There are a few ways to go about education these days, mostly aimed toward securing an easier life, neighborhood prestige, and lots of money, all such as that, or you could go to art school and learn to be a genius. Art school costs the same as a regular education, but employment possibilities are notoriously nil, no one hires artists who don’t make pictures, and there is no employment unless you can wheedle your way into teaching the same useless stuff to others. Art school, the entire system, represents an eddy in the river of human progress, a default on our mutually supportive productive life together, and it’s pure sabotage to any person who ever felt a need and desire to communicate with a diverse array of fellow humans about fundamental issues, who wanted to be an artist.
Art schools, all the way past the Phd’s, celebrate the exact moment in the studio of Kandinsky, or was it Mondrian, both have been so honored, when the first canvas was produced that didn’t refer to anything ever seen by anyone, without any reference to anything outside itself, art immaculate at last. For them the seas part when the actual world of perception and experience is left behind, finally achieving the transcendence humanity had been seeking all along. Oh really. To reinforce their point, they’ll make the rendering of anything seen seem dirty, mildly disgusting, ‘what a feeble idea, this copying of the world,’ is the way they talk, and ‘I have more important things to do with my time than to go around copying nature,‘ the threadbare academic reply when students inquire about representation.
To compensate art students for a lack of job prospects, on graduation they’ll be granted super powers few mortals possess. Consider ‘readymades,’ a legitimate, officially sanctioned category of art. Here’s how it works -- a graduate with a degree is authorized to take any item off the shelf, perhaps discarded in the park, maybe mass-produced in a foreign sweatshop, anything at all really, and declare it art -- no it’s true. Suddenly whatever it did it doesn’t do anymore, but instead it winds up in a gallery. Not only that, they also teach it’s appropriate to ‘appropriate’ the work of other artists, copy stuff out of books, it’s great, and all the artist has to do is glue it on, stick it down, and it’s theirs. If a pat on the head is a sufficient goal in life, they can just stay in school forever. The teachers pat each others heads regularly, and draw a regular paycheck, real world stay away. Most graduates just wander off into other fields, actual statistics appall.
If you have an interest in art, learn to paint on your own, you have weekends. Will your neighbors support you someday, don’t count on it, but do it anyway. You’ll be actually participating in art instead of just being an expert, while at the same time learning to see, and maybe for the first time begin to understand why so many people are fond of art. Once you’ve started becoming aware of the textures and the interaction of colors that make up a scene, at first in order to reproduce them on a flat surface, you’ll find yourself, of necessity, seeing with ‘fresh‘ eyes. Even when just attempting to paint, expect to see a whole lot more that was always there all along, but more than that, if you ever were to get good at it, the paintings you produce will be an enduring testimony to others to look a little harder, to see a little more. You won’t need a degree.
Art schools, all the way past the Phd’s, celebrate the exact moment in the studio of Kandinsky, or was it Mondrian, both have been so honored, when the first canvas was produced that didn’t refer to anything ever seen by anyone, without any reference to anything outside itself, art immaculate at last. For them the seas part when the actual world of perception and experience is left behind, finally achieving the transcendence humanity had been seeking all along. Oh really. To reinforce their point, they’ll make the rendering of anything seen seem dirty, mildly disgusting, ‘what a feeble idea, this copying of the world,’ is the way they talk, and ‘I have more important things to do with my time than to go around copying nature,‘ the threadbare academic reply when students inquire about representation.
To compensate art students for a lack of job prospects, on graduation they’ll be granted super powers few mortals possess. Consider ‘readymades,’ a legitimate, officially sanctioned category of art. Here’s how it works -- a graduate with a degree is authorized to take any item off the shelf, perhaps discarded in the park, maybe mass-produced in a foreign sweatshop, anything at all really, and declare it art -- no it’s true. Suddenly whatever it did it doesn’t do anymore, but instead it winds up in a gallery. Not only that, they also teach it’s appropriate to ‘appropriate’ the work of other artists, copy stuff out of books, it’s great, and all the artist has to do is glue it on, stick it down, and it’s theirs. If a pat on the head is a sufficient goal in life, they can just stay in school forever. The teachers pat each others heads regularly, and draw a regular paycheck, real world stay away. Most graduates just wander off into other fields, actual statistics appall.
If you have an interest in art, learn to paint on your own, you have weekends. Will your neighbors support you someday, don’t count on it, but do it anyway. You’ll be actually participating in art instead of just being an expert, while at the same time learning to see, and maybe for the first time begin to understand why so many people are fond of art. Once you’ve started becoming aware of the textures and the interaction of colors that make up a scene, at first in order to reproduce them on a flat surface, you’ll find yourself, of necessity, seeing with ‘fresh‘ eyes. Even when just attempting to paint, expect to see a whole lot more that was always there all along, but more than that, if you ever were to get good at it, the paintings you produce will be an enduring testimony to others to look a little harder, to see a little more. You won’t need a degree.
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