THE University of Newcastle will discontinue its Bachelor of Fine Arts from 2017, which makes this year’s student intake the last to be accepted into the prestigious three year undergraduate degree.
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Deputy vice chancellor, academic, Andrew Parfitt said the university would replace the degree from next year with the Bachelor of Creative Industries, which would include choosing a major from subjects including fine arts, natural history illustration, music, creative and performing arts, design, and communication and media.
Professor Parfitt said the university spent more than 18 months developing the degree, which it said in a statement was aimed at ‘building resilient graduates with better employment futures, either within the creative industries sector of the economy, or as artists and commentators, expressing their own creative identity’.
“Both nationally and globally, these types of programs are not only teaching skills to be a practitioner, but also broadening the range of skills to allow graduates to make choices about their future. The content will be around business and entrepreneurship in this landscape.”
Newcastle has the highest number of artists per capita and both students and alumni are divided over the change.
Facebook page Stop Cuts to Creativity! has invited 1200 people to a peaceful protest on Wednesday. The page creator wrote they feared the change would mean “people wanting to pursue arts in their pure form will have a much slimmer margin of opportunities and will be disadvantaged in receiving technical expertise in choice subjects”.
Practicing artist and alumna Chris Byrnes said she was concerned the change would reduce the time artists could spend honing their creative skills and “stretch” students to juggle art-making with the responsibility of becoming an entrepreneur.
“It makes great economic sense and that’s all people are looking at,” she said. “But it’s asking more and more of these people outside of their art-making. It takes away from their creativity.
“What about the people who just want to make art for art’s sake? The person who wants to be the next Jackson Pollock?”
Masters student Louisa Magrics said she agreed art should not be about making money. But she welcomed students learning new skills to excel in the “interdisciplinary, collaborative, technology driven” future. “It’s realistic to consider how to make a sustainable practice and how to empower artists to do what they do.”
The Bachelor of Teaching (Fine Art) (Honours) will be cut, but the fine arts honours, postgraduate and masters programs will continue.
