The title of this lecture comes from the 1924 prospectus of the Dunedin School of Art, which was published in November 1923 shortly after the school had been absorbed into the King Edward Technical College (the forerunner of the Polytechnic). It seems timely to reflect on the notion of art ‘being won by study’ now, exactly a hundred year later when the School of Art once again faces being absorbed into a bigger educational entity and where arts and humanities programmes at tertiary institutions around the country – not least at Otago University – are systematically being closed or scaled down as institutions struggle to meet the minimum viability targets determined by neoliberal funding models. At the same time, the proliferation of artificial intelligence language learning models and image generators are rocking the creative industry to its core, challenging the notion of what constitutes creative labour and who gets to profit from it. In this lecture I consider the value of an art(s) education to a society that nurtures and sustains it and argue for the transformative role it plays in the creation of a more meaningful, functional, and sustainable world.
Professor Federico Freschi
is Head of College of Te Maru Pūmanawa | Creative Practice & Enterprise at the Otago Polytechnic. He was formerly Executive Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa where he continues to have an appointment as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Humanities.
A widely published art historian, his work explores questions of nationalism, politics and identity in art, architecture, and design, with a specific focus on settler-colonial contexts. He has curated important exhibitions, notably ‘Henri Matisse: Rhythm and Meaning’ in 2016, the first exhibition of Matisse’s work on the African continent. Recent publications include the co-edited book The Politics of Design: Privilege and Prejudice in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and South Africa (Otago Polytechnic Press, 2021).