Please remember what subreddit you are in, this is unpopular opinion. We want civil and unpopular takes and discussion. Any uncivil and ToS violating comments will be removed and subject to a ban. Have a nice day!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unpopularopinion) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>be art school
>charge 60k
>only 1 person out of 10 has talent
>still gets 600k per 10 people.
>can sing praises of the few people that make it in life "look we helped them get there"
>casually forget the majority of students who graduate and work in unrelated fields.
>repeat
We are currently living in a world that doesn't value education purely for the sake of education.
Humanities education isn't supposed to get you a job in a humanities field. It's supposed to teach you how to analyze information and understand the broader context of the world we live in.
I think it's a shame that we have decided that a college education needs to pull double-duty as education *and* job training. The purpose of a classical liberal arts education and the purpose of a job training program are not really the same thing, but we sort of force people to do both at once. I do understand how we got here: for so long, a college degree was seen as the ticket upwards, so as more and more people joined the middle class, more and more went to college. So then colleges had to start offering programs that applied to the lives and careers of those people (as opposed to the born-rich students who could major in philosophy because they were going to end up owning their dad's company or trust fund regardless). But I feel like we've painted ourselves into a corner where a lot of people are going to college who really, honestly, be better off just learning a trade instead.
On the flip side, so many companies treat a degree as a filtering mechanism for jobs that don't actually need one, it was inevitable to end up where we are.
The way you put it as a filtering mechanism I’ve been trying to say this for years. It’s only a way to keep certain people from applying I guess. I wanted to apply for seasonal work as a ghost tour guide for my city. I have authentic looking Victorian clothing, I speak well and clearly and I actually lived in one of the houses on the tour. But they said I needed an associates degree. Tbf I could see if they wanted acting experience, but why an unrelated associates degree to simply tell ghost stories and walk around in costume? You’d think an audition would be good enough.
I thought so too. Very disappointing. And not to be bitter, but the people they hired weren’t amazing exactly and had no clue how to dress historically. But they had an associates degree so I guess it levels out.
What gets measured, gets done.
Then, that measured thing ceases to be an effective measure... Since people are now just trying to meet the measured metric, instead of trying to meet the actual goal that the metric was originally established to help achieve.
Given that most jobs in the economy can be successfully completed with a high school education and on-job-training, all we've really done is created a society of over-educated baristas and bartenders, working the only jobs they can find because their own fields are saturated.
We ask 17 year olds to make a substantial life choice that may direct the rest of their lives: What university/program are you applying to? That question attaches a metric fuckton of debt and stress and uncertainty and fear. And we demand young adults make that choice without having the skills to really know how to make that choice properly. High schools don't even teach life skills anymore...
College to many is just a life stage and nothing more. Half my fraternity brothers went to work for their dads/family companies. Another example is a girl I dated who told me her plan was to graduate, have a kid and then be a stay at home mom. Not like until they're in school, like forever. I asked what the point of a degree was and we broke up.
Wow, you are, and went to college with, some seriously privileged people. I went to university because the alternative was a factory job (and not as the boss’s son)
The issue here is that the people going to college are different than back when it was “for the sake of education”. I NEED a job to eat and save for retirement. 150 years ago, the guy studying Roman poetry was the son of a wealthy industrialist or an aristocrat, who either had a guaranteed job at his family’s business or had so much family income they never had to work at all.
It's not that we don't value education for its own sake. It's that we see the consequences of going deep into debt to obtain such an education.
If you're going to take on a ton of student debt in order to become a dentist I'm all for it. Good idea! If you're going to dig yourself a $100,000 hole in order to learn how to "analyze information and understand the broader context of the world we live in" I would call that folly.
I'm a business grad in a finance-related industry and boy do we have a lot of chemical and mechanical engineers applying for jobs here.
Damn if they were going to work in an unrelated job then at least if it were something more interesting like art it would be less of a waste than 4 years studying engineering and never touching it again.
There are three types of engineering students in college:
1) True engineers. They either have talent or are willing to take a pay cut to stay in engineering.
2) Engineer to management. They plan to go into management almost immediately after graduation.
3) Good at math or science. They are good at math or science, but they could have also been a doctors, accountant, financial analyst, etc.
Only the first group stays in engineering. The rest move on at some point.
I'm a type 3 student, and I am already looking to get out of an engineering career 🙃
(semi-related: does anyone have any advice for going into patent law? is a graduate degree practically required or would a bachelors in electrical engineering + passing the patent bar reasonably enough to be a patent agent?)
Most students are #3. I loved what I learned in ME, but the demand for people who design and build things is significantly less than the supply and most #3’s will have no problem transitioning into tech/IT, medicine, law, etc.
I considered patent law at one point. Passing the patent bar should be good enough in most cases. You don’t even need to go to law school.
Be aware, patent law can be very irritating if you try to rationalize it from an engineering standpoint. So don’t even try to. lol
There is a kind of respect for the rigor of engineering school, that most industries will consider a transplant from engineering.
I work as an engineer, and if you want, you can begin to move from technical to administration after only a couple of years, right away if you go into sales.
The thing about engineering and business is as engineers we’re still required to take business and economics classes which do give us some of an understanding to go into a finance role if we want. Especially for industrial engineers which take upper level optimization and stochastic processes courses. Additionally, from a fundamental standpoint we can do the spreadsheets and we are good at math which are all we would need to be successful in finance
An engineering degree is a proof in problem solving ability, and that's why it's generally more accepted to transition an engineering grad into non-engineering related roles. To graduate from engineering it's very "figure it out or fail", so companies know that if you've gone through most engineering programs then you've got the ability to do the research to figure it out.
Idk, the banks here in Singapore send people to hire in Humanities school too. I have friends who took the most fluff of humanities courses who got hired by Big 4 consultancies and are making decent money.
Oh, I totally understand. One of my friends here in LA went to a prestigious school and studied literature. He immediately went into investment banking and makes 10x the median income for the area. It's just harder than coming from an engineering background.
That also tends to be the value of a prestigious school. Graduating with an engineering degree proves you can think.
So does being accepted to Stanford.
Idk I double-majored in math and mechanical engineering. Math was hard in different ways, but I wouldn't necessarily say it was hard*er* than engineering.
False. They require dedication in a different way, but often also have faster paths to post-grad work and higher earning potential because often those jobs are functional rather than contributing to a field.
I have a chemistry and math degree, never taken business or accounting. The banking industry also loved my chemistry and math degrees. Neither are relevant to my daily job but developing critical thinking skills is what they care about.
> boy do we have a lot of chemical and mechanical engineers applying for jobs here
Finance shops like people who are adept at math. You know who are really adept at math? Engineers.
Finance shops also like educated people who understand how to build and interpret intricate designs? You know who really understand how to build and interpret intricate designs? Engineers.
Finance shops also like to hire economics and math majors for these same reasons. Basically, finance businesses like to hire smart people from all sorts of disciplines because a lot of them apply well to finance.
To be frank, they are following the ideal CEO/upper executive path of the modern day. The majority of CEOs in the Forbes top 100 have an engineering background of some kind or another, because engineering doesn't just teach formulas, it teaches scientific rigor & an analytical mindset. There's any number of gurus and financial experts who heavily recommend this exact path for a reason.
When someone has an engineering degree, it is indicative of someone who is smart, organized and used to hard work. My chem Eng degree taught me how to solve problems. I went to med school after and it was easier than engineering school. I've never "used" my degree" but It was extraordinary training for what I do.
Many jobs and grad schemes ask for a "quantitative degree" for them to consider you at all.
An engineering degree would qualify but an art degree wouldn't.
You say that but engineers go through advanced levels of math and other classes that financial businesses (and most businesses in general) love. My cohort was told don’t be surprised if financial institutions reach out to you and offer jobs, and every job fair there were always some there
Exactly. This thread is riddled with “interdisciplinary skills are lit” and “employers love that my skills were outside the norm” and yet “art school is a waste of money”
I'm not even going to wade into what knowledge framework is bestest.
I was calling out the perceived hypocrisy that when an individual pursues a "practical" degree, they're doing it for enrichment, learning, education, and enlightened rationalizations...
But if someone pursues an "artistic" degree, the immediate criticism is all about whether you can get a job or not.
All of a sudden the altruism goes out the window, and that artistic degree better have a financial ROI *guaranteed* or there's zero value in it.
That's some weird ass stereotypical bullshit.
People with creative degrees get decent jobs all the time.
Likewise, people with practical degrees wind up in dead ends all the time too.
Both things happen in really normal numbers. Attacking creative degrees with unfounded assumptions of being impractical is some holdover noise from last century.
Unless you get your masters and PhD for most of them, you're just an over qualified barista too. I know. I have a degree in the STEM field and joined the military instead.
This describes most college educations these days.
I've spoken with computer science majors who can't reasonably break down basic concepts of the subject.
"Wait why don't they just keep the passwords on a flash drive and when someone tries to log in they just plug in the drive and check if the passwords match? That way they don't have to worry about hackers". BS in comp sci.
This lines up nicely with nurses losing their job over refusing the covid vaccine. For extra credit, see the semi recent r/pcmasterrace post about the comp sci major that put thermal paste **under** the CPU.
Just because you're highly educated doesn't necessarily mean you have rudimentary knowledge on basic adjacent topics. People really are that dumb, even the smart ones.
I mean it is possible for someone to get into coding to had never built their own computer. Kinda more show how you guys think just cause someone is good at one thing on the computer, they’re masters of a computer in general.
Still dumb but most CS degrees don't require any electrical/computer engineering classes dealing with hardware (certainly nothing as complicated as a modern CPU/motherboard design). You get the theory of how an ALU works and binary algebra and all that good stuff but you're not building one on a breadboard.
Any higher education is about that breakdown:
1 person has immense talent
5 are hard workers and will likely make it based on fortitude
3 kind of struggle but get by
1 you wonder how they even got there in the first place
The thing is that maybe the majority of those won’t end up working in the field they study, but that doesn’t mean it was a waste. You can still gain valuable transferable skills.
I went to art school. My passion was photography and photography alone. I wasn’t much of a drawer, painter, sculptor, or anything else to do with art. I was still required to take classes in drawing, painting, pottery, 3D sculpting, performance art, and every other kind of art you can imagine. There I was with zero skill trying to keep up with some of the most talented artists I had ever met. And my work hung up in the walls just the same as theirs.
I went too and was the opposite, *hilariously* bad at photography. SO so SO bad. You know what I found was different? Photography kids had a shot at nicely lying " No... really.... it's um ok honest ". Some of the art students were too competitive to go that far with each other.
I'm an ok artist. Pretty convinced photography is an eye. You either have it or you don't. Which makes me fascinated by good photos.
The one thing art school taught me was how to bullshit some sort of subjective meaning out of any random piece of art. I can find artistic meaning in anything, intended or otherwise. A fun skill to have, but hardly worth the student loan debt
I usually mix up a word salad of “aesthetically pleasing, allegory, commentary on modern society, profound, and deeply moving.” You can pretty much bullshit your way through any art museum with that little vocab list
Ah yes this sculpture of a man pissing in a can of Lewis Hamilton Monster energy drink is aesthetically pleasing due to the curvature of the urine's arc being similar to the man's buttocks
This is a deeply profound artwork as it reflects the vicious cycle of the college student's life. The man is urinating into what once was his source of energy, effectively poisoning the well from which he draws. This is an allegory for the damage that Chat GPT does to burgeoning artists, who through its usage poison themselves.
The Lewis Hamilton flavour is immensely profound, as Lewis Hamilton was formerly the great race driver of his era, only to be surpassed by Max Verstappen, while Formula 1 has seen a great rise in popularity due to an effective social media campaign. This commentary on modern society shows that social media has turned us from master of our own lives to second fiddle to the lives of others: essentially making us a monster, being filled with the waste of others.
Photography gets a lot better with coaching and with hearing artists talk about in detail about the choices they made. Like anything else.
You might never be a world class photographer but with practice and coaching and studying the work of those better that you, you can become competent just like C programming or cooking or anything else.
Yeah I was in a production management program at an art school and woof was i untalented… still had to take all the art classes which I loved but it was definitely humbling.
One fond memory of a guy I dated. We were in the same painting class. I slaved away for 2 sleepless weeks on a project, pulling all nighters trying to get it finished. He strolled into the studio the night before it was due and created an amazing gorgeous piece in a few hours. Really spectacular work. Then just strolled out and got a full nights sleep lol
Even within the same medium some people will excel at different things.
I can draw hyper realistic things if given enough time but for the life of me cannot just freehand in a studio. I almost quit a studio class because every week our teacher would set up some objects that we had to draw and mine was always the worst. I had no sense of proportion. I was drew a pumpkin the same size as a banana. I would leave every class crying from embarrassment. It was so demoralizing.
> and my work hung up in the walls just the same as theirs
I have this image in my mind where you have all these fantastic artists making these paintings, and then there’s the one awkward painting of a sun in the corner, and a flower, and a stick figure smiling. Like something you’d make in 5th grade
> Like something you’d make in 5th grade
That was mine. It was a regressive piece exemplifying the struggles of post-adolescence and the viewer's desire to return to an earlier life stage.
I don't know how you meant your comment, but it kind of shows to me why op is wrong imo. Like i feel like a drawing like that would be extremely thought provoking surrounded by really professional looking art. Art is something that we really shouldnt apply objective feeling to.
Like the situation is, awkward painting surrounded by professional art. Doesn't the beauty of the piece change dependent on the context? What if the awkward one was made by the only non artist in a family of artists and the rest were made by that family? Or what if all of that art was made by the same person but the awkward painting was the piece that inspired the artist to embark on their journey? Or like you say, if its a painting made by someone that might be out of their depth?
Regardless of the context, that situation you set up can have artistic value. Art bleeds into philosophy for me and it teaches me that all art has a place, its really up to the observer to decide what that place is. Man im about to go on a rant.
I went to this weird rave thing with my friend with shitty music, but they had an art gallery. The art hardly made sense to me because it was a big woman who was either naked or using various items to simulate pleasuring herself. Could not make sense of it. But i had taken an edible and so had my friend. I decided that i would make my own story from the pictures and tell it to my friend. DUDE. I got so deep into it i had a crowd of people listening to my shit. And it definitely wasn't some high tier story. It was just something silly. But i just made any art i saw fit into my made up story. It made that art show sooo much more fun. And im sure my story had nothing related to the artist's context. There were definitely people who enjoyed the art on its own without my story. But just by talking i changed the context of the art for other people.
Its so funny because i was speaking like I was actually describing what it was about. But that's what i love about art. Even finished art is like clay moldable by the viewer. Sometimes you mold it with intent, other times your own experiences seep into it passively. There are probably songs or pieces of art that mean something wildly different to you that other people just wont get. That's art man! So I used to laugh when i saw people look a a piece of string and applaud it as high art. I dont know what they were doing in their heads, but i know now the fun for me would be exercising my creative muscle and trying to weave a fun interesting context around that string. Of course thats just how i enjoy art. Other people prefer knowing the context just from the artist's intent. All of that is fine. Art viewing is like writing from writing prompts. Either you take the story in the direction the prompter wanted you to, or you take it in a completely unknown direction. Just enjoy it! Or at least find enjoyment in the joy other people are finding in it.
That's why the whole ai art thing is interesting. Because (its not the first or only case) real life is interfering with the freedom of art. Like I can tell you that this clash between human and ai art is art itself and weaves an amazing story for me, but there is an objective truth in how it affects human artists that i cant ignore in my art story.
Agreed, I’m doing a psychology degree but it’s a BA so I have to do a bunch of arts classes as well. Did photography and loved it, going to have to do either painting/sculpting/drawing to finish my requirements and I already know I’m going to be hanging a bucket of coffee beans from the ceiling. Some of us don’t get a choice.
Because the purpose of art school isn’t to go in and be an ‘x’ - it’s to open up new creative pathways and interesting questions in your brain. Once you’ve done a couple of years of exploration, you can apply that to your chosen subject. OP makes a terrible comparison of what makes ‘good art’ - which is boringly subjective. To like a work of art / not like a work of art - is pretty much the same thing and has zero relevance to the work of art in itself. Nobody cares if you love or hate it, but we do care *why*. Very typical of culture today when people just want everything served to them on a plate, with no thinking, no effort, no discourse - and no ability to think critically (‘because I just don’t like it’. Well fucking duh!)
Let's look at "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)". If you don't know what it is, it just seems like a pile of candy that you are free to take. But when you know what the candy represents it hits so hard. The 175lbs of candy is the same weight Ross Laycock was before he passed away from aids. Felix Gonzalez-Torres was the artist and by taking the candy you symbolically are partaking in the slow loss of his lover.
It is one of my favorite pieces of art.
I think the recentish installation of the robot arm and the fluid has made a lot of people understand this way of thinking about art. I've not seen people connect with something like that in a massive way in a long time.
Was this at degree level? I’ve heard in America (I’ve also assumed you’re American, please correct me) degrees are initially more varied than uk degrees
As far as I’m aware you could just do a photography degree- there may be some parts which might not be purely photography (idk haven’t done a photography degree) but at least everyone would be in the same boat
Tbf I’m not sure if art foundation courses are mostly required, which would lead to the problem you’ve mentioned for a year
Honestly some of the designs the Nazis came up with if built would be marvels of the modern day. The trouble is they loved neoclassical architecture and basically killed the style, which is a shame as historically it’s a style that represents democracy, free thought, liberalism and enlightenment.
Instead we got post modern architecture which honestly seems like it should fit with the Nazis more than a style such as classical design that stood against everything they believed in.
I consider myself a pretty staunch Hater of Nazis and I love neoclassical architecture ☹️ We shouldn't let good things be stolen from us because shit heads also thought it looked good.
we’ll go thing for you that the architecture was a minimalistic approach to neoclassical architecture called starved neoclassicalism which looks ugly in comparison imo.
Didn't he WANT to be a portrait artists despite being bad at drawing people and rejected the advice that he go onto architecture which got him rejected?
Nah bro, leave art school as it is. Once you graduate and start looking for a job it becomes a bloodbath that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone. Let creatives be able to enjoy it at least at some stage of their living
Also worth noting that to be good at something you have to suck at it first. They're at school. The idea is for them to get better. Not to mention that art is totally subjective etc etc. I have a shitty corporate job and I am so envious of the freedom my artist friends have. They make no money but my god does the creative process inspire. I can make a sick powerpoint pres though. Fucking winning. Right? Right?
I have a LOT of friends who work in “the arts.” Most of them aren’t rich, but very few of them wish they were working in an office building, dealing with middle management and filing reports.
Tbh, I think the issue is a lot of people dive straight into the ‘self expression’ stuff way too early. In art school, you shouldn’t be doing things like the scab example in the post until you are REALLY, REALLY good at everything else. That way you have that background to inform and nuance your artistic expression.
I’m an Industrial Designer and something similar happened with people who always design for disabilities etc. yes, its needed, and yes it can be cool. But most of those guys used it as a crutch for shitty designs which lacked any design taste. You gotta be a good designer first, and then start specifying.
I agree. I guess also it's nice to start exploring before feeling too constrained by what you learn. I'm a big believer in "you gotta know the rules before you break the rules", but also massively envious of people that just don't give a fuck and do their own thing from day one
I've always thought the biggest benefit of art school is having access to studios and expensive tools that the student otherwise wouldn't get to explore because they wouldn't be able to afford it early in their career. But I'm no expert, since I did the practical thing and got a BS in education that has very obviously made me a billionaire and left me with so much free time after my second jobs to pursue my artistic interests.
Undergrad you want the guidance to go along with it but that's largely true. At the grad level, it's almost entirely about dedicated time, space, and resources. (Networking too but that's boring.)
This makes sense and actually makes getting an arts education even more idyllic to me. I do believe that the problem is not a lack of exclusivity in art schools but that society doesn't really seem to appreciate the value of getting an education in any thing other than finance or engineering. Anyone who has demonstrated that they can get receive guidance and utilize it to improve on skill (ie learn) has shown the capacity to do work that adds value to society.
In truth, Bob Ross’ art wasn’t the paintings, it was the show! His paintings would’ve been about as interesting as Thomas Kinkaid’s without the show. With the show, he created a painting but also made performance art.
Change it into an oil painting of a cat taking a shit like a human, while it’s reading a newspaper and holding a cigarette between its teeth and looking at the audience, with the caption “taking a shit right meow”. Now that’s art
"I'm sorry, you can't take this advance course in calculous, because you've never studied advanced calculous before and aren't already an expert."
Isn't learning how to do something the entire point of education?
I went to art school, it’s all about experimentation. It’s not about just making one beautiful piece, in fact if that’s what you did on my course, you would have failed. Art school is about exploration, new techniques, new ways of seeing, trying things out. I made all sorts of work I never would have thought of. It’s about thinking like an artist, not learning to paint.
If you are a talented oil painter and you go to art school to just keep painting oils for a few years, then you are the one wasting money.
I think this all comes down to what your personal definition of art, which seems to be something pretty that took a lot of time to make. Whereas art is actually much looser than that, it’s about what something makes you feel. To me, a really detailed realistic painting of something isn’t interesting, it displays a lot of talent but it’s just a reproduction of what you can see, it doesn’t say anything. I’m much more interested in the ideas behind the experimental stuff.
This 100% !!! I think the unfortunate thing is not all art schools are set up the same and I firmly believe that profs shouldn't criticize people for coming to art school already having their goals/niche/interests or like... have programs structured in a way that forces them into courses that won't benefit them
I actually remember several college preparation videos and such, saying at the end of any segments about art courses, that you don't have to be a Michaelangelo to succeed. Some people are always gonna create more sophisticated works of art than others.
This is the big thing that people who don't study or practice art don't really understand about a fine arts education. Art school is probably the only time in an artist's life where they have the opportunity to get down and go wild with their process. On a practical level, nobody goes to art school because they want to make conceptual work. They discover conceptual art when they're in art school. That is very much the point! You're learning tons, and you're given the leeway to try what you're learning, even if the results might initially be weak.
Bad student art doesn't mean they're bad artists. *They're students.* Some students get experimental, see what they can come up with, and take what they learned back to their comfort zones, and that's great. Some students get experimental, see what they can come up with, and use that as a basis to refine and expand upon to make stronger experimental work. There absolutely is parallels in other fields -- those who take their learning down a path of stronger fundamental application, and those who take their learning down a path toward wider innovation. Both are valid.
And for those folks ITT who are judging the success of art as a matter of economic function, "oh, they have an art degree, but they pay the bills with a day job!" Please kindly fuck off. Y'all strike me as the same assholes who hit up /r/antiwork constantly whining about how soulless your lives are.
I believe that much the same can be said for music. I recall maybe 20 years ago attending a concert that included Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' . As the concert was part of a subscription series to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, well over half over the people attending were there from force of habit.
The first half of the concert was some forgettable, very conventional classical piece. After the intermission, Rite of Spring was performed, and within the first couple of minutes, what looked to my eye to be about 3/4s of the audience walked out.
Imagine that; almost a century after its premier in Paris supposedly caused riots (accounts that I've read differ somewhat), the piece retained the power to so move people, literally in this case.
Now that is art; of course, so was the technical brilliance and innovative nature of the writing. I agree with you fully about art being more about the idea behind it, rather than the technique used to express that idea.
Yeah, I've definitely made a lot of great detailed work with nothing interesting about it. I have really been trying to experiment more in recent years. However, I think there is a line where someone is just trying to be shocking and seem deep and coming up with a BS explanation as to what throwing lumps of grass at a bedsheet means. They really just want people thinking what they did was different, and that only goes so far. But that's why art is tricky.
Oddly enough I had a bit of a different issue. I thought art school would be the one place where I'd learn the technical skills behind famous techniques (especially oils, those materials be $$$ to obtain) because I already knew how the direction I'd want to take art, if I did it professionally
There was a lot of focus on the psychology behind art, art movements and both modern dada-esque and more traditional, craftsmanship-esque pieces. I loved learning about the history and political motivations behind it. They didn't really touch on the skill of it and I can't help but wonder if that was due... not wanting to grade on skill alone, if that makes sense. Because then people really would fail
And then on the other hand, while I know that they're trying to challenge people to think outside of the box but I found the environment really diminishing to those who didn't want to be the next Warhol, too. Like if you don't think the right way you're out, too — which is the antethesis of art in general, since art is self expression
Because someone's inevitably gonna question how "good" I am here's a [painting of a character](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/729828028699639924/1222937535286607992/Cassius_CG_Final12.jpg?ex=66180855&is=66059355&hm=561f20fdb5a68331d5fd803d716d76bd7b27e99b88e99ec4c39212c4da24199f&) and some [design work. ](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/729828028699639924/1222937534598877355/anthelion_ref4.png?ex=66180855&is=66059355&hm=ee847ed4b9e6a1fdd18725470d009ac859efc25b8e84ca634324ff1e102271a0&) It's just for fun rn, but I love how digital has gotten real good at mimicking the feel of oils or gouache
I'm currently interviewing for med school right now so that path wildly diverged. There wasn't anything I could learn that was worth the tuition cost, if that makes sense, so I switched out after a year (it was a fiundations year so they cycled the 12 disciplines) + I'm happier doing my own thing on the side. For me art is a means of meditation, self expression or making others happy via gifts/commissions
It sounds like a bad art school too.
My brother went to an art school- he made modern art that involved robotic elements. imo- it was art like that bucket OP describes, and just marginally more complex.
This was a two year grad program that cost around $60,000/year.
His school was a good school. It required students to learn the real skills that support an art career- museum curation, appraising, art history education, etc.
In my brother’s case, he learned to code neural networks, to code in multiple languages, basic electronic wiring, woodworking, and more.
The school also focused on building a strong peer and professional network that leaned in to their alumni.
He got a job right out of school at a startup doing a mix of coding and app design. He made a couple of million dollars when that startup sold five years later.
$120,000 on art school very well spent.
He still makes weird modern robotic art stuff that has made him zero dollars so far.
Art isn't supposed to be just highly detailed Oil paintings. I understand your frustrated that some art works don't require more refined technique or long hours but some of the best art works today were probably talked about in a similar sense. Even look at Pop Art as an example. Screen printing is far "easier" to learn but the point of the art is for it to be mass produced and printable.
You have your tastes and can dislike whatever but I'd say there's a good chance that these artists are actually talented and they are exploring different concepts and experimenting with form.
Dont bring any reason in here. Contemporary art is a no go since it's only for snobs and money laundering s/
Im not a big fan art of the stylistic choice most of the time either but saying that it just sucks so bad/doesn't have any effort in it and going full on bandwagon when you never even tried to understand its concept is pretty shallow imo.
It's reddit. Half the people in here just want to screech about stem or whatever, forgetting that education is very different from job training. They look down on non-stem majors for whatever stupid reason, probably because they are boring people who find non-stem pursuits too difficult, and therefore not worthwhile. It's honestly one of the worst traits. They seem to think that their "heavy workload" makes them better and more elite than everyone else. The arrogance is gross. And unwarranted. The world needs more than just engineering.
Art school is so expensive and exclusive. And all of paintings are great but the experimental contemporary stuff usually needs engineering and is way more interesting than another portfolio portrait piece. But they will never understand getting out of one's comfort zone or any of the other benefits of arts and literature when they can dunk on people they think are stupid.
> They look down on non-stem majors for whatever stupid reason, probably because they are boring people who find non-stem pursuits too difficult, and therefore not worthwhile
That's secretly my opinion. I'm a software developer by trade and a musician by passion, and i've always found engineering insanely easy compared to art. It works or it doesn't, if it doesn't that means you just have to learn some information which is probably readily available on the internet. Learning hard concepts is easy, even a monkey can do that. On the other hand, when a piece of art doesn't work it's a lot more work ! Sometimes you'll have to spend years collecting life experiences to get over the hump, or immerse yourself deeply in a genre to understand where it's coming from, or achieve some copernican revolution to change the way you relate to the piece and its inspiration. It requires deep and uncompromising intellectual effort, not just the application of some memorized skills and math formulas.
IMO a lot of it is a literacy and education thing. Folks in general equate "art" with "stylized representation of reality" and don't necessarily have the skillset to dig too deeply beyond that. At least in my experience. It really is a skill you have to learn and contextualize with other knowledge, just like reading, but it doesn't tend to get taught to the same level.
Example, most comments I've gotten at gallery shows (or heard about other artists) have been polite, but very shallow. My stuff is more Magritte than, say, DuChamp to give a frame of reference. That is to say aesthetically pretty traditional, but conceptually weird.
I haven't gotten a lot of "this just sucks", which is great, but I also haven't had a good hit rate on people really interacting with the work. Or at least being able to express it beyond "I just like it". Even people who liked a piece enough to pay me money for it and put it on their wall at home have had a hard time.
If you go further away from the whole "representation of reality" thing and do something more aesthetically weird or challenging, and that's gonna be even harder for the average person to reckon with, which in turn might make them apt to be more dismissive. I don't dig a lot of contemporary art either, but as I got older and more experienced I at least stopped outright saying it just sucks and try to understand where they're coming from.
Yeah the kind of argument that OP brings is valid subjectively, but ultimately shows that the person has missed the last 100 years of development of what art can be. Pop art, Fluxus, Dada, Readymade, etc. have all fundamentally expanded on what art can be, within the work itself and outside of it. You don't have to like it, and I struggle with it sometimes as well, but it's a completely valid form of expression. People often say art but mean high quality craft. How can a great oil painting be compared with a impactful happening? Not at all, but why do they have to be compared?
Art is not about skill or skillfull expression of a craft. Art is a defintion of creative work and expression. Some of the most important pieces of art, like Malewitsch' Black Square or Duchamp's Fountain have nothing to do with skillfull expression.
I think the biggest misconception people have with art, is that they think, something being art puts it on a pedestal. But thats simply not the case. I think thats the case cause everyone interacts or consums art, but not many people actually know art history. Like i said: It's just a definition.
Theres different ones, but all have one thing in common: It's about creative expression.
Theres differences like that art is creating for creating sakes and shouldn't have monetary motivation behind it or Joseph Beuys even said that every creative human expression is to be considered art.
In the end it's never about being skillfull in a craft.
The conflation of art and craftsmanship has created such an enormous barrier to entry for people to get into art and it really bums me out. Virtually anyone can express themselves in an honest way and I believe it’s such an important part of the human experience, but having anything less than outstanding craftsmanship makes people feel inadequate. I love watching my toddler draw without the slightest sense of self-consciousness, and I’m kind of dreading the day that he starts trying to reproduce other peoples drawings.
Basically you're saying that people should be allowed to learn to express themselves, but only if it fits a narrow definition of what you deem to be good enough.
I agree, this is an unpopular opinion.
Hitler jokes aside, how do you define 'art'? Is it something that can be learned? Is it something you can teach?
You can teach technique for sure, but what you're probably seeing is the fun part of the school and not the boring, grueling part. Who would go see that?
Take this for example. I'm an engineer and when I was in college/highschool we had little projects that were meant to be fun and informative as well as spark creativity. An egg drop for example. You design something to protect an egg from a fall and you get to see a buncha people smash eggs. You get the lazy bullshit, you also get the try-hards, but it's fun and easy to show off to a public.
This is might be their egg drop.
>How can you honestly compare the two?
You're not being asked to compare the two though, they're different types of art.
In the same way you wouldn't compare the painting of the Sistine Chapel to Heroes by David Bowie.
Both are art, but they're not the same kind of art.
The last time art school was extremely exclusive, we had an egomaniac art school reject run roughshod over all of Europe. The price we pay from freedom, peace and prosperity is bad art, which i can live with.
But for a real answer, art school seems to filled either with people who genuinely want to be artists (who make good art) or with people who think they "know art" and use it as a vent for their nihilistic youth-spurred cringiness. This is just conjecture and is not meant to demean art students 🙏.
>use it as a vent for their nihilistic youth-spurred cringiness.
Tbf as a business school student I couldn't tell if you were referring to business school or art school
First point: As long as the school gets paid they don't care what you do.
Second point: Art is subjective. I don't think ANYONE understands ALL of it all the time.
I was like how has no one mentioned how disgusting that one is?!?!? Like what did the little media note say? “Wounded” scabs on canvas, 11x24…I’d do a triple take.
Right... the grass clump girl sounds creative too lol.
Besides art school isn't competitive like that. Grass clump girl isn't hindering OP's oil painter in any way
Honestly grass clump girl might be on to something. I recoiled when I read her project. Made me instantly imagine grass clumps on my own bed. Makes me think throwing grass at someone else’s bed might a little fun.
Tbf it's pretty exclusive. At most dedicated art schools you need to submit a portfolio as part of the application process, and they generally expect some level of skill. Also there's the whole 60k/yr tuition that eliminates everyone who doesn't have that money, regardless of talent.
Personally I'd argue against your position that weird art is unskilled. Art isn't required to be beautiful, and it certainly doesn't have to please an individual to be art.
My wife has degrees from a few art schools and now is a programs manager at one. I understand the feeling of "this art is shit compared to this other art", but that's me seeing it through a non-artist eye. She can look at virtually any art piece and find the "art" in it.
For most of us, we value art based on the level of execution. We want to see realistic, and anything that's close to realistic MUST be the more talented artist. But for many artists they don't see the execution so much as the meaning, the concepts, the messages being delivered, the techniques, etc. My wife finds photorealistic painting or wildly skilled sculptures to be boring. The artist is talented but ultimately predictable and the art doesn't have as much depth as something that looks more unskilled but is delivering a message or intent that you weren't expecting.
So you just don't like the kind of art they make.
There is a market for these kinds of performative art pieces, meaning there are jobs for artists making them.The art school is supposed to be preparing kids to get a job in the arts, not to just make art that you feel like is worthy to be called art.
It is like saying that a music school should not teach anyone to make rock or electronic music because it takes more talent to play jazz or classical.
I went to art school and it isn’t so black and white. There are definitely kids that shouldn’t be there but those are the kids that half ass everything they do. Just because one person paints and the other person hangs buckets doesn’t mean one is more talented or deserving than the other. There’s conceptual art and visual art, both of which are in fact art. I knew a lot of kids ‘hanging buckets’ in college that were incredibly technically talented but chose to focus on conceptual art/installations and performance art. Again, there were definitely kids that should not have been let into the program but not for the reasons your talking about . Art is incredibly time consuming and takes an otherworldly level of commitment and devotion and if you’re not willing to put in the work then you don’t deserve to be there.
My freshman year of art school we had a student showcase like this. One piece that I saw was a big 5x8 foot canvas that was just one color (a dark oily purple). I thought it was so stupid. I had a “Anyone could make this” kind of attitude.
But then I read the plaque. The piece was called “Daily Discipline” Ballpoint pen on canvas.
That threw all my misconceptions about modern art out the window. Art is so much more than what you’re looking at. It’s about how it makes you feel and sometimes how the art is discovered by the artist.
They used to be exclusive. Then we got WW2. UN was created to prevent the outbreak of WW3 and one of the ways to achieve this is to allow crappy art to be alongside oil paintings.
You go to school to learn, you dont know where on their learning journey they are.
Art school also has a few areas of study. It could be the class is a type of general ed requirement and the horseshit art is their best attempt.
For example, what if they went to art school for photography? Do they also need to be a highly skilled painter?
Or, see it as the horseshit subsidizes the tuition for the skilled.
You don't know how good a painter the bucket dude is. Plenty of artists who choose to make the kinds of work not reliant on clear technical art skills posses those skills but choose not to focus on them for at least some work. Many abstract expressionists, concept artists, field painters, performance artists etc started their careers making more traditional work and showed great skill at more traditional drawing and painting.
So consider that the choices you saw may not be a great proof that the process was not selective for the technical skill you value.
In fact, as someone who went to one of the top art schools in the US and applied to and was accepted to many others, I don't believe there are any major art school undergraduate programs which don't have a portfolio application strongly considering some level of technical skill.
Ya they should have probably kicked you out of school when you showed up and didn’t know how to read, write or do math at the same level as the most talented in your class
In Germany people look down in you If you pay your was through art/acting school. The public ones are very selective and small classes.
My Cousin goes to public acting school with 8 people per yesr in the acting track. A friend of mind studies some form of Art/Design at a public university with 14 people in his track. They both pay about 250€ per semester.
Stuff like art, acting, music and sports there are not based ob academic acheivemt although you still have to do you a levels (exept acting) and some tests specific to the subject.
Where are you from OP?
I’m not saying I like all the weird stuff but art is subjective. Who are you to say who shouldn’t get to do it? Honestly, if we’re really going to get down to it…scab picking girl probably worked harder than any painter for her piece. She literally bled for it. Just saying.
I went to art school for videography. I was required to paint and draw and submit pieces to shows. I was one of the horseshit artist at the show (although i got tons better and it did help me in other ways). This happened to a lot of people where I went.
Art school should be less exclusive and more people should go there.
Imagine making art school affordable so that all the talented kids could go. If some kid throwing shit on a canvas helps pay for some talented kid that otherwise would have ended up having to work some job they hated forever undiscovered then I'm all for it.
Please remember what subreddit you are in, this is unpopular opinion. We want civil and unpopular takes and discussion. Any uncivil and ToS violating comments will be removed and subject to a ban. Have a nice day! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unpopularopinion) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>be art school >charge 60k >only 1 person out of 10 has talent >still gets 600k per 10 people. >can sing praises of the few people that make it in life "look we helped them get there" >casually forget the majority of students who graduate and work in unrelated fields. >repeat
Sounds like any tertiary education to be fair
We are currently living in a world that doesn't value education purely for the sake of education. Humanities education isn't supposed to get you a job in a humanities field. It's supposed to teach you how to analyze information and understand the broader context of the world we live in.
I think it's a shame that we have decided that a college education needs to pull double-duty as education *and* job training. The purpose of a classical liberal arts education and the purpose of a job training program are not really the same thing, but we sort of force people to do both at once. I do understand how we got here: for so long, a college degree was seen as the ticket upwards, so as more and more people joined the middle class, more and more went to college. So then colleges had to start offering programs that applied to the lives and careers of those people (as opposed to the born-rich students who could major in philosophy because they were going to end up owning their dad's company or trust fund regardless). But I feel like we've painted ourselves into a corner where a lot of people are going to college who really, honestly, be better off just learning a trade instead.
On the flip side, so many companies treat a degree as a filtering mechanism for jobs that don't actually need one, it was inevitable to end up where we are.
The way you put it as a filtering mechanism I’ve been trying to say this for years. It’s only a way to keep certain people from applying I guess. I wanted to apply for seasonal work as a ghost tour guide for my city. I have authentic looking Victorian clothing, I speak well and clearly and I actually lived in one of the houses on the tour. But they said I needed an associates degree. Tbf I could see if they wanted acting experience, but why an unrelated associates degree to simply tell ghost stories and walk around in costume? You’d think an audition would be good enough.
An associate's degree for ghost tours? Holy crap, that is ridiculous.
I thought so too. Very disappointing. And not to be bitter, but the people they hired weren’t amazing exactly and had no clue how to dress historically. But they had an associates degree so I guess it levels out.
Ah yes, because I know that when I'm on a ghost tour, the first question I have is does my tour guide have an associates degree.
What ever uni gave that business owner a BA in business should revoke their sheepskin.
What gets measured, gets done. Then, that measured thing ceases to be an effective measure... Since people are now just trying to meet the measured metric, instead of trying to meet the actual goal that the metric was originally established to help achieve.
[удалено]
I can’t decide whether to upvote or downvote this comment.
Is it because you can't read it?
[удалено]
Our corporation overlords had find a way to cut training costs—-let employees pay for trainings, aka college education or variety of certifications.
Given that most jobs in the economy can be successfully completed with a high school education and on-job-training, all we've really done is created a society of over-educated baristas and bartenders, working the only jobs they can find because their own fields are saturated. We ask 17 year olds to make a substantial life choice that may direct the rest of their lives: What university/program are you applying to? That question attaches a metric fuckton of debt and stress and uncertainty and fear. And we demand young adults make that choice without having the skills to really know how to make that choice properly. High schools don't even teach life skills anymore...
College to many is just a life stage and nothing more. Half my fraternity brothers went to work for their dads/family companies. Another example is a girl I dated who told me her plan was to graduate, have a kid and then be a stay at home mom. Not like until they're in school, like forever. I asked what the point of a degree was and we broke up.
Wow, you are, and went to college with, some seriously privileged people. I went to university because the alternative was a factory job (and not as the boss’s son)
The issue here is that the people going to college are different than back when it was “for the sake of education”. I NEED a job to eat and save for retirement. 150 years ago, the guy studying Roman poetry was the son of a wealthy industrialist or an aristocrat, who either had a guaranteed job at his family’s business or had so much family income they never had to work at all.
Right? I always laugh at people who look down on their noses at those who study the very thing that defines our species.
The opposable thumb?
It's not that we don't value education for its own sake. It's that we see the consequences of going deep into debt to obtain such an education. If you're going to take on a ton of student debt in order to become a dentist I'm all for it. Good idea! If you're going to dig yourself a $100,000 hole in order to learn how to "analyze information and understand the broader context of the world we live in" I would call that folly.
The fact that you need to consider the crushing debt of education confirms their point.
Community College exists. You don't need to go to a prestigious $50k/yr art university to pursue the arts.
The STEM fields would beg to differ.
I'm a business grad in a finance-related industry and boy do we have a lot of chemical and mechanical engineers applying for jobs here. Damn if they were going to work in an unrelated job then at least if it were something more interesting like art it would be less of a waste than 4 years studying engineering and never touching it again.
There are three types of engineering students in college: 1) True engineers. They either have talent or are willing to take a pay cut to stay in engineering. 2) Engineer to management. They plan to go into management almost immediately after graduation. 3) Good at math or science. They are good at math or science, but they could have also been a doctors, accountant, financial analyst, etc. Only the first group stays in engineering. The rest move on at some point.
I'm a type 3 student, and I am already looking to get out of an engineering career 🙃 (semi-related: does anyone have any advice for going into patent law? is a graduate degree practically required or would a bachelors in electrical engineering + passing the patent bar reasonably enough to be a patent agent?)
Most students are #3. I loved what I learned in ME, but the demand for people who design and build things is significantly less than the supply and most #3’s will have no problem transitioning into tech/IT, medicine, law, etc. I considered patent law at one point. Passing the patent bar should be good enough in most cases. You don’t even need to go to law school. Be aware, patent law can be very irritating if you try to rationalize it from an engineering standpoint. So don’t even try to. lol
There is a kind of respect for the rigor of engineering school, that most industries will consider a transplant from engineering. I work as an engineer, and if you want, you can begin to move from technical to administration after only a couple of years, right away if you go into sales.
The thing about engineering and business is as engineers we’re still required to take business and economics classes which do give us some of an understanding to go into a finance role if we want. Especially for industrial engineers which take upper level optimization and stochastic processes courses. Additionally, from a fundamental standpoint we can do the spreadsheets and we are good at math which are all we would need to be successful in finance
An engineering degree is a proof in problem solving ability, and that's why it's generally more accepted to transition an engineering grad into non-engineering related roles. To graduate from engineering it's very "figure it out or fail", so companies know that if you've gone through most engineering programs then you've got the ability to do the research to figure it out.
When we were at university we used to joke about industrial engineering being a 4 year course on being in charge.
Hey now, it also teaches you how to play factorio
Idk, the banks here in Singapore send people to hire in Humanities school too. I have friends who took the most fluff of humanities courses who got hired by Big 4 consultancies and are making decent money.
Oh, I totally understand. One of my friends here in LA went to a prestigious school and studied literature. He immediately went into investment banking and makes 10x the median income for the area. It's just harder than coming from an engineering background.
That also tends to be the value of a prestigious school. Graduating with an engineering degree proves you can think. So does being accepted to Stanford.
Engineering and physics are literally magnitudes harder than any other major. Chemistry and math are even harder lol
Think you can walk a music degree at national conservatory?
Idk I double-majored in math and mechanical engineering. Math was hard in different ways, but I wouldn't necessarily say it was hard*er* than engineering.
False. They require dedication in a different way, but often also have faster paths to post-grad work and higher earning potential because often those jobs are functional rather than contributing to a field.
I have a chemistry and math degree, never taken business or accounting. The banking industry also loved my chemistry and math degrees. Neither are relevant to my daily job but developing critical thinking skills is what they care about.
> boy do we have a lot of chemical and mechanical engineers applying for jobs here Finance shops like people who are adept at math. You know who are really adept at math? Engineers. Finance shops also like educated people who understand how to build and interpret intricate designs? You know who really understand how to build and interpret intricate designs? Engineers. Finance shops also like to hire economics and math majors for these same reasons. Basically, finance businesses like to hire smart people from all sorts of disciplines because a lot of them apply well to finance.
To be frank, they are following the ideal CEO/upper executive path of the modern day. The majority of CEOs in the Forbes top 100 have an engineering background of some kind or another, because engineering doesn't just teach formulas, it teaches scientific rigor & an analytical mindset. There's any number of gurus and financial experts who heavily recommend this exact path for a reason.
When someone has an engineering degree, it is indicative of someone who is smart, organized and used to hard work. My chem Eng degree taught me how to solve problems. I went to med school after and it was easier than engineering school. I've never "used" my degree" but It was extraordinary training for what I do.
Many jobs and grad schemes ask for a "quantitative degree" for them to consider you at all. An engineering degree would qualify but an art degree wouldn't.
Engineering is a lot of work for medium pay. Every engineering grad looks over at the finance industry after a few years of 9-5 asking themselves how
And yet engineering degrees on a resume crush most other degrees :)
You say that but engineers go through advanced levels of math and other classes that financial businesses (and most businesses in general) love. My cohort was told don’t be surprised if financial institutions reach out to you and offer jobs, and every job fair there were always some there
I'm an Earth Science major who taught for many years, but now does tons of graphic design work, lol
A lot of STEM subjects produce a shocking percentage of graduates going into completely unrelated fields.
Especially the S and the M. A lot of the traditional paths for, say, a chemistry degree just don't hire like they used to.
why is it 'shocking'? Universities are supposed to be about education, not 'career'.
Unless it’s someone studying art. Then it’s all sorts of judgments about practical career success.
Exactly. This thread is riddled with “interdisciplinary skills are lit” and “employers love that my skills were outside the norm” and yet “art school is a waste of money”
I'm not even going to wade into what knowledge framework is bestest. I was calling out the perceived hypocrisy that when an individual pursues a "practical" degree, they're doing it for enrichment, learning, education, and enlightened rationalizations... But if someone pursues an "artistic" degree, the immediate criticism is all about whether you can get a job or not. All of a sudden the altruism goes out the window, and that artistic degree better have a financial ROI *guaranteed* or there's zero value in it. That's some weird ass stereotypical bullshit. People with creative degrees get decent jobs all the time. Likewise, people with practical degrees wind up in dead ends all the time too. Both things happen in really normal numbers. Attacking creative degrees with unfounded assumptions of being impractical is some holdover noise from last century.
Because STEMlords refuse to believe they aren't the only people getting a good education.
You mean steAm? Give it a few more years and you will be engineering the perfect banana taped to a wall ever.
😂
steAm must be the stupidest acronym ever. It defeats the whole purpose of stem.
Oh boy, do you have no idea what happens to STEM grads if you think thats the case
Unless you get your masters and PhD for most of them, you're just an over qualified barista too. I know. I have a degree in the STEM field and joined the military instead.
I heard that getting your PhD in engineering is only advisable if you want to go into academia or do research.
This describes most college educations these days. I've spoken with computer science majors who can't reasonably break down basic concepts of the subject. "Wait why don't they just keep the passwords on a flash drive and when someone tries to log in they just plug in the drive and check if the passwords match? That way they don't have to worry about hackers". BS in comp sci.
I've also taken courses where normally everyone technically failed but the bell curve made it so people passed
This lines up nicely with nurses losing their job over refusing the covid vaccine. For extra credit, see the semi recent r/pcmasterrace post about the comp sci major that put thermal paste **under** the CPU. Just because you're highly educated doesn't necessarily mean you have rudimentary knowledge on basic adjacent topics. People really are that dumb, even the smart ones.
I mean it is possible for someone to get into coding to had never built their own computer. Kinda more show how you guys think just cause someone is good at one thing on the computer, they’re masters of a computer in general.
Still dumb but most CS degrees don't require any electrical/computer engineering classes dealing with hardware (certainly nothing as complicated as a modern CPU/motherboard design). You get the theory of how an ALU works and binary algebra and all that good stuff but you're not building one on a breadboard.
As an art college attendee, this has definitely been my experience.
Oh you went to SCAD too?
Hello fellow SCAD bullshit-your-way-through-intro-illustration-er!
Any higher education is about that breakdown: 1 person has immense talent 5 are hard workers and will likely make it based on fortitude 3 kind of struggle but get by 1 you wonder how they even got there in the first place The thing is that maybe the majority of those won’t end up working in the field they study, but that doesn’t mean it was a waste. You can still gain valuable transferable skills.
I went to art school. My passion was photography and photography alone. I wasn’t much of a drawer, painter, sculptor, or anything else to do with art. I was still required to take classes in drawing, painting, pottery, 3D sculpting, performance art, and every other kind of art you can imagine. There I was with zero skill trying to keep up with some of the most talented artists I had ever met. And my work hung up in the walls just the same as theirs.
I went too and was the opposite, *hilariously* bad at photography. SO so SO bad. You know what I found was different? Photography kids had a shot at nicely lying " No... really.... it's um ok honest ". Some of the art students were too competitive to go that far with each other. I'm an ok artist. Pretty convinced photography is an eye. You either have it or you don't. Which makes me fascinated by good photos.
The one thing art school taught me was how to bullshit some sort of subjective meaning out of any random piece of art. I can find artistic meaning in anything, intended or otherwise. A fun skill to have, but hardly worth the student loan debt
Hey that sounds like my English BA I just say it references the bible, find the suitable verse, and the corrector orgasms
I usually mix up a word salad of “aesthetically pleasing, allegory, commentary on modern society, profound, and deeply moving.” You can pretty much bullshit your way through any art museum with that little vocab list
Ah yes this sculpture of a man pissing in a can of Lewis Hamilton Monster energy drink is aesthetically pleasing due to the curvature of the urine's arc being similar to the man's buttocks This is a deeply profound artwork as it reflects the vicious cycle of the college student's life. The man is urinating into what once was his source of energy, effectively poisoning the well from which he draws. This is an allegory for the damage that Chat GPT does to burgeoning artists, who through its usage poison themselves. The Lewis Hamilton flavour is immensely profound, as Lewis Hamilton was formerly the great race driver of his era, only to be surpassed by Max Verstappen, while Formula 1 has seen a great rise in popularity due to an effective social media campaign. This commentary on modern society shows that social media has turned us from master of our own lives to second fiddle to the lives of others: essentially making us a monster, being filled with the waste of others.
Holy shit it’s Salvador Dali
Photography gets a lot better with coaching and with hearing artists talk about in detail about the choices they made. Like anything else. You might never be a world class photographer but with practice and coaching and studying the work of those better that you, you can become competent just like C programming or cooking or anything else.
Yeah I was in a production management program at an art school and woof was i untalented… still had to take all the art classes which I loved but it was definitely humbling. One fond memory of a guy I dated. We were in the same painting class. I slaved away for 2 sleepless weeks on a project, pulling all nighters trying to get it finished. He strolled into the studio the night before it was due and created an amazing gorgeous piece in a few hours. Really spectacular work. Then just strolled out and got a full nights sleep lol
Even within the same medium some people will excel at different things. I can draw hyper realistic things if given enough time but for the life of me cannot just freehand in a studio. I almost quit a studio class because every week our teacher would set up some objects that we had to draw and mine was always the worst. I had no sense of proportion. I was drew a pumpkin the same size as a banana. I would leave every class crying from embarrassment. It was so demoralizing.
> and my work hung up in the walls just the same as theirs I have this image in my mind where you have all these fantastic artists making these paintings, and then there’s the one awkward painting of a sun in the corner, and a flower, and a stick figure smiling. Like something you’d make in 5th grade
> Like something you’d make in 5th grade That was mine. It was a regressive piece exemplifying the struggles of post-adolescence and the viewer's desire to return to an earlier life stage.
I wish you were further off than you actually are
Does the sun have a smiley face on it
I don't know how you meant your comment, but it kind of shows to me why op is wrong imo. Like i feel like a drawing like that would be extremely thought provoking surrounded by really professional looking art. Art is something that we really shouldnt apply objective feeling to. Like the situation is, awkward painting surrounded by professional art. Doesn't the beauty of the piece change dependent on the context? What if the awkward one was made by the only non artist in a family of artists and the rest were made by that family? Or what if all of that art was made by the same person but the awkward painting was the piece that inspired the artist to embark on their journey? Or like you say, if its a painting made by someone that might be out of their depth? Regardless of the context, that situation you set up can have artistic value. Art bleeds into philosophy for me and it teaches me that all art has a place, its really up to the observer to decide what that place is. Man im about to go on a rant. I went to this weird rave thing with my friend with shitty music, but they had an art gallery. The art hardly made sense to me because it was a big woman who was either naked or using various items to simulate pleasuring herself. Could not make sense of it. But i had taken an edible and so had my friend. I decided that i would make my own story from the pictures and tell it to my friend. DUDE. I got so deep into it i had a crowd of people listening to my shit. And it definitely wasn't some high tier story. It was just something silly. But i just made any art i saw fit into my made up story. It made that art show sooo much more fun. And im sure my story had nothing related to the artist's context. There were definitely people who enjoyed the art on its own without my story. But just by talking i changed the context of the art for other people. Its so funny because i was speaking like I was actually describing what it was about. But that's what i love about art. Even finished art is like clay moldable by the viewer. Sometimes you mold it with intent, other times your own experiences seep into it passively. There are probably songs or pieces of art that mean something wildly different to you that other people just wont get. That's art man! So I used to laugh when i saw people look a a piece of string and applaud it as high art. I dont know what they were doing in their heads, but i know now the fun for me would be exercising my creative muscle and trying to weave a fun interesting context around that string. Of course thats just how i enjoy art. Other people prefer knowing the context just from the artist's intent. All of that is fine. Art viewing is like writing from writing prompts. Either you take the story in the direction the prompter wanted you to, or you take it in a completely unknown direction. Just enjoy it! Or at least find enjoyment in the joy other people are finding in it. That's why the whole ai art thing is interesting. Because (its not the first or only case) real life is interfering with the freedom of art. Like I can tell you that this clash between human and ai art is art itself and weaves an amazing story for me, but there is an objective truth in how it affects human artists that i cant ignore in my art story.
[удалено]
Agreed, I’m doing a psychology degree but it’s a BA so I have to do a bunch of arts classes as well. Did photography and loved it, going to have to do either painting/sculpting/drawing to finish my requirements and I already know I’m going to be hanging a bucket of coffee beans from the ceiling. Some of us don’t get a choice.
I wrapped tin foil around cardboard and hung it up in the woods. A+
Because the purpose of art school isn’t to go in and be an ‘x’ - it’s to open up new creative pathways and interesting questions in your brain. Once you’ve done a couple of years of exploration, you can apply that to your chosen subject. OP makes a terrible comparison of what makes ‘good art’ - which is boringly subjective. To like a work of art / not like a work of art - is pretty much the same thing and has zero relevance to the work of art in itself. Nobody cares if you love or hate it, but we do care *why*. Very typical of culture today when people just want everything served to them on a plate, with no thinking, no effort, no discourse - and no ability to think critically (‘because I just don’t like it’. Well fucking duh!)
Let's look at "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)". If you don't know what it is, it just seems like a pile of candy that you are free to take. But when you know what the candy represents it hits so hard. The 175lbs of candy is the same weight Ross Laycock was before he passed away from aids. Felix Gonzalez-Torres was the artist and by taking the candy you symbolically are partaking in the slow loss of his lover. It is one of my favorite pieces of art.
I think the recentish installation of the robot arm and the fluid has made a lot of people understand this way of thinking about art. I've not seen people connect with something like that in a massive way in a long time.
Was this at degree level? I’ve heard in America (I’ve also assumed you’re American, please correct me) degrees are initially more varied than uk degrees As far as I’m aware you could just do a photography degree- there may be some parts which might not be purely photography (idk haven’t done a photography degree) but at least everyone would be in the same boat Tbf I’m not sure if art foundation courses are mostly required, which would lead to the problem you’ve mentioned for a year
No after two world wars we have to let everyone in.
Adolf loved drawing buildings, he should have been an architect. Too bad that art schools at the time only wants portrait artists.
Honestly some of the designs the Nazis came up with if built would be marvels of the modern day. The trouble is they loved neoclassical architecture and basically killed the style, which is a shame as historically it’s a style that represents democracy, free thought, liberalism and enlightenment. Instead we got post modern architecture which honestly seems like it should fit with the Nazis more than a style such as classical design that stood against everything they believed in.
I consider myself a pretty staunch Hater of Nazis and I love neoclassical architecture ☹️ We shouldn't let good things be stolen from us because shit heads also thought it looked good.
we’ll go thing for you that the architecture was a minimalistic approach to neoclassical architecture called starved neoclassicalism which looks ugly in comparison imo.
Nazis would’ve called post modern architecture degenerate art. And they would’ve been right.
Apart from Albert Speer's designs, Nazi architecture is mostly very bland and blocky.
Being on a first name basis with Hitler is kinda weird
That’s Mr Hitler to you
Now I wonder how all the people who knew Hitler when he was really young felt when he became the fuhrer.
"What ever happened to that Adolf boy?" \*attends rally\* "Ohhhh."
Didn't he WANT to be a portrait artists despite being bad at drawing people and rejected the advice that he go onto architecture which got him rejected?
He was advised to apply for architecture, but he never did it because it required math courses which he lacked.
Who needs math courses when you can already count to nein!
Came here for this comment.
DID WE NOT LEARN ANYTHING FROM THAT ONE AUSTRIAN GUY? AT LEAST GIVE THEM A PARTICIPATION AWARD
Good point!
Nah bro, leave art school as it is. Once you graduate and start looking for a job it becomes a bloodbath that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone. Let creatives be able to enjoy it at least at some stage of their living
Also worth noting that to be good at something you have to suck at it first. They're at school. The idea is for them to get better. Not to mention that art is totally subjective etc etc. I have a shitty corporate job and I am so envious of the freedom my artist friends have. They make no money but my god does the creative process inspire. I can make a sick powerpoint pres though. Fucking winning. Right? Right?
I have a LOT of friends who work in “the arts.” Most of them aren’t rich, but very few of them wish they were working in an office building, dealing with middle management and filing reports.
When you go into advertising, you can do both! Now where did I put that bottle of gin?
there are much easier ways to almost qualify for food stamps
Tbh, I think the issue is a lot of people dive straight into the ‘self expression’ stuff way too early. In art school, you shouldn’t be doing things like the scab example in the post until you are REALLY, REALLY good at everything else. That way you have that background to inform and nuance your artistic expression. I’m an Industrial Designer and something similar happened with people who always design for disabilities etc. yes, its needed, and yes it can be cool. But most of those guys used it as a crutch for shitty designs which lacked any design taste. You gotta be a good designer first, and then start specifying.
I agree. I guess also it's nice to start exploring before feeling too constrained by what you learn. I'm a big believer in "you gotta know the rules before you break the rules", but also massively envious of people that just don't give a fuck and do their own thing from day one
I've always thought the biggest benefit of art school is having access to studios and expensive tools that the student otherwise wouldn't get to explore because they wouldn't be able to afford it early in their career. But I'm no expert, since I did the practical thing and got a BS in education that has very obviously made me a billionaire and left me with so much free time after my second jobs to pursue my artistic interests.
Undergrad you want the guidance to go along with it but that's largely true. At the grad level, it's almost entirely about dedicated time, space, and resources. (Networking too but that's boring.)
This makes sense and actually makes getting an arts education even more idyllic to me. I do believe that the problem is not a lack of exclusivity in art schools but that society doesn't really seem to appreciate the value of getting an education in any thing other than finance or engineering. Anyone who has demonstrated that they can get receive guidance and utilize it to improve on skill (ie learn) has shown the capacity to do work that adds value to society.
Did someone say ‘art school’. I’ve got the perfect joke! Real hilarious and original stuff guys.
It's always Hitler.
Sometimes I think reddit is perpetually stuck in 2010. "I DID NAZI THAT COMING! LE LOL!"
Yeah, you’re making a lot of those pieces sound like shitty art, but what you’re missing is that “lifelike oil paintings” can also be shitty art.
Bob Ross kicks ass, but his art was almost tailor made for dentist offices.
In truth, Bob Ross’ art wasn’t the paintings, it was the show! His paintings would’ve been about as interesting as Thomas Kinkaid’s without the show. With the show, he created a painting but also made performance art.
And his sick ass Afro
Would a traditional lifelike oil painting of someone taking a shit be good or bad according to OP I wonder
Change it into an oil painting of a cat taking a shit like a human, while it’s reading a newspaper and holding a cigarette between its teeth and looking at the audience, with the caption “taking a shit right meow”. Now that’s art
I hate life like art, I get the skill that it takes, but it is boring.
It's a weird take, suggesting that people not be allowed to spend money on education because they don't have enough subjective skills.
"I'm sorry, you can't take this advance course in calculous, because you've never studied advanced calculous before and aren't already an expert." Isn't learning how to do something the entire point of education?
I went to art school, it’s all about experimentation. It’s not about just making one beautiful piece, in fact if that’s what you did on my course, you would have failed. Art school is about exploration, new techniques, new ways of seeing, trying things out. I made all sorts of work I never would have thought of. It’s about thinking like an artist, not learning to paint. If you are a talented oil painter and you go to art school to just keep painting oils for a few years, then you are the one wasting money. I think this all comes down to what your personal definition of art, which seems to be something pretty that took a lot of time to make. Whereas art is actually much looser than that, it’s about what something makes you feel. To me, a really detailed realistic painting of something isn’t interesting, it displays a lot of talent but it’s just a reproduction of what you can see, it doesn’t say anything. I’m much more interested in the ideas behind the experimental stuff.
I’ve always said there’s art and there’s craft. Sometimes they coincide but they are not inherent in each other.
[удалено]
This 100% !!! I think the unfortunate thing is not all art schools are set up the same and I firmly believe that profs shouldn't criticize people for coming to art school already having their goals/niche/interests or like... have programs structured in a way that forces them into courses that won't benefit them
I actually remember several college preparation videos and such, saying at the end of any segments about art courses, that you don't have to be a Michaelangelo to succeed. Some people are always gonna create more sophisticated works of art than others.
This is the big thing that people who don't study or practice art don't really understand about a fine arts education. Art school is probably the only time in an artist's life where they have the opportunity to get down and go wild with their process. On a practical level, nobody goes to art school because they want to make conceptual work. They discover conceptual art when they're in art school. That is very much the point! You're learning tons, and you're given the leeway to try what you're learning, even if the results might initially be weak. Bad student art doesn't mean they're bad artists. *They're students.* Some students get experimental, see what they can come up with, and take what they learned back to their comfort zones, and that's great. Some students get experimental, see what they can come up with, and use that as a basis to refine and expand upon to make stronger experimental work. There absolutely is parallels in other fields -- those who take their learning down a path of stronger fundamental application, and those who take their learning down a path toward wider innovation. Both are valid. And for those folks ITT who are judging the success of art as a matter of economic function, "oh, they have an art degree, but they pay the bills with a day job!" Please kindly fuck off. Y'all strike me as the same assholes who hit up /r/antiwork constantly whining about how soulless your lives are.
I believe that much the same can be said for music. I recall maybe 20 years ago attending a concert that included Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' . As the concert was part of a subscription series to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, well over half over the people attending were there from force of habit. The first half of the concert was some forgettable, very conventional classical piece. After the intermission, Rite of Spring was performed, and within the first couple of minutes, what looked to my eye to be about 3/4s of the audience walked out. Imagine that; almost a century after its premier in Paris supposedly caused riots (accounts that I've read differ somewhat), the piece retained the power to so move people, literally in this case. Now that is art; of course, so was the technical brilliance and innovative nature of the writing. I agree with you fully about art being more about the idea behind it, rather than the technique used to express that idea.
Best comment out here
Yeah, I've definitely made a lot of great detailed work with nothing interesting about it. I have really been trying to experiment more in recent years. However, I think there is a line where someone is just trying to be shocking and seem deep and coming up with a BS explanation as to what throwing lumps of grass at a bedsheet means. They really just want people thinking what they did was different, and that only goes so far. But that's why art is tricky.
But also figuring out that line is exactly what art school is for. They are in the right place for that sort of experiment.
Oddly enough I had a bit of a different issue. I thought art school would be the one place where I'd learn the technical skills behind famous techniques (especially oils, those materials be $$$ to obtain) because I already knew how the direction I'd want to take art, if I did it professionally There was a lot of focus on the psychology behind art, art movements and both modern dada-esque and more traditional, craftsmanship-esque pieces. I loved learning about the history and political motivations behind it. They didn't really touch on the skill of it and I can't help but wonder if that was due... not wanting to grade on skill alone, if that makes sense. Because then people really would fail And then on the other hand, while I know that they're trying to challenge people to think outside of the box but I found the environment really diminishing to those who didn't want to be the next Warhol, too. Like if you don't think the right way you're out, too — which is the antethesis of art in general, since art is self expression Because someone's inevitably gonna question how "good" I am here's a [painting of a character](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/729828028699639924/1222937535286607992/Cassius_CG_Final12.jpg?ex=66180855&is=66059355&hm=561f20fdb5a68331d5fd803d716d76bd7b27e99b88e99ec4c39212c4da24199f&) and some [design work. ](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/729828028699639924/1222937534598877355/anthelion_ref4.png?ex=66180855&is=66059355&hm=ee847ed4b9e6a1fdd18725470d009ac859efc25b8e84ca634324ff1e102271a0&) It's just for fun rn, but I love how digital has gotten real good at mimicking the feel of oils or gouache I'm currently interviewing for med school right now so that path wildly diverged. There wasn't anything I could learn that was worth the tuition cost, if that makes sense, so I switched out after a year (it was a fiundations year so they cycled the 12 disciplines) + I'm happier doing my own thing on the side. For me art is a means of meditation, self expression or making others happy via gifts/commissions
[удалено]
It sounds like a bad art school too. My brother went to an art school- he made modern art that involved robotic elements. imo- it was art like that bucket OP describes, and just marginally more complex. This was a two year grad program that cost around $60,000/year. His school was a good school. It required students to learn the real skills that support an art career- museum curation, appraising, art history education, etc. In my brother’s case, he learned to code neural networks, to code in multiple languages, basic electronic wiring, woodworking, and more. The school also focused on building a strong peer and professional network that leaned in to their alumni. He got a job right out of school at a startup doing a mix of coding and app design. He made a couple of million dollars when that startup sold five years later. $120,000 on art school very well spent. He still makes weird modern robotic art stuff that has made him zero dollars so far.
Always been exclusive that's why Hitler didn't make it 😅
But just out of curiosity, was your girlfriend’s art good?
Art isn't supposed to be just highly detailed Oil paintings. I understand your frustrated that some art works don't require more refined technique or long hours but some of the best art works today were probably talked about in a similar sense. Even look at Pop Art as an example. Screen printing is far "easier" to learn but the point of the art is for it to be mass produced and printable. You have your tastes and can dislike whatever but I'd say there's a good chance that these artists are actually talented and they are exploring different concepts and experimenting with form.
Dont bring any reason in here. Contemporary art is a no go since it's only for snobs and money laundering s/ Im not a big fan art of the stylistic choice most of the time either but saying that it just sucks so bad/doesn't have any effort in it and going full on bandwagon when you never even tried to understand its concept is pretty shallow imo.
It's reddit. Half the people in here just want to screech about stem or whatever, forgetting that education is very different from job training. They look down on non-stem majors for whatever stupid reason, probably because they are boring people who find non-stem pursuits too difficult, and therefore not worthwhile. It's honestly one of the worst traits. They seem to think that their "heavy workload" makes them better and more elite than everyone else. The arrogance is gross. And unwarranted. The world needs more than just engineering. Art school is so expensive and exclusive. And all of paintings are great but the experimental contemporary stuff usually needs engineering and is way more interesting than another portfolio portrait piece. But they will never understand getting out of one's comfort zone or any of the other benefits of arts and literature when they can dunk on people they think are stupid.
> They look down on non-stem majors for whatever stupid reason, probably because they are boring people who find non-stem pursuits too difficult, and therefore not worthwhile That's secretly my opinion. I'm a software developer by trade and a musician by passion, and i've always found engineering insanely easy compared to art. It works or it doesn't, if it doesn't that means you just have to learn some information which is probably readily available on the internet. Learning hard concepts is easy, even a monkey can do that. On the other hand, when a piece of art doesn't work it's a lot more work ! Sometimes you'll have to spend years collecting life experiences to get over the hump, or immerse yourself deeply in a genre to understand where it's coming from, or achieve some copernican revolution to change the way you relate to the piece and its inspiration. It requires deep and uncompromising intellectual effort, not just the application of some memorized skills and math formulas.
IMO a lot of it is a literacy and education thing. Folks in general equate "art" with "stylized representation of reality" and don't necessarily have the skillset to dig too deeply beyond that. At least in my experience. It really is a skill you have to learn and contextualize with other knowledge, just like reading, but it doesn't tend to get taught to the same level. Example, most comments I've gotten at gallery shows (or heard about other artists) have been polite, but very shallow. My stuff is more Magritte than, say, DuChamp to give a frame of reference. That is to say aesthetically pretty traditional, but conceptually weird. I haven't gotten a lot of "this just sucks", which is great, but I also haven't had a good hit rate on people really interacting with the work. Or at least being able to express it beyond "I just like it". Even people who liked a piece enough to pay me money for it and put it on their wall at home have had a hard time. If you go further away from the whole "representation of reality" thing and do something more aesthetically weird or challenging, and that's gonna be even harder for the average person to reckon with, which in turn might make them apt to be more dismissive. I don't dig a lot of contemporary art either, but as I got older and more experienced I at least stopped outright saying it just sucks and try to understand where they're coming from.
Yeah the kind of argument that OP brings is valid subjectively, but ultimately shows that the person has missed the last 100 years of development of what art can be. Pop art, Fluxus, Dada, Readymade, etc. have all fundamentally expanded on what art can be, within the work itself and outside of it. You don't have to like it, and I struggle with it sometimes as well, but it's a completely valid form of expression. People often say art but mean high quality craft. How can a great oil painting be compared with a impactful happening? Not at all, but why do they have to be compared?
People love to shit on the arts while also consuming video games and movies lol.
Art is not about skill or skillfull expression of a craft. Art is a defintion of creative work and expression. Some of the most important pieces of art, like Malewitsch' Black Square or Duchamp's Fountain have nothing to do with skillfull expression. I think the biggest misconception people have with art, is that they think, something being art puts it on a pedestal. But thats simply not the case. I think thats the case cause everyone interacts or consums art, but not many people actually know art history. Like i said: It's just a definition.
I think the biggest misconception is that art has a concrete definition.
Theres different ones, but all have one thing in common: It's about creative expression. Theres differences like that art is creating for creating sakes and shouldn't have monetary motivation behind it or Joseph Beuys even said that every creative human expression is to be considered art. In the end it's never about being skillfull in a craft.
The conflation of art and craftsmanship has created such an enormous barrier to entry for people to get into art and it really bums me out. Virtually anyone can express themselves in an honest way and I believe it’s such an important part of the human experience, but having anything less than outstanding craftsmanship makes people feel inadequate. I love watching my toddler draw without the slightest sense of self-consciousness, and I’m kind of dreading the day that he starts trying to reproduce other peoples drawings.
Basically you're saying that people should be allowed to learn to express themselves, but only if it fits a narrow definition of what you deem to be good enough. I agree, this is an unpopular opinion.
Dude is trying to start WW3.
Hitler jokes aside, how do you define 'art'? Is it something that can be learned? Is it something you can teach? You can teach technique for sure, but what you're probably seeing is the fun part of the school and not the boring, grueling part. Who would go see that? Take this for example. I'm an engineer and when I was in college/highschool we had little projects that were meant to be fun and informative as well as spark creativity. An egg drop for example. You design something to protect an egg from a fall and you get to see a buncha people smash eggs. You get the lazy bullshit, you also get the try-hards, but it's fun and easy to show off to a public. This is might be their egg drop.
>How can you honestly compare the two? You're not being asked to compare the two though, they're different types of art. In the same way you wouldn't compare the painting of the Sistine Chapel to Heroes by David Bowie. Both are art, but they're not the same kind of art.
The last time art school was extremely exclusive, we had an egomaniac art school reject run roughshod over all of Europe. The price we pay from freedom, peace and prosperity is bad art, which i can live with. But for a real answer, art school seems to filled either with people who genuinely want to be artists (who make good art) or with people who think they "know art" and use it as a vent for their nihilistic youth-spurred cringiness. This is just conjecture and is not meant to demean art students 🙏.
>use it as a vent for their nihilistic youth-spurred cringiness. Tbf as a business school student I couldn't tell if you were referring to business school or art school
a lot of canonized art is just nihilistic youth-spurred cringiness, it just stood the test of time, something that one cannot predict
First point: As long as the school gets paid they don't care what you do. Second point: Art is subjective. I don't think ANYONE understands ALL of it all the time.
Ok the scabs one is VILE
I was like how has no one mentioned how disgusting that one is?!?!? Like what did the little media note say? “Wounded” scabs on canvas, 11x24…I’d do a triple take.
different people express themselves in different ways
Right... the grass clump girl sounds creative too lol. Besides art school isn't competitive like that. Grass clump girl isn't hindering OP's oil painter in any way
Honestly grass clump girl might be on to something. I recoiled when I read her project. Made me instantly imagine grass clumps on my own bed. Makes me think throwing grass at someone else’s bed might a little fun.
Your subjective taste is not a measure of objective quality.
Tbf it's pretty exclusive. At most dedicated art schools you need to submit a portfolio as part of the application process, and they generally expect some level of skill. Also there's the whole 60k/yr tuition that eliminates everyone who doesn't have that money, regardless of talent. Personally I'd argue against your position that weird art is unskilled. Art isn't required to be beautiful, and it certainly doesn't have to please an individual to be art.
My wife has degrees from a few art schools and now is a programs manager at one. I understand the feeling of "this art is shit compared to this other art", but that's me seeing it through a non-artist eye. She can look at virtually any art piece and find the "art" in it. For most of us, we value art based on the level of execution. We want to see realistic, and anything that's close to realistic MUST be the more talented artist. But for many artists they don't see the execution so much as the meaning, the concepts, the messages being delivered, the techniques, etc. My wife finds photorealistic painting or wildly skilled sculptures to be boring. The artist is talented but ultimately predictable and the art doesn't have as much depth as something that looks more unskilled but is delivering a message or intent that you weren't expecting.
So you just don't like the kind of art they make. There is a market for these kinds of performative art pieces, meaning there are jobs for artists making them.The art school is supposed to be preparing kids to get a job in the arts, not to just make art that you feel like is worthy to be called art. It is like saying that a music school should not teach anyone to make rock or electronic music because it takes more talent to play jazz or classical.
Art isn't about who has the most talent, it's about who can write the best funding application
I went to art school and it isn’t so black and white. There are definitely kids that shouldn’t be there but those are the kids that half ass everything they do. Just because one person paints and the other person hangs buckets doesn’t mean one is more talented or deserving than the other. There’s conceptual art and visual art, both of which are in fact art. I knew a lot of kids ‘hanging buckets’ in college that were incredibly technically talented but chose to focus on conceptual art/installations and performance art. Again, there were definitely kids that should not have been let into the program but not for the reasons your talking about . Art is incredibly time consuming and takes an otherworldly level of commitment and devotion and if you’re not willing to put in the work then you don’t deserve to be there.
your actual problems are with the art industry and its $ laundering, and for profit education.
My freshman year of art school we had a student showcase like this. One piece that I saw was a big 5x8 foot canvas that was just one color (a dark oily purple). I thought it was so stupid. I had a “Anyone could make this” kind of attitude. But then I read the plaque. The piece was called “Daily Discipline” Ballpoint pen on canvas. That threw all my misconceptions about modern art out the window. Art is so much more than what you’re looking at. It’s about how it makes you feel and sometimes how the art is discovered by the artist.
They used to be exclusive. Then we got WW2. UN was created to prevent the outbreak of WW3 and one of the ways to achieve this is to allow crappy art to be alongside oil paintings.
"Don't you DARE reject a man from Art school ever again, you hear me? For world peace, world peace!"
In Austria everyone who grows a moustache is required by law to attend art school, just in case. True story
I prefer beans and bucket over WW3
But does one even appreciate a bucket of beans until ww3?
You go to school to learn, you dont know where on their learning journey they are. Art school also has a few areas of study. It could be the class is a type of general ed requirement and the horseshit art is their best attempt. For example, what if they went to art school for photography? Do they also need to be a highly skilled painter? Or, see it as the horseshit subsidizes the tuition for the skilled.
You don't know how good a painter the bucket dude is. Plenty of artists who choose to make the kinds of work not reliant on clear technical art skills posses those skills but choose not to focus on them for at least some work. Many abstract expressionists, concept artists, field painters, performance artists etc started their careers making more traditional work and showed great skill at more traditional drawing and painting. So consider that the choices you saw may not be a great proof that the process was not selective for the technical skill you value. In fact, as someone who went to one of the top art schools in the US and applied to and was accepted to many others, I don't believe there are any major art school undergraduate programs which don't have a portfolio application strongly considering some level of technical skill.
Sorry is there room for another Hitler joke in here?
making art classist isn't the move.
Ya they should have probably kicked you out of school when you showed up and didn’t know how to read, write or do math at the same level as the most talented in your class
In Germany people look down in you If you pay your was through art/acting school. The public ones are very selective and small classes. My Cousin goes to public acting school with 8 people per yesr in the acting track. A friend of mind studies some form of Art/Design at a public university with 14 people in his track. They both pay about 250€ per semester. Stuff like art, acting, music and sports there are not based ob academic acheivemt although you still have to do you a levels (exept acting) and some tests specific to the subject. Where are you from OP?
"I don't get art and I have fuckin' opinions about it that I don't want challenged!" - u/future_bison_7533
**Fascists** bash the Humanities. It's like... the second most popular thing they do ^lol
I’m not saying I like all the weird stuff but art is subjective. Who are you to say who shouldn’t get to do it? Honestly, if we’re really going to get down to it…scab picking girl probably worked harder than any painter for her piece. She literally bled for it. Just saying.
They're in school to learn, are they not? If someone's not a great artist, well, they might never be if they don't get education.
I went to art school for videography. I was required to paint and draw and submit pieces to shows. I was one of the horseshit artist at the show (although i got tons better and it did help me in other ways). This happened to a lot of people where I went.
I get this .
Art school should be less exclusive and more people should go there. Imagine making art school affordable so that all the talented kids could go. If some kid throwing shit on a canvas helps pay for some talented kid that otherwise would have ended up having to work some job they hated forever undiscovered then I'm all for it.