Artistic studies in Catalonia, a superior problem
The ways of accessing not only information, but also knowledge, how to organize work and the organizations that bring it together, as well as the educational and professional biographies of each person, are changing very rapidly. For decades, life was organized around a succession of stages that were completed one by one and in a predictable order: training, employment, retirement. Today the sequence is no longer fixed: one studies throughout life, one changes profession often, and all of this is linked, alternated, and overlaps in unpredictable ways.
And universities are modifying their structures and instruments to try to respond to this. Some examples of this are open degrees, double degrees, micro-credentials, or industrial doctorates. Higher artistic studies in Catalonia are not alien to these changes, but they have fewer institutional resources to cope with them. These are studies that bring together disciplines and practices as diverse as music, dance, dramatic art, circus, cinema, design, fine arts, or conservation and restoration, and that bring together thousands of students and professors in a wide variety of centers and institutions. We are talking about schools of recognized European prestige, such as Esmuc, Institut del Teatre, Escac, Escola Massana, Elisava, Bau, the Faculty of Fine Arts itself, and many other equally significant ones. And yet, they live in a certain regulatory mess that is difficult to understand if one is not directly involved.
The problem is, first of all, legal. Neither the recent laws that have regulated the university system, nor the one that regulates secondary and vocational training, nor the more specific one, the law on artistic education (LEA) of 2024, have fully resolved the ambiguities. Are we talking about university studies or higher vocational training studies? No matter how much the norm speaks of "equivalence" with the university, many of these studies are, in fact, outside the university system. And thus, students and teachers live between two worlds. They are subjected to university quality assessments, but they retain an inspection designed for secondary education. A student can take a degree that has passed through the same sieve as a university one and find that it is not registered in the state register of titles, that it does not grant access to the same scholarships, or that it has no voice where the policies that affect it are decided.
Behind this confusion of legal frameworks are people with very concrete problems. In various public centers, the price per credit exceeds that of the university, with often less generous scholarships. The case of the teaching staff is even more revealing, as they have salaries and workloads typical of secondary education and cannot obtain a doctorate within the same framework: the LEA subordinates research and doctorates to agreements with the university. Therefore, a musician or a choreographer who wants to conduct advanced research must go to a university that often has no specialists in their discipline, while the knowledge accumulated in art schools is not recognized as a product of higher education itself. It is not just an administrative problem. A concert, a restoration, or a film can be forms of research, and, on the other hand, these intellectual creations are not recognized as part of higher education.
The National Council of Culture and the Arts (CoNCA) has commissioned two reports on the subject – one in 2018, and the other, very recently – that place the problem within the European framework. With the exceptions of France and Italy, most European countries have these studies integrated within universities, often in specialized arts universities, with the right to award doctorates, such as in Austria or Germany. The model of merely "equivalent" degrees – the closest to our non-university framework – is already in the minority; even France and Italy, which are approaching it, are evolving towards the university sphere. Increasingly, the situation of higher artistic education in Catalonia is an exception.
It is not about resolving the tangle with a simple integration into the university system. Being within the university means playing by rules that would not be easy for many institutions to comply with today. But it is also very difficult to maintain the current situation, especially seeing what is happening elsewhere. The European Union is pushing for alliances of universities and artistic consortia that share funding, mobility, and prestige, but which presuppose a status and capacity to award degrees that non-university centers do not have. For years, Can Ricart, in Poblenou, was spoken of as a possible alternative. It was in this old factory where the Campus of the Arts was to become a reality, conceived as a shared center for third-cycle research and training. The rehabilitation has not yet occurred, and the project has been abandoned.
Surely, there is no single recipe to respond to such a diverse and heterogeneous framework. But there are reasonable and non-exclusive paths. For example, a stable consortium between public universities to offer joint degrees. Or a real strengthening of the existing own frameworkso that it is endowed, now yes, with the autonomy, resources, and equivalence that have so far been more proclaimed than effective. With good judgment, the latest CoNCA report does not close itself off to any of them.
In the end, the question is whether or not we want to recognize that the arts are a form of knowledge comparable to any other. If the answer is yes, we should accept that those who choose these studies deserve to have the same opportunities for adaptation and projection as those who study physics, law, or medicine. It is about seeing it not as a guild matter, or one that affects a few thousand people, but as a matter of the country's future.
