Errkal wrote:I was serious about the attitude of people I've experience that have gone through art stuff.
As I said there is obviously a lot of learning that goes on about history and whatever else which GG seems to have ignored to make a longwinded post.
However, from my experience there is an arrogance that comes across with some people and that go through it that their art is more important than anything else that leads them to lean on others because they couldn't possibly support themselves as it would compromise their art.
Thats a generalisation and isn't the case for all people certainly but it is something I have seen from some people I know.
Just to reiterate so it is obvious I understand their is more to art schools that painting and stuff I'm not a strawberry floating idiot, my point was about the attitude of some art school people that art and stuff is the most important thing and so they are to be revered and treasured because of it.
I'm going to reply to you because I respect you, or I wouldn't. And ignore the part implying that I like to waste my time posting whataboutery, rather than genuinely trying to fill you guys in on mistaken assertions where you don't really have a full picture as I see it. If that's a waste of mine or anyone else's time, oh well, I tried.
First of all I'd ask you to understand that my ranting comes from being the subject from a lot of people over many years (right from when I was a kid, like career councilling, and my dad telling me art isn't a viable career, telling me to give up etc) of what you're talking about, generally asserting "art people" are generally disagreeable self-important asshats who are wasting their and everyone else's time and money. It gets pretty exhausting over time. Imagine if you had to fairly often (or choose not to and just quietly seethe instead) explain why what you do, and how you came to do it, is useful in some way ("but you just spend time punching characters into computers! It can't be that hard if you take so many breaks!" - I'm sure you have, actually, had this, but probably not as frequently as I have from "competing", worthwhile careers according to government targets, curriculum changes, yadda yadda - and probably none of the contractual and payment abuses rife in this sector).
"a lot of learning" is fairly unspecific which is why I gave some examples, and history is a relatively small component of
any academic subject at all - because stuff happens in the past, and affects the future, obviously. If you had visited a good art course's facilities (like an entire campus) you would find a plethora of industrial machinery and production equipment which people learn to use to make the things they read and draw pictures about. That's technical skill, it is learnable and teachable with methods taught over many centuries. Things like ironmongery, welding, glass-blowing, ceramics, carpentry, developing photographs, building websites, laying out magazines, printing posters, sewing clothes, editing films, building interactive displays, building levels in video games - things that still exist in the market to name a few.
You speak about "something I have seen from some people I know" but I think it's fairly clear from the way you've structured your two posts that it's about your spouse's cousin, a relatively distant relative who you don't seem to like very much (describing them as a freeloader). I bargain that you're conflating the behaviour and attitude of a freeloading narcissist with an entire discipline which is, ridiculous, you must know that? And it's going to tick people like me off, and others you hopefully don't seem to think that little of, along with totally random, culturally-ingrained digs like Laga's, who's said the same lazy thing a few times before (In certain industries and classes of society - "art school" was for a long time where "stupid" and "lazy" students were sent because they wouldn't do anything else, rightly or wrongly - so it is literally a common form of classism to describe people as wasteful and thick-headed by opting to do what elitists consider a "pointless" X course. The famous example being John Lennon). That's because I and many other people I know do work their arse off to make a success of the skills they have invested time in developing, not overnight, and not smothering over with bullshittery if I didn't have those skills - like your cousin-in-law probably does.
Wouldn't you understand that this group you're talking about is
more than familiar to someone who has
actually been to an art college (university, so about 4000 students)? This is first hand information. I once saw some hopeless bint retake the first year four times in a row by the time I had graduated on the same programme, and her work really was
utterly dire, by which I mean she was just
useless and barely did any work. She could barely string together a coherent sentence to explain the random lopsided, poorly developed Polaroid-a-likes she hung on the wall. Suffice to say, it isn't just a walk in the park. You have to support most of what you do with droves of research (I'm talking box files / lever arch files each semester, for 50% of your grade - not including essays/dissertations). The pompous banana splits with no original ideas, echoing philosophy/critical theory from the handful of books/lectures they showed up to, to justify their own existential crises and absence of originality of any kind - and also the types who just produce volume and volume of the same boring pretentious gooseberry fool for three entire years, honestly don't come out top of the class, they barely scrape the equivalent of a "C". But you can't and won't know that, because you weren't there. I have met loads of people like that, and they were an embarrassment;- everyone knew they were gooseberry fool (including the ones that got first class theory marks but had terrible artwork), actually we'd tell them they were gooseberry fool because group criticism is (a fairly brutal) part of art school. So just trust a brother on that, yeah? Your cousin sounds like a dumbass, no offence. That shouldn't slight an entire discipline. Maybe we have different ideas on whether schooling and people actually doing it are or need to be intrinsically connected but, well, in most cases they are. It's pretty well proven that if a child isn't given art materials and encouraged to play with them, or given further reading or reference or whatever, they probably won't blossom into a professional artist/designer/whatever, to go on to make films, or products, or games or paintings or anything. But that doesn't mean they couldn't have. Or shouldn't have. That goes to parenting and how we raise individuals in society, what kind of roles we need to fill, which is a different subject.
I honestly give you credit when I say, I don't believe you are asserting an idea that
all or even
most people that choose to learn a subject covered by the arts (including some science / split disciplinary subjects), are pompous, overly-aggrandising wankers, or what I was saying about art not just being painting/unmade beds or "ideas" about art, is lost on you. That would be ignorant, and I don't consider you an ignorant or stupid person. And if you or Laga do believe that, why shouldn't another individual like myself be mildy upset by that? Because it is taking the piss, StayDead defense or not (nice try Laga, you posted the same old boring business school / compsci grad asshattery I've read a billion times with nothing to back it up, because it's a cheap target for technocratic elitists to feel more important then those art school dropouts).
That's why I get frustrated, because it's peddling an amusing little narrative that undermines the importance of education, and is necessarily judgemental, something I find distasteful in any discourse whatsoever. Because it helps nobody, especially not the people that take their discipline seriously and try to use it to improve the lives of others. I have the same disdain for -isms, classism and such, it is just academic instead - the irony being, it echoes self-importance to diminish the meaningfulness of other's time spent giving or receiving instruction or guidance in whatever. I don't see the point. Let people revel in discourse for whatever subject they want; it's the individual concerned that determines their success in life, and the value they (and society) gets from it. You'll find idiots (or intellectual arrogance, which is just as bad) in every subject known to man, as well as (worse in my opinion) people who just read and spit out passages in books (something you can let Google do), all sapping invention, creativity from the potential pool of talent we need to make the world better.
Drummy, I apologise, I updated my post to be less twattish. I've been triggered, and I don't care, because I feel it needs saying, and I think that's OK.
