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Paper short abstract:

How do fashion schools convince students that their work to produce wearable garments is not labor? Safeguarding a strategic arrangement of time and obligation, the arts university formalizes critique as a precarious labor performed by tutors in a discrete spatiotemporal context: the tutorial.

Paper long abstract:

When fashion students complain casually or officially about the conduct of their tutors, what tacit social contract do they break? This paper considers how the practice-based pedagogies of fashion programs such as Central Saint Martins and Parsons School of Design operate upon the logically-fraught axiom that only work, not people, can be subject to critique. That axiom attempts to constrain the relationship between tutor and student such that their roles within the university are incommensurable and mutually differentiating, entrenching a quite literal distinction between the “material” work created by the student and the “immaterial” labor of the tutor to assign, guide, and assess it. The fashion school’s regime of critique aims to convince students that the hours they spend crafting wearable garments are not remunerable labor hours but intangible investments in professional and personal development. Depoliticizing students’ identities as their aesthetic personalities, critique securitizes the arts university’s asymmetrical distribution of time and obligation which precaritizes faculty in short-term work contracts and imprisons students in long-term loan agreements. By leasing its monopoly on critique to faculty in events like tutorials and crits, the university instrumentalizes the tutor as a kind of mercenary against the labor-value of student work, insulating itself from solidarity between students and tutors to prevent such uprisings as the recent part-time faculty strike and subsequent student occupation at the New School.