Conservatives are celebrating a cultural victory with President Trump’s return to the White House. He has promised to restore American culture by vanquishing wokeness in the arts and entertainment. Yet there are reasons to be skeptical that a war on wokeness will be enough to restore excellence to the fine arts.

Wokeness has merely exacerbated existing failures that stem from a fundamental devaluation of artistic technical training in higher education, which has led to artists who graduate from university often having little to no technical proficiency.

In the Middle Ages, Western art education was traditionally transmitted from a master to apprentices, through guilds where pupils learned by copying masterworks. By the eighteenth century, formal art academies had superseded guilds. Students studied a set curriculum, which included art history and philosophy. Both the guild system and formal art academies emphasized the mastery of technical skills like drawing the human figure and convincingly representing nature. Skills were developed in a sequence, and learning them was not optional.

In Art Subjects, the art historian Howard Singerman explains how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to integrate the fine arts into liberal-arts universities reshaped art education. Early members of professional associations such as the College Art Association (CAA, founded in 1911) tried to reconcile the teaching of the fine arts—often previously considered a form of vocational training—with the liberal scholarly environment.

The CAA’s first president, art historian John Pickard, and the president of Amherst College, Alexander Meiklejohn, were early supporters of the idea that a fine arts education should feature the intellectual theory behind art at least as prominently as practical training, in order to justify its inclusion in the liberal arts. These notions were reflected in early editions of Art Journal and Art Bulletin.

Gradually, universities across the U.S. adopted this framework. No one school was the nexus of this change, though members of the Ivy League were early adopters. As educators moved away from the disciplined training of the Western masters, students’ ability to compose images significantly declined. By the late twentieth century—as “art” became distinct from technique—art schools conceived of themselves as existing to resolve the “problem of the artist.” Students attended gallery openings, read high theory, and forged their own paths, often outside the confines of tradition, to become “artists.” In the twenty-first century, art school education is even more hollowed out.

The course of study at Pratt Institute, for example, is similar to the first-year track at nearly every art school, which is called “Foundations.” This introductory year tends to be of higher quality than the instruction in subsequent years. In Foundations, students learn many Western traditions, such as anatomy, still life drawing, perspective, and color theory. This year of technical training holds students to high expectations.

Yet Foundations only lasts two semesters, roughly eight months, hardly enough time to master the material. Undergraduate fine arts majors essentially stop learning after freshman year. In their sophomore year, students are given an excessive degree of freedom, and the skills they learned in Foundations are not reinforced and are often forgotten.

Students in other disciplines taught in the art schools, such as the various design fields, also take Foundations. Unlike in the fine arts, students in these majors continue learning the skills of their field when they matriculate into higher courses. Consequently, as Camille Paglia, who taught for forty years at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, lamented in 2012, “our fine arts have become a wasteland” because of the lack of technical education, while “Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all industrial design.”

This disparity may seem surprising given the ubiquity of fine arts courses with names like “Painting I” that culminate in a higher number like “Painting VI.” Such titles give a false impression. Fine arts professors have a degree of academic freedom that borders on anarchy—liberty to teach whatever they want, however they want, or not to teach at all.

Many art professors simply sit, walk around, or converse with their students, providing little instruction or guidance. They may nudge students along or discuss their ideas with them, but teaching is usually a hands-off experience in today’s fine arts classroom. An exceptional professor here or there may emphasize skills for a semester, but those skills are rarely presented as part of a cohesive curriculum.

Laurie Fendrich, a professor emerita of fine arts at Hofstra University, writes that “a depressing number of students in advanced painting classes tell me that . . . they feel cheated because no one required them to learn anything fundamental about” painting. These failures are not exceptions but the norm at art schools across the United States.

Faculty members at other institutions have similar complaints. Art professor Matthew Napoli also relates that when he was an undergraduate at the Maryland Institute College of Art, one of his peers told him he “wished there was ‘more brush to canvas instruction,’” regretting that students do not receive a “rigid and steady technical materials and process education.”

The crisis of free speech on college campuses has worsened the situation. Since the 1940s, art students have been assessed in a process called “critique” wherein students and faculty gather in a half-circle around a student’s work and criticize it based on a set of criteria. When “wokeness” entered the classroom discourse in the mid-2010s, its insistence on sensitivity made honest critique difficult or impossible.

A 2016 documentary by a student at the Rhode Island College of Art & Design (RISD), The Room of Silence, was an early attempt to discuss the consequences of self-censorship in art schools. The documentary shows how critique is shut down when student work addresses sensitive issues such as race and gender. Students interviewed in the documentary complain that fear of coming off as “racist” severely limited their willingness to criticize the work of their peers.

Many RISD students held views that highlighted an ideological struggle between the revolutionary “critical framework” (akin, in this case, to “critical” race theory) and the Western tradition. The former value system—negative and cynical—sees art as serving systems of power based on group identity. In this view, art needs to be dissected and “deconstructed.” The latter system—ancient and complex—has developed over centuries of the Western tradition and celebrates its own grand narrative. Originating in classical antiquity and the Renaissance, it stresses humanism and the figurative. Culminating in Modernism, it also emphasizes “formal” values: the aesthetic qualities of art.

I experienced both the traditional, positive form of critique, and the vacuous kind common at universities. At one of the best arts high schools in the United States, Baltimore County’s Carver Center for Arts and Technology, our critiques were based upon a clear value hierarchy. We learned how to compose images so they were engaging to the eye and told stories effectively.

But such a clear set of priorities was usually absent in my later college critiques. My peers at the Pratt Institute, where I majored in painting, commented that my critiques were unusual because they focused on improving the work instead of merely remarking on it or validating the artist. Imagine a student who draws a hand incorrectly—not in a manner where it appears to be an intentional distortion but as an undeniable mistake. Many students would nonetheless protest my attempts to correct such errors, saying, “But what if he wanted it to look that way?” 

A reaction against this aesthetic subjectivism has inspired some young figurative painters, including Leo Frontini and Samantha Joy Groff, to master their craft after art school—in large part as a response to the failures of art education. Despite the failures of the art school establishment, some institutions, such as the Laguna College of Art & Design, the New York Academy of Art, and the many ateliers, still teach the Western tradition. Their influence is visible on gallery walls, as we are in a miniature renaissance of figure painting.

The United States may be entering a period of national change more significant than the destruction of woke ideology. Culturally stale universities have an opportunity to redefine themselves. Conservatives have been almost entirely excluded from arts institutions, and with their exclusion has come the degradation of structure and standards of excellence. In our moment of tectonic cultural shifts, art schools should consciously hire faculty who believe in the Western tradition and wish to reinstate an overarching curriculum. If we are truly to enter a golden age, universities should teach students the skills to depict a vision that reflects something meaningful about life.