This formalism of institutional systems, historically, dates back to when industrialisation triggered the end of craft and design that in turn divided the makers from the thinkers.  Modernism allowed this transition.  As a result it made the concept of an arts education complicated. With Modernism ruling the market, a college education dominated this thinking, allowing years of psychological self regard to reaffirm the individual but unfortunately created a hermeticism that disconnected us from lower Middle Class/Working class America/UK, making education suspect and irrelevant.

The artworld retreated thinking of itself as superior, believing that it could survive through the private sector.  And the private sector somehow conquered the education market, with university colleges costing more than $40,000 a year. Creating this elitist underlining, you have to go to a good, well established college to get anywhere, or know an artist or writer who knows someone else in order to get your big break.  Then on top of this, because exhibitions are often funded by corporate sponsors, the work is often conservative - relying on a  name rather than risk, and emerging talent - to bring in visitor numbers. 

Bois Groys suggested in a text concerning art education that an arts education today, specifically, has no definite goal, no method and no particular content that the students can be taught.  In a liberal arts education the student tends to make or research work that gives them hope in revealing the struggles of modern day life in an attempt to positively change their landscape with socially charged work.   This “change” rarely can be achieved through a private educational sector, but rather we should leave the capitalistic institution and to go into the community itself and heal the world from there.

This is interesting because essentially these actions often become bigger and create something more integral to the world.  The future of art lies in its potential to delve into other fields. Art does become stronger if you can evaluate it from other perspectives than just the art historical. 

Which also begs this question of why social art practices, and/or small performative actions are never given the same amount of an outlet as other forms of art and discussions?    I know that t

We think of institutional critique when we think of alternative formats.  Institutions, in a word—transcends into assuming great political divides that lay in between anticapitalism and antisocialism being only the most obvious. Institutions were understood to be the means by which authority exercised itself and were thus by definition—regardless of the politics of the institution in question—the embodiment of conservation and constriction, of untruth and unfreedom, of illegitimate authority.

The principle of institutionality itself reverts back to the heart of the bourgeois. We can see historically the resentment of institutions from 1968.  Blake Stimson in his introduction of his book institutional critique suggests that “That dream of becoming social, becoming institutional, of becoming governmental in its larger (pre- Foucauldian, pretendance Groucho) sense, ultimately, was also always the dream of becoming human, of self- realization”

Meaning, as humanity we always strive to find or be something bigger than ourselves, thus when we become part of an assembly line, a party, a class, an institution—as the original Karl Marx famously  said, “he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species”

What is interesting, however,  are institutions that are set up to be reactionary to the institutions before them.  This is something that this blog will begin to un-pick and reveal. 

Are counter institutions/formats more genuine?  What makes them less like the other systems?