The Academy in a State of Siege:
Pictures of an Institution
W. J. T. Mitchell
The essay argues that the idea of the academy has always been shaped by a “state of siege,” from Plato’s
grove outside Athens to today’s culture wars and political attacks on higher education. Tracing the concept
through the etymology of demos, the rise of the “Dark Academy” and posthumanist critique, and the
founding of the Florentine Academy of Drawing as the first academy of the visual arts, he shows how
internal and external sieges have alternately threatened and renewed academic institutions. Case studies
range from Reynolds’s Royal Academy and Blake’s rebellion against it, to twentieth-century artist collectives
like Black Mountain College and Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation. The essay closes by speculating on
the academy’s future between authoritarian “dark” formations and utopian, art-as-institution models —
with a wry nod to AI as the latest interlocutor in this age-old dialogue.