying with confidence and fluency what a physical work of art that they have made is about, and that contextualizing discourse is expected to be, for the most part, a compelling, cosmopolitan, and somehow original comment on the human condition. To produce better and better artist’s statements about the deeper significances of their work (and to manufacture such deeper significances), students are challenged and cajoled by their teachers and, in some formats, their fellow students. It may come as a surprise to the uninitiated that a cultural performance genre centered on something akin to the verbal dueling so well studied by folklorists turns out to be at the heart of graduate studio art training. Fine helps us understand how this could have happened and what it means. For me, Fine’s book has deepened my understanding of a world that I have drifted into, but it cannot relieve my discomfort at what goes on in that world.
Long practiced in the nuanced pursuit of ethnography of just such small social worlds within the broader social order, Fine is better than I am at remaining unflustered in the presence of the artist as social researcher, and he is quite adept at presenting a sympathetic and understanding account of what is going on in fine art graduate training. The critique is a central rite in MFA fine arts training, but it is not the only thing going on. In keeping with the study of cultural performances within our shared field, it is a window on those other things—the nature of the market for contemporary art, the arrival of credentialing and of professionalization in the arts, the growing gap between the history of art and its contemporary practice, the structural transformation of the university and the effects catalyzed by student debt, the impatience of contemporary artists with genre constraints, the crucial nature of social networks for careers, the devaluing of technique that accompanies the celebration of conceptual discourse, and the affective culture of MFA programs. These transformations and dynamics, and others, are also, of course, evident within the critique as performance. Fine brings these many threads together compellingly and in a way that makes what he describes logical in terms of the interconnected social world that he chronicles.
For folklorists who study expressive material culture outside of elite art worlds, created by those without university training, Talking Art provides an excellent resource for clarifying how such different art worlds not only remain different but, in some instances, are actively being made more different still through the processes of professionalization and hierarchialization that Fine describes. While Talking Art offers different things for different audiences (from MFA faculties to interactionalist sociologists), for folklorists it points to a key area just outside our frame. In many MFA programs (and Fine explores this) relatively little attention is given to technique-oriented training. Faculty do expect students to get progressively better at working with materials, but skills are often acquired outside of faculty-student interactions. While a significant range of approaches—from experimentation to peer-to-peer show and tell to watching YouTube videos—can help students expand their technical competencies, a parallel non-university world co-exists in which both faculty (as teachers and as students) and students (usually as students, but sometimes as teachers) go off campus to pursue the technical craft side of their arts. University and non-university art worlds sometimes overlap in the associated network of craft schools. This is a world that folklorist Kelley Totten has begun exploring in her dissertation on the “folk school” end of the craft school continuum (Totten 2017). An ethnographer wanting to build on Fine’s treatment of what happens inside the walls of an MFA program would certainly be tempted to go see what happens to a community of students post-graduation as they navigate galleries and cultivate collectors, but an ethnography of craft education, at places like Pennland School of Craft, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, the Center for Book Arts, and Haytstack Mountain School of Crafts, that tracks the comings and goings between graduate art programs and such less-regimented schools would also be highly instructive.
As they increasingly study making, including the making of art, within scenes, cityscapes, and distributed social networks rather than in villages or ateliers, folklorists can particularly benefit from close study in this smart ethnography. As folklorists focus in new or renewed ways on the co-presentation of talk and narrated object, Fine’s book stands out as a model, particularly for its sociological sophistication. Fine’s study also contributes to a broader and longstanding interest in folklore studies on persuasive speech. For the appreciation and consideration of ethnography most broadly, Talking Art is a well-crafted and well-conceived work that extends and enriches both interactionist traditions in sociology and performance-oriented ones in folkloristics. My copy is heavily marked noting key insights and finely wrought sentences. I wish I could share them all with you but instead I urge you take up the text yourself.
Works Cited
Danille Christensen. “‘Look at Us Now!’: Scrapbooking, Regimes of Value, and the Risks of (Auto)Ethnography.” Journal of American Folklore 124 (2011): 175–210.
Danille Christensen. “(Not) Going Public: Mediating Reception and Managing Visibility in Contemporary Scrapbook Performance.” In Material Vernaculars: Objects, Images, and Their Social Worlds, edited by Jason Baird Jackson, 40–104. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.
Danille Christensen. “Materializing the Everyday: ‘Safe’ Scrapbooks, Aesthetic Mess, and the Rhetorics of Workmanship.” Journal of Folklore Research 54 (2017): 233–84.
Jon Kay. Folk Art and Aging: Life-Story Objects and Their Makers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016..
Kelley Totten, “Making Craft: Performing an Idea of Craft at U.S. Folk Schools.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2017.
--------
[Review length: 1720 words • Review posted on December 4, 2020]