Earlier this week, we reported on the launch of an intriguing new journal, aCCeSsions, at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS). Now, in the spirit of provocation, we bring you some vitriol directed at curatorial studies programs—like CCS—by Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) director Michael Govan.

Previously head of the Dia Art Foundation and a key advocate for Michael Heizer’s “City,” Govan told the Observer’s Alanna Martinez during a meeting in New York this week that such programs, particularly those focused on art made today, are “creating an even bigger artificial bubble around contemporary art… Churning out more and more people who are in that circuit, and now that field is so chock full of people—it’s so competitive.”

His colleague, LACMA senior curator Stephanie Barron, concurred: “I don’t believe in programs for curatorial practice… They’re trade schools. I’d much rather take a chance on someone who wants to come do an internship.”

And if the message was still ambiguous, Barron added, for good measure, that graduates of these curatorial studies programs “think that Warhol is an Old Master.”