Dear Eduardo,

This note points to what I mean by unclear lines
of descent. There are many academies, but few fit
the Florentine model.

You note that there were academies from Oslo to
Cape Town, so I'll use the academy in Oslo as an
example. The National Academy of Fine Art was
established in Oslo in 1909. The education was
neither practical nor scientific. It was a pure
studio fine arts education and there was no
design. A few years ago, the academy was merged
into the new Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

The merger brought the academy into a single unit
with the old National College of Art and Craft,
an older school anchored in the crafts guilds.
This school offered Norway's first design
education -- and its first industrial design
program. The industrial design program later
broke away to join the old College of
Architecture, now known as the Oslo School of
Architecture and Design. Graphic design, interior
design, furniture design, and textile design
remain at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Many teachers and students at the old academy
protested the merger. Some felt the free art of
the academy to be a higher order of enterprise
with greater prestige. Many argued that fine art
and academy traditions did not belong in a school
dedicated to the productive arts, industrial
arts, or design.

None of the arts educations were comparable to a
university in the sense that the Florentine
Academy was, and there were no research
traditions in any of these schools before the
1990s. Some research took place in the old
College of Architecture, but the research
programs remained weak until recently.

Even though the academies practiced the art of
drawing, many maintained a strict separation
between fine art and craft. Many of the
architecture academies also maintained a
distinction between architecture and other design
fields.

You are pleading for pluralism, but most
academies in the twentieth century were not
pluralist. They were generally elite, rarely
pluralist, and few maintained research programs.
Most academies offered studio courses based on
studio guild traditions. A friend of mine studied
for several years in the 1960s at one of the
great Italian academies. Whatever they did back
in the 1660s, research had vanished by the time
he got there. He told stories of months on end
spent drawing plaster casts. Once his drawings
were good enough, he was allowed to enter the
room with advanced students. Drawing more
advanced plaster casts. After the third promotion
to yet another room full of casts, he left for a
university where he took science courses, art
courses, and began to make video.

While I think we're both shedding light from
different perspectives, we're not going to reach
an agreement here. We're talking about different
traditions, different historical frames,
different places in time and space. The Oslo
academy did not represent the Florentine
tradition -- even those who believe that the
academy in Oslo was a great national institution
would find it hard to call it a university. I
don't know enough about Cape Town, but this
newspaper clipping that downloads from your URL
doesn't persuade me that they reached the level
of a Florentine venture.

I join you in celebrating the fourth centennial
of António Vieira, SJ. He was a voice against
slavery, a diplomatic, missionary, military
strategist ... and a great homileticist. Now that
I know you are a Vieira fan, I understand your
metaphors and similes better.

My proposal is to meet you in Sheffield this July
for a pint of ale -- and perhaps we can sneak in
a glass of aguardente.

Yours,

Ken




>Sorry Ken,
>
>The plea for pluralism was mine. I asked you to
>join the pertinent Academy to Design Academia.
>As I guessed, even guild style lectures, are
>interesting as design research communication
>artifacts. Perhaps showing design research
>knowledge as guild knowledge may do the trick
>(in your tradition). In my tradition we tend to
>dress our Jesuit long black gowns and speak
>endlessly to mesmerized young audiences.
>We throw them bones instead of bananas.
>This year we comemorate 400 years of Padre
>António Vieira (Hi friends from Brazil) one of
>those incredible jesuit priests that in the
>1600's visited more regions of the world than I
>did today.
>There is something you must remember Classic Art
>Academies were founded from Oslo to Cape Town.
>Take a look at:
>http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=990CE1DA1639E433A25754C0A9609C946297D6CF&oref=slogin
>Cheers,
>Eduardo