discussions and opinions
What might have to change in contemporary art for apprenticeship and collective production to make a meaningful return?
A Discussion with Nico Goldstein
[Written in September 2026]
This week I spoke with Nico, a close friend and artist who moved to London from the United States in 2025 to begin her MFA at Goldsmiths. We discussed several topics including being perceived as an artist and how important trust is to audience interpretation. However, another issue was brought up that I felt was interesting enough to warrant a smaller exploration. This piece seeks to outline and reflect on several points examined in our discussion on the importance of artistic relationships in contemporary art.There is a broad but strongly documented history of relationships, especially interpersonal ones, driving forward artistic culture, but I’ve found it difficult to find similar patterns present in contemporary art. Indeed, I could suffer from a lack of knowledge about current happenings amongst artists, likely influenced by my background in art history. Yet, workshops, apprenticeships, academies, movements, and the consolidation of art communities feel like a much less obscure part of understanding the historiography of different art periods. Some might identify these examples as forming part of artistic traditions, but I believe they aren’t interchangeable, so do not represent a continuous historical phenomenon. My conversation with Nico focuses more on questioning the function of such structures and how they serve our ability to understand and develop art.To begin, I asked Nico what her initial thoughts were on what we know about artists working closely with great masters, and her opinions on whether, in the future, it might play as significant a role as it has in the past.
I think it would be cool [to do it]! Personally, I would want to do that. I would love to be someone's weirdo apprentice. “[To have] studied under Bruegel”, you know? I’d love a title like that
I want to highlight here the description of the weirdo apprentice as important to what art might have moved away from. This description avoids the assumption that at the core of this discussion is a nostalgia for the old master/apprentice model, which distinguishes itself from the contemporary emphasis of personal vision. Often these older models are seen as limiting in their ability to allow artists a departure from established techniques in high culture. There can be arguments made that relationships resembling the master/apprentice model continue to exist within contemporary artistic practice, such as through artists including Banksy or Hirst. I reject this comparison, although the reasons for doing so relate to my much larger speculation about how ‘contemporary’ may have problematised the way we understand the evolution of art. This is something I will return to more substantially in future writing, particularly through looking at art movements. For this discussion, the most interesting point is that although contemporary shifts away from a workshop system imply a positive progression from the historical institution of apprenticeship, it does not account for the desire of proximity and identity that comes with ‘studying under someone’.Across different art disciplines the importance of each stage of studying art can vary, and there were subtle variations in how Nico and I approached this. Regardless, between us was the need to understand the relationships connecting artists to their surroundings. Nico noted Art Brut's manifesto post-Holocaust, where looking at the effects of the war makes sense of the works' symbolism and stylistic choices, which then informs our ability to interpret the works' significance. Because there has been such a change to the formation and visibility of artistic communities, the effect on how ‘contemporary’ is understood is almost unavoidable.An artist's interpersonal relationships also form a large part of what we consider them to be ‘surrounded by’, which alongside social and environmental factors, are frequently recorded in biographies and historical accounts of art. As Nico points out:
When you look at Dada [artists], they were hanging out with the French poets and the weird philosophers. They all sort of just hung out together. Even with Cabaret Voltaire, novelists, authors, poets, philosophers, artists, they're all sitting around getting drunk together.
Part of Dadaism and other movements was this collective intellectual productivity developed from relationships across artistic disciplines, acting as the connection between art production and wider artistic identity. When comparing this to contemporary art, artists and their work are often described as ‘fitting into’ a scene that builds on specific principles to form a collective classification of style. Maybe contemporary communities within the arts are not yet required to be known as movements in the same way historical ones are. And our ability to consolidate art techniques and schools of thought through a retrospective analysis of history contributes to an uncertainty in what defines ‘current’ movements. Leaning into the debate on whether late 20th century art is capable of being categorised into retrospectively understood movements might possibly be beneficial to understanding where we are with contemporary artists in relation to the wider public.
I wonder if [the importance of] mentorship and pilgrimage in art creation ended too long ago to be included in [the current trend of] people wanting to reintroduce physical media? If instead of ending around the 50s or 60s, it was the early 2000s, [and] whether artists would be more willing to engage with it again.
This was a question I asked Nico and which, from my perspective, is important to this conversation. There has been a major effort to reintroduce and prioritise physical engagement with media in craft and music spaces, as well as in literature, where the popularity of book clubs continues. People are especially concerned with experiencing art forms through physical connections with others. What hasn’t returned with such initiatives is the associated social structure that makes up part of its historiography, but in the art world, especially in the ‘high art’ world, we haven’t seen anything similar. There continues to be a focus on a quest to find someone who ‘we didn’t know’, the artist who isn’t an artist. And what might be most consequential to a plateau in awareness of current, widely recognised, critically acclaimed art is the continued drive for innovation.Patronage is a huge factor in our ability to see the changes in what people desire from art and what it reflects from our current cultural landscape. Art patronage is now much more anonymised than it once was, when artistic communities were offered economic support through politics, and systems of social and religious aristocracy. How dependent artistic communities may be on this economic support requires more research, but I believe that a continued need for newly subversive art may not recognise the multitude of factors that contribute to an ever-increasing turnover of what is culturally impactful. In art, a higher turnover of cultural trends can speed up obsolescence, which is often the justification of art’s significance. I would further add that significance has too often been conflated with talent and what is to be viewed as ‘quality’ art.Additionally, ‘the outsider’ has itself become an aspirational artistic identity and has defined subversion for many decades. I put forward a possibility where, if the symbolism of the isolated artist had not emerged in the mid 20th century and instead during the 2010s, renewed calls for connection among creatives and art would require the rejection of artistic independence to subvert how ‘contemporary’ has been shaped.
I want to end this piece questioning how relevant older structures of artistic communal practice are to conversations amongst artists now, and whether past ideas of mentorship can develop into a contemporary engagement with the creation of art in a culture potentially incapable of performing the functions older movements did. As mentioned in the opening paragraphs, it is often difficult for art historians to maintain an understanding of the present due to the distance between academia and practicing artists. Other artists may challenge an assumption of homogeneity, and the exploration into whether there are generational or discipline specific differences between desires for art communities should continue to be explored.
Thank you to Nico for having this discussion that inspired me to write this piece!Nico will be presenting her wonderful art for the exhibition Grot, being held at The Crypt of St Pancras Parish Church from the 15th October. She will join nine other artists in showcasing work that explores the “gut, glamour and garbage of contemporary visual culture”. You can find details of this exciting event here.To get in touch with Nico about her life and work, you can find her on Instagram or reach out via email .