Singerman to discuss ‘Conflict of the Faculties’

What should artists be taught? What do they need to know or to be able to do? It is no longer clear what skills are needed to become an artist, and whether those skills are the same as learning to pull prints or cast metal or blow glass, or whether, in the university and in an increasingly professionalized art world, the skill of art are not more theoretical or critical.

Howard Singerman’s lecture, “The Conflict of the Faculties” will offer an archeology of the art department in the contemporary university. Singerman will present his talk Tuesday, March 28, at 5:30 p.m. in 160 Elvehjem Museum of Art.

Singerman, assistant professor of art history at the University of Virginia, will explore the often contradictory, and insistently ideological, discourses on the uses of art, the role and gender of the artist, and the goal of university education that emerged with the arrival of “practical” art in the first part of the 20th century. Singerman’s lecture takes it title from a 1798 essay by Immanuel Kant on the relation of philosophy to the professions in the university.

Singerman, who has an MFA in sculpture, is author of “Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University” (1999) and has published criticism in Art in America, Artforum, October, and Parkett. His campus visit is sponsored by the University Lectures Committee and the Department of Art Visiting Artist/Critic Program.