The IDSVA PhD in Visual Arts: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory

The IDSVA PhD in Visual Arts:  Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory is a non-studio PhD for artists and creative thinkers.

The IDSVA curriculum fuses interactive online education with intensive residencies in Rome, Spannocchia Castle (Tuscany), Siena, Florence, Venice, Berlin, Paris, Athens, Madrid, Marrakech, Mexico City, and NYC.

As a decentralized and indeed deterritorialized institution, IDSVA offers a low-residency, distance-learning PhD program that allows working professionals to keep their faculty posts and curatorial positions and allows them to maintain their family and community obligations. This is to say that IDSVA students learn from wherever they live and work, travel the world to learn from different cultures and histories, and from leading scholars and artists who live and work around the world.

At home and in their travels, IDSVA students complete a rigorous course of study centred on the ever-increasing importance of interdisciplinary knowledge. They pursue this experiential education and write a dissertation as members of the world’s first PhD program in philosophy, especially for visual artists. These are IDSVA’s main themes as an institutional medium. The message IDSVA delivers, we hope, is a vision of the future.

The IDSVA experience is centred on Global Learning. IDSVA students see and feel and touch the ever-changing and deeply intertwined relations between the history of ideas and visual culture history.

Western Metaphysics has long been recognized as the dominant mode of modern human consciousness. More recently, a growing number of artist-philosophers worldwide have come to realize that the age-old issues concerning hierarchy and inequality will continue to persist as long as Western Metaphysics dominates human consciousness.

This is why the IDSVA curriculum focuses on Western Metaphysics. If we are going to overcome Western Metaphysics, we must know it for what it is.

As for exploring “other thinking” as it exists in Western and non-Western cultural practices, histories, and philosophies, IDSVA independent studies and dissertations remain a continually expanding source of the possibilities for a new mode of thought, a New Philosophy, or New Philosophies. These explorations are brought before the IDSVA community through independent study and dissertation presentations, special symposia, visiting faculty lectures, and worldwide residencies.

The IDSVA course of study comprises three interrelated academic programs: Seminars, Topological Studies, and Independent Studies. Each of these programs focuses on the historical relationship between art and ideas. Over the three-year course of study, the programs overlap and intersect.

The PhD degree is granted upon successful defence of the dissertation. The total time to complete the degree is about five years. Tuition is charged for the three-year course of study.

The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA) offers a PhD in philosophy and art theory designed for artists, curators, and creative thinkers. The Institute is headquartered in Portland, Maine. Our mission is to operate a school of graduate studies providing education in philosophy, aesthetics, art theory, and similar disciplines related to the visual arts. The mission includes the provision of doctoral studies to holders of the MFA or the master's degree in a related field, the conferring of PhD degrees, and otherwise providing education and training related to the arts.

Traditionally the MFA has served as the terminal degree for studio artists. This degree has trained studio artists in the skills necessary for successful art practice and has prepared artists for teaching in college and university studio art programs. However, there is a strong sense among today's artists and educators that training beyond the MFA and similar degrees would benefit many artists, architects, curators, and creative scholars, especially those who grapple with issues surrounding contemporary media and culture. The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts's pioneering curriculum---fusing distance learning with intensive residencies---allows working art professionals to pursue rigorous advanced scholarship without having to interrupt or abandon their teaching careers, art practice, or other professional responsibilities.

Insofar as the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts offers to creative practitioners a PhD in philosophy, aesthetics, and art theory, it addresses an important opportunity for contemporary art and culture. The measure of this opportunity can be summed up in terms of The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts's primary learning goals. These include the nourishment and cultivation of the ability to speak and write critically and philosophically about the relationship between the history of ideas and art in general; The ability to teach university-level courses on subjects dealing with the relation of philosophy and art—such as courses in aesthetics, art theory, and critical theory; The capacity to situate oneself in the history of ideas and culture in terms of one's creative practice and/or field of inquiry; And lastly, The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts's overarching learning goal is to nourish and cultivate an ethos of inquiry that encourages creative thinkers to conceive new systems of knowledge.