https://doi.org/10.52652/e.6.24.12This essay describes the art schools in the UK as institutions driven solely by an imperative to survive. It challenges the conditions and the ideology under which art schools created generations of artists since the 1970s and their reaction to the economic, social, and political upheavals of the past decade. The text makes a comparison between the current expansion in the training of psychotherapists – today’s cognitive professionals of the future – and the socially positive motivations for the expansion of art schools. The text suggests that having failed to transform itself and being of little practical use to societies, art schools will face competition from other, more overtly instrumental cognitive disciplines. The freedom which they promise, however, will be as short‑lived as that of mass art education.
