What Should an Art School Honor? Short Answer, Not Kanye West.

If you’re reading this you probably have already heard. The School of the Art Institue of Chicago will be honoring Kanye West with an honorary doctorate at this year’s commencement ceremony… and this is a sad and worrisome prospect.

If you already agree that this a terible idea go sign this petition, if not read on.

Before we get into why Kanye West is the worst choice ( of all time ) to recieve an honorary doctorate from a prestigious art school here are 5 reasons why I have no problems with Kanye or honorary doctorates.

1. A honorary Phd does not devalue a MFA degree from SAIC. This is an honorary degree and are given out to many well deserving people who have not done Phd level work.
2. A honorary Phd is about the honor bestowed and is not a real degree in a specific field. So, it does not matter that SAIC does not have a music department. (There are bad-ass sound & fashion departments though.)
3. Popular art, whether it’s music, comic books or porn, is a fine and valid form of art, that for me, has value along side other high-brow or elitist forms of art. (Neither institutional pedigree nor gold records do a good artist make.)
4. I am not concerned about the content of Kanye West’s artistic output. (Although some find it misogynistic, I personaly like his music.)
5. I am not even concerned that some people think Kanye is not an artist. (I think he is an artist, but now that he is an artist, let’s compare him to all of the other artists and see how he stacks up.)

Ok, so why then am I the ‘pissed off’ twitter guy about all of this?

It is a question about the value I see in going to SAIC or any other art school of its caliber. During my first summer in gradschool I went on a study trip to Italy. My first day in Rome I meet a friend and his new girlfried for lunch. She was in the process of applying for MBA programs at the time and asked me what my return on investment (ROI) was for a MFA. She was expecting a dollar amount and I had to admit that I had no such number figured out. It was only after that conversation that I understood the metric that I used to validate my pricey MFA decision. I measure the value of my MFA in critiques. How many critiques would I get and with who. I mesured my two years at SAIC in the number of critical encounters with world class faculty and other engaged students. I did this to make my work stronger, because I see value in the type of critical dialogue that institutions like SAIC provide.

If Kanye understood the value of critical dialogue he would seek it out as I did, but he doesn’t.

Art school sends you down a path of critically interrogating your own work, the work of others, as well as the artistic dicipline itself. If you have taken this path, or respect this path, you don’t say things like Kanye spewed in his interview where he leaked the news of his Phd.

“I’d like to be able to work with the system to bring more beauty and truth to the world, and inspiration.” — Kanye West

No, Kanye, I don’t know what you mean (and you don’t seem to either), but if any one of the engaged, responsible faculty at SAIC heard this statment in a critique they might help you get to a better understanding of this by asking the following questions: What system are we talking about, capitalism? Perhaps you should investigate the structures of late market capitalism. How do you understand beauty? Is it beauty as defined by the male gaze? Or are there multiple beauties? What is truth? Who gets to decide? Maybe, Is truth socially and historically constructed through power structures and narrative? Do we need more inspiration and if so how does inspiration function in a socity? Inspiration implies directionality, to what end(s) should we be inspiring, Kanye?

That, Mr. West, is the beginning of a critical dialogue, and if you are so enamored by the power of creativity these are the question you should be asking yourself. These are the kinds of difficult questions you get in art school. The kinds of questions that develop the skills of critical dialogue.

Now maybe you are thinking, “Hey! Kanye is not here to defend himself, don’t pick on Kanye”. I’m not picking on him. I am pointing out that he doesn’t know what he means by his own statement, if he did he would be the most excited person in the world to share it with us. That is my feeling when I have discovered an insight into my work. I don’t gloss over it with unsubstantiated platitudes.

Stop screaming about magic asses!

In 2013 Kanye was in the ‘trays’ at the Harvard Graduate School of Design making a statement about the power of design:

“I just wanted to tell you guys: I really do believe that the world can be saved through design, and everything needs to actually be “architected.” […] I believe that utopia is actually possible — but we’re led by the least noble, the least dignified, the least tasteful, the dumbest, and the most political. So in no way am I a politician — I’m usually at my best politically incorrect and very direct. I really appreciate you guys’ willingness to learn and hone your craft, and not be lazy about creation.”

That’s right Kanye, they are not lazy about creation, you are. The value of an arts education can be drownd out in a wash of sound bites, neologisms, and pompous content-less cheerleading. You’re lazy Kanye when you don’t realize that you are the one doing the drowning. The problem is when hyperbole and bombast, no mater how positive, erases the critical details, hard work and struggles of those doing the creating, building and honing. Simplifying the work of artists and designers to creative, innovative, beautiful, or inspirational destroys their power to engage with and tackle the complexity you are talking about. There is no bigger danger in the arts than creating an over inflated bubble around the magic powers of the artist.

As an occasional design strategy consultant I find myself in meetings with lots of acronyms; CEO, MSc, COO, CPA, VP, CFO, SVP, on the whole very smart people. The reason I am there is because they need some ‘innovation’ or ‘out of the box creativity’ they have heard so much about. In these meeting I am introduced as the creative and on more than one occasion someone turns to me and says something to the effect of, “what do you got?”. This is an invitation to pitch my new creative idea, to reach down the back of my pants and pull that sweet money making creativity out of my ass. The reason they think creativity lives up my ass is that people like Kanye are running around spouting off about our amazing world changing awesomeness without understanding what we really do. What we do is criticaly engage with the world around us. We are in a constant, sometimes paralyzing state, of questioning; but it is exactly this deep questioning that leads artist and designers to expand our sense of the world. This skill of critiquing, of parsing ideas, is worth understanding. Please stop screaming about this group of artists and designers with magic asses and you might understand what we (and this includes you Kanye as an artist) do.

Shame on you SAIC.

In the end Kanye is not to blame, he is free to be as uncritical and loud as he likes, it is the administration who is accountable for understanding and supporting the values of SAIC. There are many administrators who could have and should have questioned this decision, and thanks to the reporting of the Chicago Tribune, we know one of them is Lisa Wainwright.

“Lisa Wainwright, dean of faculty and vice president of academic administration at SAIC, said she read a recent interview with West in which he said he wished that he had attended the SAIC. “I read it and thought, ‘Wow, this is a fantastic moment.’ Here is this major figure in the cultural landscape promoting art school, this guy from Chicago saying art school is cool. So we thought, ‘This man deserves an honorary doctorate from us!’ He should have gone here. He would have been a perfect SAIC student — he likes to shake people out of complacency.”

In one respect Lisa is right, Kanye should have gone to SAIC, a 20 year-old Kanye would have made a great art student, and as that student he would have learned to hone and craft his ideas in an institution that celebrates critical dialogue, but he didn’t. Today 37 year-old Kanye shows no understanding that there is such a thing as critical dialogue let alone that it is the backbone of a creative practice.

Lisa Wainwright on the other hand should know better. That’s great that Kanye wished he had studied at SAIC, give him a shout out on twitter, offer him a private tour, let him give SAIC students a private concert after crit week if he thinks the school is so great; but an honorary Phd!? It is right there in the word, honorary doctorates are a way to HONOR the achievements and contributions of an individual to a community, a community that is held together by values, of which the hightest value is its critical dialogue. Lisa Wainwright — How do you not see that Kanye West is the anthesis of this value, our values?

You were a faculty member on that trip to Italy where I started to develop my critical awareness, staring up Borromini’s dome in San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Please don’t diminish all the work I have done since.

Sign this petition if you think art institutions should honor critical dialogue in service of the arts and not hyperbole and bombast.