Punk attitude of art schools can help UK rise above tsunami of AI blandness

I remember my first visit to an art school, outside which someone had spray-painted “I WANT TO GO TO ART SCHOOL, MUMMY”. I wandered in by accident.

The walls of the corridor were layered with paint and posters, decades of them, each generation partially obscuring the last. The smell was particular; turpentine, coffee, plaster – the cliché. Through an open doorway I saw a student covered in clay dust, headphones (and PPE) on, completely absorbed in a sculpture.

This I would think of much later as the art school ethos in its natural habitat. It isn’t a policy or mission statement, but a lived reality that is permeable, chaotic, indifferent to conventional hierarchies, and with a kind of energy that is almost impossible to quantify but unmistakable when you encounter it.

In Britain we punch above our weight in creativity and innovation. In the sciences, this is well documented. The return on investment for British fundamental research consistently outperforms nations with similar R&D spending per capita, infrastructure and cultural capital – America, Germany, Japan, Canada. We produce more Nobel laureates per capita than almost anywhere. Our universities spawn discoveries that reshape entire fields. But why? What is it about this damp, complicated island that makes it such fertile ground for ideas that change the world?

The answer, I believe, lies not in our laboratories, but in something more diffuse and essential; the peculiar ecology of culture itself, and I argue, specifically the role that art schools have played within it. Art schools are the nucleation sites of British innovation. They are, to borrow from crystallography, the necessary imperfection.

When you make a supersaturated solution, all the chemical ingredients dissolved, the crystals will not form if the vessel is perfectly smooth. Pour the liquid into laboratory-grade glassware, eliminate every speck of dust, and…nothing happens. The solution remains stubbornly liquid, holding its potential in suspension. But introduce a scratch on the glass, a grain of sand, the slightest irregularity, and suddenly the crystals cascade into being. The imperfection gives them something to grip on to, a starting point from which structure can propagate.

Art schools are Britain’s productive imperfection. They are the scratched beaker, the deliberate roughness that allows innovation to crystallise. For generations, our art schools have cultivated what might be called a punk attitude towards knowledge-making: sceptical of received wisdom, allergic to unnecessary hierarchy, committed to risk and experimentation, and fundamentally uninterested in respectability for its own sake.

What makes this particularly British is the tension between our establishment instincts and our counter-cultural impulses. We are simultaneously the country of the monarchy and the Sex Pistols, of Oxford tradition and punk’s year zero, of the BBC and pirate radio. Art schools have historically occupied the productive gap between these poles. They exist within the higher education system but maintain a studied distance from academic convention. They are institutionalised anti-institutionalism; which is contradictory until you experience it.

When students arrive at my art school (the University for the Creative Arts), they often describe a sensation of finally meeting “their people”. Not necessarily people who look like them or who share their background, but people who operate at the same frequency, who understand instinctively that the point is not to reproduce what already exists but to make something new, even if that something is strange or uncomfortable or inexplicable. This is the art school’s great gift; but it is being eroded.

Over the past two decades, art schools in Britain have faced relentless pressure to homogenise. We must compete with Russell Group universities for students and funding. We must demonstrate impact in language borrowed from the sciences. We must achieve metrics designed for institutions with fundamentally different aims. Conservatoires – which have their own valuable place in the cultural ecosystem but operate from different principles – become comparators. Business schools become aspirational models. The peculiar, productive messiness of art school culture is slowly being sanded down, made smooth, so no crystals can form.

This is happening, paradoxically, at the moment when art school thinking is most urgently needed.

Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence. Whether the current economic bubble surrounding AI will burst is beside the point, the technology will continue to evolve regardless. And what AI does, fundamentally, is homogenise. Large language models are trained on datasets to produce outputs that approximate the statistically most likely continuation of any given input. They are consensus, the aggregated middle of everything that has been said before.

Of course, they are extraordinarily useful for many tasks. But they are, by design, incapable of genuine provocation, they don’t have the actual agency to do so. They cannot take the creative risks that art schools cultivate, the willingness to produce something that no statistical model would predict that fails interestingly rather than succeeds predictably.

Oh the irony! For decades the employability argument has been wielded against us. Why study fine art when you could study law? Why sculpture when you could do management consulting? But it is the white-collar professions that are first in line to be displaced. AI companies are already demonstrating what happens when agents and sub-agents do the analytical, procedural, administrative work that once justified a professional salary.

If this trajectory holds, and there is every reason to think it will, the employability “problem” is being flipped. The skills that art schools cultivate, the capacity to interpret rather than merely process, the willingness to sit with not-knowing until something genuinely new emerges from a blank canvas “upwards”, these are the capabilities that resist automation.

Employability, that blunt instrument so long used to beat art schools into submission, is about to become our strongest suit.

There is something deeper here, something ontological. At the heart of art school culture is a conviction about interpretation. In most academic disciplines, subjectivity is a problem to be minimised. The ideal is clean data, measurement, and the elimination of the researcher’s influence on the research.

But art schools operate from a different premise: that interpretation is new knowledge, that individual perspective is not a contamination but the point, that having ourselves, with all our biases and obsessions and particular ways of seeing. The interpretive act is not a weakness but our greatest strength.

If you do not know what I am talking about, then I invite you to our art school, you will see what we mean. Forward-looking parents will be saying, “You should go to art school”.

Harry Whalley is reader in music and sound at the University for the Creative Arts.