Art school, art students, and actually giving a damn.

Cafe Society
1

A friend that I went to high school with liked to take photos. He wasn’t good at school and didn’t work hard generally, but he liked taking photos. So he decided to go to Cornish College of the Arts right out of high school. This was two years ago.

The first year he was there, he got bad grades - I think 2.somethings. This did not surprise me. The next year, he started flunking courses. He was kicked out of the college.

He now has forty thousand dollars in debt from going to Cornish for two years and dicking around there. He still tells me that he’d like to work in design as a profession or something, but when I suggest more sensible options, like going to the UW (which costs a lot less and offers a lot more gift aid), he says “I’m not competitive enough for that”.

News flash: if you aren’t willing to be competitive, you shouldn’t go into a field where only the top single percent make enough money from what they do to make a living. Don’t try to be a photographer and not take it unbelievably seriously. It is so hard to make it even if you work hard that you absolutely cannot afford to not work hard.

The world is not merely filled with unbelievably talented guitarists, actors, painters, and photographers who do not make it. It is full of extremely skilled guitarists, actors, painters, and photographers who do not make it. So if you want to make it as an artist, more power to you. Try actually practicing your art, my friend.

I’m done railing against my one friend. Once, he showed me around Cornish. I noticed something: it seemed like a place where bogo-chic hipsters sat around and did their hipsterish things. They didn’t seem to be like people who really cared about art. I’m not just saying that it didn’t seem like someone like Dali could be among the students there. I’m saying that few of the students even cared enough about art to do things like, say, paint when not required to. I would have been pleased to meet some moderately talented people who just seemed like they were really into art.

Is it just something I’m making up, or is a lot of “art” school culture not really about loving art? I see lots of “art students” who obviously aren’t really that into art. They just like the whole show of it all: the belief that one has talent, the fashion and glitziness, and the right to shirk responsibility.

Does anybody else know what I’m talking about?

2

Replace “art” with literature, sports medicine, or Chicano studies, etc., and you’re just describing college. Nothing really special here, except art school resembles junior college more than a standard 4-year. Any school for 19 year olds is probably going to be filled with people looking to shirk responsibility, they’re 19. And really, who can blame them? I’m certainly pleased that I’m not the person a more driven and passionate version of my 19 year old self would have become.

3

There are two halves of art school. One is the part where you get to lounge around and be a semi-douchebag, drink coffee and pretend to have deep philosophical conversations. The other is the actual creation of art, and holy crap do these same idiots transform into the most talented and creative and competitive artists you’ve ever met.

I went to a school that mixed art and technology (animation, digital effects, movie and video game making). The disparity between what you would expect artistically from a person based on their personality and what they actually produced was, at times, positively shocking. The nicest, humblest guy and the raving asshole could each produce a sculpture or short animation that was fascinating and intricate.

One particular jerk I never got along with nevertheless created some mind-blowing art that showed he had a love for the craft he simply never expressed apart from the art itself.

4

My nephew was like that. He liked thinking of himself as an artist, writer or photographer. He just didn’t like making art, writing or photographing. He liked the pose. What made it easier to get away with the pose was that he was a very pretty boy.

He never went to an art school, though. Now, at 26, he’s still sort of figuring out what to do with his life and has a few crappy jobs on the side.

5

I think you’re overgeneralizing, but my freshman year my roommate was a theater major who was almost exactly like the person you described in the OP. When he wasn’t working on a play, it wasn’t unusual for him to sleep all day - literally. The man would come in around 2 a.m., crash on his bed, and not get up until 6 p.m. the following day. I don’t think I ever once saw him crack open a book, and towards the end of the year we started getting messages on our answering machine from deans saying that they need to talk to him about some “academic problems.” The sad part is that he was on scholarship, so I guess he must have been a decent student at some point.

6

There are a few professions – sometimes they are called “glamour professions” in which the vast majority of the people in them make practically nothing, but a few people at the top get rich. Examples are sports, music, arts, show business, and writing.

I think you not only need talent, but a certain kind of personality to want to go into this kind of competitive environment.

7

Yes.

I have a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and my whole time there most of the students seemed more interested in playing the part of a Great Artist than actually doing the hard work required to BE a Great Artist.

8

How about a testimony from one of those losers, almost thirty years later?

I earned a BFA with a concentration in painting in 1983. I was required to put in a 60+ hour week, plus I carried around a sketchbook at all times. I also read voraciously outside of my required material on all sorts of topics.

The drive was to make connections and observations as uniquely as possible, but make them still accessible to the “average” person. This is a delicate, often frustrating balance for a callow young person to make.

Another drive was to visualize an ambitious outcome, beyond what I’d never done but built upon the skill I had, over and over again. But, odd little accidents happened along the way, and unlike an engineering or scientific project, I learned not to ride roughshod over them or resolve them while keeping the original end goal in sight: the object was to use those little accidents as prompts to go in new, better directions. Otherwise I’d become a hack, complacently but competently painting the same meaningless watercolors of violets year after year.

I also learned that understanding human nature is not a naturally human; it has to be developed as a skill. I was learning to think in a critical/analytical method, about art but also about society and human existence in general; not just how to paint worse than your kindergartner can.

A great deal of the energy required for this was due to my youthful egotism and selfishness. Although I survived the weeding-out process that degreed BFA’s had to undergo, all these years later, I admit that I lacked whatever it took in terms of talent or skill or continuing selfishness to excel as an artist. But I do think that the creative thought process I’ve described above is something which civilization needs just as much as the hard-headed scientific method.

9

Broomstick’s post came in while I was typing mine, and I want to comment that perhaps our complaint should be with the faculty, not the students, of these schools for not setting a high enough standard.

Although my school was by no means the Art Institute of Chicago: it was a little state cow college 400 miles further out in the sticks, so our experiences are bound to be different. I didn’t see a lot of poseurs (other than myself). What I saw was a lot of kids from small Midwestern towns where any girl who’d wanted to be anything besides a wife & mom was a slut, and any boy who dreamed of being anything besides a football player or racecar driver was a queer.

Art school was the first place these kids ever had where expressing themselves was OK. They probably went off the deep end a bit, but so do all kids in college. And if they weren’t screwed up by art school, they probably would have been even worse screwed up by whatever else was available to them.

10

Current art student here (actually taking a year off between undergrad and graduate school). The one major difference between art students and most other majors is that 95% of our work is done inside the studio. Except for art history classes, we spend very little time studying in the library or writing papers. So when we finally do leave the studio (and trust me, I’ve spent enough time in the studio that I bought an air mattress), we don’t want to even think about art.

Of course, there are the few that don’t take it seriously and never create anything and generally if they do end up with a career in art it’s teaching art at elementary schools (no offense to any elementary school art teachers of course)

11

My son just finished up at Columbia College Chicago. He said that a large number of students go there thinking they’re going to spend their days making art, music, films, etc., and are shocked to find out that a) the staff expects them to thoroughly master the fundamentals (if your assignment is to write a sonnet, and you turn in a haiku, you’re going to fail no matter how brilliant your haiku is) and b) they still have academic requirements.

Between that and the high tuition, something like three out of four freshmen leave without graduating.

12

Before i left Baltimore, i spent four years teaching (non-art) academic classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art. MICA is consistently ranked among the best art schools in the country.

Obviously, as someone who wasn’t teaching the actual art that the students had come to study, i can’t comment too much on their attitudes to their own art. In general, though, i found that MICA had no more lazy students, no more self-important jerkoffs, and no more self-obsessed hipsters than any other college campus. I found many of the students perfectly amiable and down-to-earth.

As a prestigious, expensive private college, MICA attracts a student body that is generally intelligent and well-prepared. Many of my students had clearly gone to private schools, or good public schools, and for the most part their general level of writing ability and engagement with the material was quite good.

Despite the fact that basically every single student in my classes was there because they had to be, not because they really wanted to be, i had lots of students who worked really hard to do all the reading, participate in class, and turn in good pieces of written work. I always figured that if they were willing to work that hard in my American Intellectual History courses, they must really put a bunch of effort into their actual artwork. And touring campus at the end of the academic year, viewing all the final projects on display, i must say (as a layman in the world of art) there was some pretty impressive work coming out of that place.

Sure, there were some students who did the minimum, and some who made clear that they would like to be anywhere else except in my classroom, and some who just weren’t very good at history, but as a whole they were a perfectly good bunch of students, and i really enjoyed teaching there.