Success by degrees

This is the time of year when art looks to its future. For art professionals, the degree shows at major colleges are essential viewing for spotting talent and monitoring trends. Art schools are our most concentrated centres of artistic activity, with ideas fermenting between students and teachers.

Most of the final-year undergraduate shows in London are over, but the post-grads will be showing over the next few weeks. At the Slade School of Fine Art, where I work, more than 100 students have already exhibited - that's just one college. I've been to another half a dozen shows at other colleges so far, but I've covered only a fraction of the ground. Every year we produce thousands of art-school graduates, and they all get an opportunity to face public scrutiny. Many for the first time - and many for the last.

Already, I detect two distinct trends. Firstly, the influence of Tate Modern is beginning to bear fruit. This year's graduates are the first to have benefited from access to Tate Modern throughout their studies. Although there are many other places to see contemporary work, the Tate's obligation is one of contextualisation. It is one thing to have an instinctive response to something they see in an exhibition, quite another to understand it in the context of its immediate contemporaries.

The second trend is that students no longer seem burdened by the legacy of the Young British Artist phenomenon. The nearly-fortysomething YBAs aren't so young these days, and precisely because they inhabit the centre of the art world today's graduates are striving to distance themselves. It's hard to pinpoint exactly how this manifests itself, except perhaps in the way that the new artists are less hesitant about producing work which has a handmade quality to it, rather than the hands-off conceptualism that dominated the Nineties.

I remember Jake Chapman's degree show from the Royal College in 1990, where he hired his sculpture (some Rota-Board hoardings) prefabricated from the manufacturer. Today, Ryan Denton's drawing of a monkey wearing shades (at St Martin's) is drawn in ballpoint painstakingly across thousands of Post-It notes over an entire wall. It must have taken months. A labour of love, its title is "There's a lot riding on this one".

The biggest surprise for me was at the Royal Academy School, which I'd always thought a bit stuffy. This year there was some highly accomplished, smoothly worked stuff. Everyone's talking about Christian Ward's stylish and knowing landscapes. He's taken on that potentially tired and hackneyed genre by looking at it with a keen eye. The resulting paintings emerge totally fresh.

The Royal College seems still to be paying the price for expelling sculptors from Kensington Gore to an isolated studio over the river. That was nearly 10 years ago, and while this year's shows of its various departments look professional and slick, I craved some atmosphere and a work of art that didn't already anticipate its market. Indeed, one of the biggest problems in art school these days is the politics of departmental structures, where painters only work with painters, and sculptors stay put in the sculpture studio. At the Slade this year the shows stirred this up by mixing the different media together. Conflict of interest prevents me from singling out the best work on show, but the strategy of integrating the different media worked brilliantly.

The London Institute, with Chelsea, Camberwell and Central St Martin's under its auspices, has been struggling to rationalise its departmental differences and college identities. Camberwell has the reputation for craft-based arts, Chelsea shows its strength through artists who don't stray far from their chosen medium, and St Martin's is more conceptual. Give or take.

This year, for me, St Martin's was a treat. There seemed to be several rigorous but unpretentious projects going on and a lot of interplay between artists. I loved Paul Dugdale's photographic self-portrait, with the remote cable unfeasibly far from the camera. It's almost a self-defeating thing to do, but that distance yields up a whole surrounding landscape which the photographer could never have composed for himself. And I wept at the poignancy and conceptual cheek of Simon Davison's All The Quiet Bits Between All Of The Songs Of All Of My Records. It's an old-fashioned vinyl LP, playing on a turntable. This is more than a John Cage musical provocation; you can actually see the silence cut into the grooves of the disc.

Goldsmiths has been the big disappointment this year. The irony is that, until the emergence of what was called the Goldsmiths' phenomenon, art schools had escaped much critical attention since the 1960s when Hockney, Kitaj and friends were dancing the night away at the Royal College. What happened at Goldsmiths in 1989 and 1990 was the birth of a movement and a chapter in art history. It made the degree shows essential viewing. These days it's a difficult reputation to sustain.

I tried hard to find some real joy in this year's show, but sensed far less coherence than I had hoped. There was the occasional charming piece, like Jane Chang's video of a girl playing Satie's Trois GymnopÈdies while overlooking a suburban garden, or Fiona Taylor's enlarged, almost clichÈd photographs taken in Brighton. Or Elizabeth Frey's reconstruction of spaces through memory and drawing and an obsessive archiving of images. And I want to own one of Libby Hart Langford's knitted cigarette logo blankets over in Textiles.

Yet the more I single out names, the less comfortable I become. It's hard to tell what will survive, even over the summer. Only this year one collector sold a painting he'd bought at Peter Doig's Chelsea degree show some 12 years ago. He paid about £1,000 for it. Sotheby's sold it for more than £300,000. It's this kind of lottery that has led to an overheated activity at the degree shows in recent years.

As a teacher, I see that the atmosphere it engenders can work against the measured thought which is indispensable to make serious art. Students see fame and fortune around the corner; the punters just the fortune. The degree show is a crucial part of the art-making process, but it's just the beginning. Art needs time, and as true patrons we would do well to look beyond the degree-show bargain. Perhaps the shows need to be shut for speculative business.