Creative protesting

It’s time to heed the complaints and free art schools from the constraints of the university system, says Niru Ratnam

The Turner Prize award ceremony always attracts protest — usually in the shape of the Stuckists, a group of bedraggled, eccentric-looking artists who gather outside Tate Britain in funny hats and bemoan the death of representational painting. But this year they were upstaged by around 200 art students, who entered the museum in the afternoon and refused to leave, staging what was described as a ‘teach-in’. In addition to wearing their own humorous hats, the students made speeches, marched round and chanted. The ‘teach-in’ was a protest against proposals unveiled in the Browne Review to remove state funding from university undergraduate fine art courses (along with all other arts, humanities and social sciences subjects).

The Turner Prize teach-in was one of a number of such protests at art schools. Goldsmiths students occupied their library (some presumably overjoyed at having finally located it), students occupied the Slade and there was a teach-in at the National Gallery.