Last month, the Art Institute of Chicago revealed that the school would award Kanye West with an honorary doctorate and not everyone was happy about the news. More recently, the school's president and dean of faculty have defended their decision to give the degree to the "All Day" rapper.
Vibe notes that among the various responses to the news, students of the campus have been handing out fliers either for this decision or against it.
AIC President Walter E. Massey says that some of West's actions have deterred some from enjoying his work.
"Us giving Kanye this honorary degree shows a lot of complexity in his music and his creative persona that they didn't see before," Massey said. "I know you're going to ask whether we've had controversy, and, as you might expect, we've had some. But, what's been interesting is the people who have been positive. Those who seem to oppose it react in a kind of visceral way to what they see: his surface image, what they see on television about him taking the Grammy from Taylor Swift. So they haven't taken the time, haven't been interested enough, to really see behind those kind of surface images. What a good thing about this for me — I'm not an artist — is that this is provoking just the kind of discussion we like to have. What is art? Who's an artist?"
Dean Lisa Wainwright shared similar sentiments saying West represents an element that often goes overlooked in the high art world.
"I actually think that's a high-low problem," she explained. "There's still this sense that high art is what we do, is what we honor, is what we're about. And that pop culture is not what we teach in art school. Pop culture, mass culture — that's a whole other thing, and we're about high art. I think that's a problem. We're trying to collapse those boundaries a little bit. That's what I like about Kanye. Chicago's known for it. Chicago pop art. Harry Who and The Chicago Imagists. Chicago's known for really looking at source material that's popular. And yet we're associated with the museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, which features high art. A little bit of it was class within the art world. There are many classes in the art world, some of the push back was, 'Wait a second, this is pop.' That's what I dig. We're going to have, on stage, both the director of the Art Institute, Doug Druick, who's a very renowned historian of 19th century art and runs a major encyclopedic museum in the country, and Kanye West, who talks to the people on the street. It's perfect. I love the combination."
During an interview with CliqueTV, West (who says his artistry dates back to his childhood) noted that he benefits from having an artistic background in the pop world.
He explained: "What's fun about playing in the pop field vs. the art field is you get a lot of exposure ... The majority of the pop artists don't have the same responsibility to the sensibility, so it's sort of easy to always slam dunk them."
Kanye West will be awarded with an honorary doctoral degree at the class of 2015's commencement ceremony on May 5.
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