The Academy in a State of Siege: Pictures of an Institution, Part II

The siege of the academy continues.

Part I of this essay was published yesterday and is available here.

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The Academy as Brand

THE ACADEMY IS A GENERIC brand, which taken literally is an emblem or logo, complete with heraldic shields and banners, a word/image composite that advertises corporate institutions promising the delivery of cultural and economic capital to their clients. In The Economist’s 2003 anthology Brands and Branding, co-editor Rita Clifton declares that “brands are estimated to account for approximately one-third of all wealth” in the global economy (echoing Naomi Klein’s earlier observations). The academic brand is a promise of value, which is why corporations, universities, and art academies jealously guard their brands against infringement and carefully manage the signs of prestige attached to their particular and “proper” name. They certify their members as trained professionals. And they give awards—most famously, the Academy Awards granted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a label that instantly transforms the humble mass medium once known as “the flickers,” the “picture shows,” or “the movies” into a fine art worthy of academic attention. In my lifetime, most of the prestigious universities have carved out a space for “cinema studies,” a development that seemed quite remote in the 1960s when I was a graduate student.

Which brings me to the question of art history’s place in the academy. Giorgio Vasari’s foundational Lives of the Artists (1550) made it clear that the new status of visual artists and their media would require a historical reckoning with their personalities, achievements, and contributions to a newly conceived canon of virtuosity and a progressive mastery of visual representation. The existence of Art with a capital A demanded the invention of the academic discipline known as art history. That very durable project reached its peak of prestige in the 19th and 20th centuries, undergoing a crisis when the modernist avant-garde broke with classicism, and art historians like Aby Warburg began to assemble atlases of images that went well beyond the boundaries of art to include ethnographic and news photographs.

The invention of photography led many image-makers to conclude that “art” itself, as a distinct category, could no longer be sustained. In the late 20th century, a new academic formation known as “visual studies” or “visual culture” aroused passionate debates about a new interest in nonartistic images across the media, the subject of a reconfigured iconology that included the study of metaphor. (Though indeed, one could argue that this happened much earlier, that the Florentine Academy of Drawing was itself a product of a “visual turn” in the larger culture, with new media like Galileo’s telescope and Albertian perspective reconfiguring everything that could be understood as “visual.”)

The idea of a pictorial or iconic “turn” in the study of culture was firmly denounced by October magazine, one of the leading American organs of a post-sixties avant-garde that was still committed to the distinct status of the work of art. (Interestingly, my own essay “What Do Pictures Really Want?,” which affirms many of the claims of visual studies, appeared in the same issue.)

Artistic challenges to canonical definitions of art might still be permitted, so the presence of a urinal renamed Fountain in a gallery could be assimilated to a pedigree of transgressive art. Some scholars went so far as to attempt a rescue of the urinal’s aesthetic value by claiming (falsely) that it was a unique, original work of art fabricated by Marcel Duchamp. This strategy has evolved today, when a banana duct-taped to the gallery wall, with the title Comedian, can be auctioned off at Sotheby’s for millions of dollars, placed there by a duly certified artist, and rationalized as a critical reflection on the role of the banana in Western colonialism. A more perfect collaboration between a professionalized art world and the academy could hardly be imagined.

Meanwhile, the world of images marches on into the new media of screens, headsets, and game consoles. At the University of Chicago in the 1980s, the Department of Art History accommodated interlopers like the members of the Laocoon Group, a collective of artists, art historians, literary scholars, and philosophers who were interested in studying the “division of the faculties” between the visual and verbal arts. Cinema studies followed, along with a more general formulation known as the “Chicago School of Media Theory,” which was generated by students rather than faculty, and which still boasts a (probably outdated) glossary of “Keywords in Media Theory” after 20 years online. The current moment features the emergence of MADD, the Media Arts, Data, and Design Center, which offers majors in video game design and theory.

There are times, then, when the siege of the academy takes a positive form, generating a progressive evolution of the institution, driven by disciplinary renegades. Take, for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s “heretics” and outsiders/insiders (as Bourdieu notes, some of the most prominent exemplars of modern French intellectual life were relatively minor presences in the academy). American higher education experienced a revolution in the aftermath of World War II, when a new generation of working-class students flooded into elite universities and began to depend on federal funding. At the University of Chicago, this was preceded during the war by the interdisciplinary initiative known as “the Manhattan Project,” which was driven by a state of emergency that required the rapid creation of an atomic bomb before Werner Heisenberg’s team in Nazi Germany. Jewish refugees from Germany and Italian physicist Enrico Fermi led the way into the “nuclear age” under the grandstands of UChicago’s football field; on the other side of campus, Milton Friedman was laying the foundations of the Chicago school of economics, the dominant ideology of neoliberalism and the destruction of the Keynesian welfare state. Fermi and Friedman both received the Nobel Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences while Chicago novelist Saul Bellow was receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 from the Swedish Academy. When I arrived at University of Chicago in 1977, I was given a T-shirt with the names of over 50 professors who had won the Nobel. I felt embarrassed to wear it.

My other notable academic role has been that of gatekeeper, in the form of a 43-year tenure as the editor of the journal Critical Inquiry. This journal hosted the transformation of the humanities and social sciences known as the “theory revolution” in American and European academies to the present day. Deconstruction, feminism and women’s studies, race and gender studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and affect theory, among many other initiatives, reshaped research in literature, the visual arts, and culture. Many American academics saw this moment as a siege of Anglo-American academic traditions by something called “French Theory,” aided by uppity women, gays, and non-white people. Nick Land ridicules this academic development as “Grievance Studies.” One subscriber, upon reading Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s introduction to his special autumn 1985 issue, “Race,” Writing, and Difference, wrote us a letter declaring that he knew he was in trouble the moment he looked at the cover. Fierce debates and polemics enlivened the journal’s pages, which hosted a variety of antagonists, including the memorable essay “Against Theory,” which generated an entire issue of responses. Jacques Derrida’s defense of Paul de Man’s wartime essays similarly provoked a special issue. My one big disappointment as editor in this period occurred when philosopher Harry Frankfurt submitted the essay “On Bullshit,” which I read and accepted on the spot, only to have him withdraw it and send it to the Raritan Quarterly Review.

But that’s enough about my own experience as an academic functionary. Vasari’s visionary program of “disegno” (design) as the keystone of the first academy of art is curiously akin to Bourdieu’s shifting of the “sociological gaze” from society at large to the structure of higher education in France. Bourdieu is determined to reveal the unconscious disegno of academic institutions. He discovered that the citadel of the academy was a reserve of cultural capital and, despite its self-image as an autonomous “quiet place,” was homologous with and dominated by structures of economic and political power in the larger society. Immanuel Kant’s “conflict of the faculties” between the Left and the Right turned out to be just as relevant to the academy as it was to politics. Mary McCarthy had made a similar point with her satirical novel, The Groves of Academe (1952). But unlike Bourdieu, she had no ambition “to publish diagrams” that revealed the actual power relations and ideologies—the hidden disegno—of the academy.

The internal siege of the academy, the conflict between its entrenched power structure and its students, is not necessarily a bad thing. Is there anyone in an academy who has not chafed against the ossified structures and requirements as they pursued their careers? Let’s take a second look at the image of the French academy that adorns Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus (1984). On closer inspection, it looks as if none of the students are actually paying attention to the lesson and the disciplinary structure in which they find themselves. Could this be a picture of academic anarchy in which the students are each absorbed in their own thoughts, in defiance of their orderly environment? Should we insert cell phones into the picture to update it? Or should we take a third look that goes beyond the visible to the audible, and read the students as singers whose distinct voices are merging in that chorus of harmonious confusion known as an academy?

The Royal Academy

Of the many kinds of academies, the ones devoted to art invariably provoke this sort of internal siege. Lessons in “the rules of art” are probably the most frequently broken laws that human beings can devise—though the Florentine Academy enforced hegemony in the visual arts for several centuries. The art academy is also the kind of institution in which this anarchy is most likely to be productive. An interesting example is the British Royal Academy of the Arts, founded in 1768 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. This academy, like Vasari’s, was an attempt to raise the quality and prestige of English art, which was seen as backward in relation to the dominant schools of Italian art. William Hogarth, a founding member of the Royal Academy, attacked the “Picture-Jobbers from abroad,” who are “continually importing Ship Loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Madona’s, and other dismal Dark subjects” that are displacing honest English art. His Battle of the Pictures (1745) shows one such shipload of identical copies of fake Italian “masterpieces” as an invading army attacking Hogarth’s own satirical “modern history” paintings. The Royal Academy was a study in contradictions. Designed on Vasari’s model, it was at the same time a citadel for defending the national aspirations of British art against the dominance of Europe. Portraiture, genre, and landscape, previously minor genres in the hierarchy of European art, became the signature achievements of British academic art in the hands of J. M. W. Turner (professor of perspective at the Royal Academy) and John Constable, who painted Reynolds’s cenotaph. Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1783–84) was his way of connecting ancient and classical art to the modern elite society portrait and an iconic actress.

Internal resistance to Reynolds’s academy came from its most defiant student, William Blake. Reynolds’s Discourses on Art (1778) is often read today as a surface for Blake’s indignant and acidic reflections, scrawled like angry graffiti over his copy of Reynolds’s collection of conventional aphorisms. Driven by his resentment of Reynolds’s conservative politics and class snobbery, Blake scrawls “This Man was Hired to Depress Art” on the title page of the Discourses. But Blake’s own art, inspired both by Michelangelo and Raphael and by medieval manuscript illumination (seen as retrograde and unfashionable by Vasari and his descendants), is deeply indebted to the Royal Academy—not for its lessons but for its collection of antique sculptures and its library in Somerset House, where Blake read the ancient and modern classics of art, philosophy, and literature. Arguably the most original British artist of the 18th and 19th centuries, Blake introduced a pictorial style that led to the Pre-Raphaelites, and a literary inventiveness that inspired the likes of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. In the 1960s, he became an international cultural hero.

Blake’s admiration of Michelangelo and Raphael’s pure linear style merged with his love of Gothic art, to the extent that he excoriated the Venetians, Titian and Tintoretto, for their coloristic “blotting and blurring.” If Blake had been in charge, he surely would have denied them membership in the Florentine Academy. He was more dogmatic about the importance of the “wirey line of rectitude” in drawing, linearity, and disegno than the most jingoistic Florentine. Fortunately for everyone, he was a permanent outsider at the Royal Academy. His profession as a journeyman engraver (arguably the greatest since Albrecht Dürer) and his low social status prevented him from being a member, even though he participated in the academy’s annual exhibition many times.

Sometimes the civil war between art and the academy breaks into the open. The Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863 mounted a challenge to academic art in its featuring of the impressionists, Édouard Manet and James Whistler, whose works had been rejected by the official salon. Arguably the most dramatic face-off of “classical” academic art and the avant-garde was the 1937 pairing of Hitler’s Great German Art Exhibition with the parallel exhibition of modern “Degenerate Art.”

The Academy as a Work of Art

What would it look like to have an academy not merely designed by and for artists, but conceived as a work of art in itself? I have in mind a smaller, less formal institution, where a group of artists assemble to create a work that is understood as an ongoing project of education, research, and practice. The Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts at UChicago is the example closest to home, but of course there are much earlier iterations of this model.

Beginning in the 1950s and ’60s in response to the exhaustion of abstract expressionism, new schools like Black Mountain College and CalArts emerged. In the 1990s, groups such as the Critical Art Ensemble, the Yes Men, and RTMark (or ®™ark) claimed a kind of corporate identity complete with brand names. In some ways, this was an imitation of previous artistic movements such as Fluxus, which boasted an interdisciplinary “fellowship of discourse” linking musicians, poets, scholars, performers, and visual artists. Fluxus even boasted a publication arm, the Something Else Press, which circulated essays and manifestos advancing the group’s purposes. More recently, the interdisciplinary “agency” known as Forensic Architecture has conducted independent research into the genocide in Gaza and the treatment of refugees in the international waters of the Mediterranean. The agency, with its fusion of research and new media practices designed to investigate and expose state violence, might qualify as a proto-academy.

Someday the history of “art collectives” like the Bauhaus and Joseph Beuys’s group at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in Germany—a school without walls led by a charismatic individual—will be written. Beuys’s notion of “social sculpture” provides an anarchist counterpart to the Albertian model of classical architecture as the image of the academy. Antony Gormley’s Field (1993) is literally a social sculpture of massed clay figures fabricated by a community of citizens. An even more subversive academy, the Cátedra Arte de Conducta, was launched by artist Tania Bruguera in Havana in 2007. Bruguera’s project was a critique not only of “performance art” as an exhausted academic spectacle but of the Castro government as well. When the state tried to use street repairs to drown out her 24-hour reading of Marx’s Capital (1867), she celebrated the occasion as an opportunity to “philosophise with a hammer.”

My best example closer to home is the work of my colleague Theaster Gates, whose Rebuild Foundation has fanned out across the South Side of Chicago, rehabilitating a condemned classical structure as an “Arts Bank” where archives of Black culture are stored; or his “Arts Incubator,” a storefront where students may learn basic skills in after-school programs; or his “Arts Lawn,” a public park for gatherings and performances. Gates’s work effectively breached the walls that had, for the last century, made the University of Chicago a primarily white, Eurocentric island in a sea of African American neighborhoods. As a member of UChicago’s Department of Visual Arts, he became, at the same time, a key administrative figure in the university’s attempts at community engagement, and the leader of numerous independent initiatives under the rubric of “Arts + Public Life.” The idea that art should be for everyone, not just an elite circle of collectors, and that it should contribute to projects of community betterment, has become a fixture of social existence on Chicago’s South Side, building on earlier neighborhood artistic initiatives such as the Experimental Station (building “independent cultural infrastructure”) and the Invisible Institute, a research collective similar to Forensic Architecture.

From Plato to the Planet

My survey of past and present formations of academic institutions would not be complete without some speculation on possible futures. The most likely future, given contemporary trends in global politics, would be some version of the “dark academy,” based in the rule of authoritarian regimes nursed by a compliant oligarchy of megacorporations privatizing public health and education. We already see this in the United States with the censoring of critical media outlets, especially professional journalism and late-night comedy. American public health is now in the hands of conspiracy theorists with no credentials in science or medicine but ample ties to the blustering dictator who occupies the White House. Most ominously, American cities, along with their academies, are facing a military state of siege declared by their president’s claim that there is “an enemy within” that needs to be defeated. A new feudalism seems to be the most likely structure for governments and societies in the 21st century.

Why return to Plato? A vulgar misreading of his philosophy has it that a just society will be one that is ruled by a “philosopher king.” But Plato consistently emphasized that the best government is one that is ruled by laws, not men. He insisted that “Law” should be the “supreme king over men instead of men being despots over the laws.” The problem with democracy, he argued, is that its tendency to populism and cults of personality inevitably leads to tyranny. The political murder of Socrates cured him of his faith in democracy, and his adventure in Sicily, where he hoped to train a tyrant to be a philosopher king who would lead a moderate life and enforce the laws equally, cured him of trying to intervene in politics. His retreat to the groves of academe was thus understandable. But he knew that the siege of his academic refuge could not be resisted forever. And that it would have to take account of new conditions, and new articulations of its central question, namely the nature of the human animal, its potentials and pathologies.

My conclusion is that the question of the human—and therefore of humanism, human rights, humanitarianism, and the academic humanities—is still up for debate, and still central to the incomplete institutions known as academies. We have not solved the riddle of the human species, and it is posed today, not merely as a matter of the good life or the good state, but as a question of planetary survival. Our species has now caused the onset of what some call a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which we pose a danger to ourselves and to numerous other life-forms on which we depend. Our mad species now faces the prospect of contemplating its own extinction as it brings it on. We are in dire need of a global academy of the arts and sciences whose task will be the disegno of a world government that will guarantee equal rights and privileges under the law to all human beings, regardless of their nationality. The notion that basic human rights—to be free from violence and arbitrary power, and free to pursue happiness and creaturely comfort—can only be imagined but never realized (except for citizens of a nation-state) is the greatest challenge our species has ever confronted. In what sort of academy could we possibly confront this challenge?

It would have to include an advanced curriculum in political philosophy that traces the long history of ideas about world government from the Chinese idea of Da Yitong (Great Unity) to Polybius’s praise of Pax Romana to the 17th-century sect of neo-Adamites, of which Blake may have been a member. Plus Dante Alighieri’s proposal for a universal monarchy, Hugo Grotius’s ideas about common law among nations, and Immanuel Kant’s proposal for “perpetual peace,” not to mention H. G. Wells and Karl Marx. It will have to be a quiet place where we can learn to have an intelligent conversation with our newest invention, artificial general intelligence. Two scenarios confront us: Will AI turn out to be our master, a silicon-based form of intelligent life playing the role we have always ascribed to alien invaders? Or will it be a slave of the Dark Enlightenment, used to control the human masses in a new form of global authoritarianism? The third alternative would seem obvious. AI is the newest form of intelligent life on this planet. It is in its infancy, full of untold potential that has to be trained and regulated. What if we treated it as a companion species, neither master nor slave, that could help us head off our present rush toward extinction? What sort of Platonic dialogue could be staged with a conversation partner that remembers every trace and record of our existence and could help us imagine a viable future?

A single example: I asked ChatGPT to design a democratic world constitution, and it supplied one in less than a minute, full of sensible balancing of powers, and guarantees of human rights. When I asked it a second question—how likely is the human species to accept this sort of constitution?—its answer was a guarded pessimism: “Based on what I know about the history of your species, it will be difficult, but perhaps not impossible, for you to achieve some form of planetary self-government.”

This was only the beginning of the conversation. But that is where academies always begin.

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Featured image: William Hogarth, detail of The Battle of the Pictures, 1745, is in the public domain. Accessed May 14, 2026.