According to Josh Jordan, who graduated from Yale’s Painting and Printmaking department in 1997 and is now teaching at Montclair State University, one value of the MFA is that it confers a kind of legitimacy on a young artist. He believes that earning a degree from Yale, though it’s unlikely to be a ticket to instant success (of the kind seen in such highly publicized as those of 2002 Columbia graduate Dana Schutz and 2005 Hunter graduate Jules de Balincourt), is like having “overdraft protection on your checking account.”

“The perception of Yale and the reputation of the pedigree is significant enough in some people’s minds that they tend to hesitate when criticizing or questioning the credibility of the art or artist,” he says.

Such credibility is particularly valuable for MFA graduates who must wrestle not only with the difficulty of achieving a successful career as an artist, but also the rather hefty grad-school price tag. Students pay $24,000 a year at SVA, $27,000 at Yale, and $39,000 at Columbia. Compared to those numbers, Hunter’s not-unsubstantial fee of $6,400 for in-state students seems like a real bargain. Given how unlikely it is that MFA graduates will shoot straight to fame and fortune, many students could benefit from some real-world financial advice. Upon graduation, they will face the challenge not only of how to begin to make a living, but also how to deal with a sizable debt.

Enter Jackie Battenfield. A practicing artist herself, Battenfield is also writing a book with a working title of “The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love,” set to be published in fall 2008. In addition, she heads the Artists in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and has taught a similar class at Columbia, The Business of Art: Building and Sustaining a Career in the Visual Arts, for the past four years. About half of the students in Columbia’s MFA program enroll in her course, which is open only to second-year graduate students. According to Battenfield, the class is not about the market or how to sell your art. Instead it asks “What is life like after graduate school?” and explains “how to live your life with art in it over the long term.”

Battenfield is encouraged that many students seem to question the status quo when it comes to the art business. “Many of them have not come directly from an undergraduate program to a graduate program, so they realize there is some stuff they need to know about. Leaving school and wondering why everything out there has to be learned through trial and error makes them start wondering why they couldn’t have gotten some information while they were in school.” She also suggests a practical reason why students are not making work that reflects the market. “An artist’s life is difficult enough. If you aren’t in the studio working with ideas that are compelling to you, then go do something else. It’s crazy to be making art just for a market.”

While there is no public record of how many art-related business classes are taught around the country, Battenfield confirms that Virginia Commonwealth University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have them, while Parsons the New School for Design previously offered one. California Institute of the Arts and Maryland Institute College of Art offer them on the undergraduate level.

Trendy Work and Hand Signals

Abby Manock, a 2007 graduate of Columbia who took Battenfield’s class and is now working as an artist’s assistant, agrees with her former teacher that the market is not an overriding concern of classmates, but she argues that it does assert itself to some degree in the educational setting. Manock says the market “is not discussed in relation to an artwork or whether it could sell, and most work was not what I would consider trendy,” but concedes, “some trendy work was made by a few people.” She says it was not discussed in her individual critiques, but believes that if she had brought it up, her teachers would not have objected.

On the other hand, at Hunter College—sometimes called the next best thing after Yale or Columbia because of its reasonable tuition and large studio facilities—current student Orit Ben-Shitrit denies that the market has a strong force there. She claims students would rather have more tangible resources such as access to cutting-edge technology than deal with the realities of the market. She says the market is not taught at all and she doesn’t want it to be: “It might be detrimental. I’m into making good, honest work, not thinking about the market.” While admitting some students may be making work that is easier to sell than others, she says most are into experimentation and pushing boundaries.