The MFA Degree-As-Fraud
We are a long way from late-19th-century Paris, where “academic painting” signified technically dazzling neoclassical figures, lush but sterile, and where the brutal disruptions of Manet and the Impressionists were consigned to the “Salon des Refusés.” Beauty within the academies, scandal without. Today these positions are reversed, and the academic institutions that serve as gatekeepers […