‘Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain was published by Pickering and Chatto in 2012. This book engages with the following issues:

1. The publicly funded art school in England emerges from a dispute about the relationship about art and the state, which was initiated and led by followers and acolytes of Jeremy Bentham in the 1830s. The utilitarian idea of a publicly funded art school is the idea of the academy expanded and extended into public space, serving public interests.

2. The idea of an academy of art extended or expanded into public space relates to a larger problem of cultural pedagogy within commercial society framed by Adam Smith. It was Jeremy Bentham’s solutions to this problem that paved the way for a politicization of the academy of art.

3. What differentiates the art school from the academy of art is a focus on experimental and contingent solutions to endemic and persistent problems in the construction of cultural pedagogy within liberal democracy.

State funded art education in England comes ‘after the academy of art’ and after a key moment for liberal democracy in Britain, the Reform Bill of 1832. In a lecture at the conference ‘What’s the point of Art School?’ at Central Saint Martins on 14 May 2003, I concluded that the conditions of the art school’s existence (1) after the academy and (2) after liberal democracy, mean that we continue to need the art school and that will be nothing after the art school until the Great Reform Act of 2032.