The Academicized Arts

The global history of the arts in higher education has been punctuated by a series of political interventions, which had the effect of progressively academicizing the arts. The resulting contemporary educational environment is one in which there is an array of artistic communities holding diverse values in a context in which there are drives towards harmonization, transferability and inter-disciplinarity. Ideally, harmonization should be achieved without homogenization, and the richness and diversity in the art culture in HE has proven to be resilient to these interventions. However, there are lost opportunities for the optimal contribution of the arts to the higher education sector owing to a lack of understanding (by both artists and academia alike) of the values inherent in the academicized arts. Effective harmonization of the arts within academia can only be achieved through making explicit what are currently the implicit values of the constituent arts communities following the global process of academicization.