'[T]he Royal Academy, and the effects produced by it': accounting for art education in 1835

• Published in: Journal of visual art practice Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 7 - 16
• Main Author: Quinn, Malcolm
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 02.01.2014
• ISSN: 1470-2029; 1758-9185
• DOI: 10.1080/14702029.2014.933022

State funded art education in England began by offering a political view of the Royal Academy of Arts from the perspective of the social, commercial and cultural consequences of its existence. This article shows how the conceptualization and initiation of state funded art education in England in the 1830s raised the question of how the social determinants of fine art practice were to be taken into account in the configuration of the art institution within industrial capitalism. The specifically utilitarian and consequentialist ethos that informed the beginnings of state funding of art education in England showed that what matters is not only which items are taken into account in the social constitution of art educational institutions, but whether they can be fully taken into account within the terms of an education in art. The continuing relevance of the political experiments in state funded art education in the 1830s is in the link that was made between a political redefinition of the Royal Academy of Arts and the institution of the state funded art school as a new form of pedagogy under capital.