Fine Art Education has at times necessarily, and at others been driven to shift its ground and therefore test its curriculum regularly over the last forty years and is now a many faceted and differential beast. Even in the UK the models of Fine Art curricula are multiple as Higher Education Institutions have either; been consumed by the current pedagogic theories, or at times become subsumed due to an integration within a larger institutional regime, or even purely by attempting to follow (often too closely) the most prevalent contemporary fine art trends.

The collapse or disappearance of the small specialist institution as Art Schools have become immersed within the University system has led to a reassessment of the curriculum and consequently the delivery of that curriculum. Forced to adapt to the layers within a new culture of bureaucracy, programme, course and module writing and delivery through the constraints of those systems, the ideological aspects of fine art education have often been drained of their core interests, in essence the infiltration of a form of ‘drift’.

Speaking from the perspective of one of the last remaining independent Art Schools in the UK, Glasgow School of Art, this paper looks to explore the importance of historicism, tradition and belief in terms of the maintenance of a thriving, adaptable yet long-standing fine art curriculum and structure. This is not an attempt to ignore the currency of different types of artistic practice, but rather a central belief that there are (alongside new technologies, materials and audiences) fundamental aspects of learning embedded within fine art curricula which allow students to explore, test and critically analyse aspects of media, disciplines and ideas.

At the same time alternate external options will be discussed within the paper, including modularisation, genericism as Fine Art practice, as well as Artistic Research (a European model) and its internal research-teaching linkage potential (yet complex variables when inverted upon a UK based research framework). Additional issues relating to professionalism, employability, recruitment and the retention of studio space will also be discussed within the paper.