Can They Paint Or Not?

I'm always surprised at how many aspiring artists just seem to just do random things and hope that someone will see something in it that they themselves didn't have the wit to put there - the deliberately obtuse and jargon heavy press-releases are very useful to hide this lack of ideas. I remember my girlfriend saying that a lot of wannabes just do something crap and believe that what makes it art is the fact that they are an artist. Of course, the reason that they are an artist is because they make art. Still, ninety percent of this stuff gets exactly the recognition that it deserves and promoting it is surely a joyless task that leaves you feeling empty inside so I can't get too worked up about those who choose to follow this path.

it is mindblowing. ive got a mate who went art school and hed drag me along to these things and every time my jaw dropped in astonishment.... you studied at art school for THREE YEARS, you did nothing but study art for three whole years and this is the best you can come up with.... i would then make my excuses and leave while they drank bottled lager and exchanged air kisses. if you have never been to this sort of thing you cannot begin to imagine who amateurish it all is...

A few years back I attended the end-of-degree exhibition put on by the students from the art school of the university I was studying at, and it was all a bit meh. I mean, there were a few good things, but most of it was pretty so-so - as people have mentioned already, some of it was trying to make facile points, some of it seemed to have been made in such a way that invited the viewer to project their own 'meaning' onto something that was, in and of itself, largely meaningless, and much of it was executed without a great deal of skill. I dunno how highly regarded the art school itself is, but the university as a whole generally ranks in the UK's top half-dozen.

Rich, I've a feeling Louise might have seen the same show, you could ask her about it...or were you there yourself? Can't remember.

i graduated from art college about 4 few years ago and even then it seemed that most of the people having interesting ideas and had the work ethic to go through with them were choosing to go into graphics/art direction/embroidery multimedia etc. i agree that a lot of those in 'traditional' fine art were of the idea that as an 'artist' they could put out any toss and let it 'ask questions'. the way art direction etc is taught these days allows the freedom of expression of traditional fine art but also allows the posibility of a job other than working in a crummy gallery so a lot of less privilidged folks go that way

straight said:

i agree that a lot of those in 'traditional' fine art were of the idea that as an 'artist' they could put out any toss and let it 'ask questions'.

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Haha, yes - or 'challenge perceptions', that's always a good 'un.

Lot of these guys need to brush up on their art history and technique, innit. I know more about art history than most art-studes I've met and that's just from reading various articles online and a couple of Robert Hughes books.

People decide they want to be something because they like the sound of it, rather than because they've shown aptitude for it in the first place or have any amazing ideas.

I find that in the conceptual art debate, i just think both sides are wankers.

I don't mean you lot in this, btw

In the 1950s the historical avant-garde entered into a state of profound crisis. The dilemma to which it fell victim may be diagnosed as follows: so dependant had it become on elements of shock, provocation, scandal, and rupture that, once these techniques had been routinized, they too would become new artistic conventions. In essence, newness itself had become traditional: it became a new aesthetic canon, acheiving a bourgeois respectability that would have anathema to its original partisans. For quite some time now, it has no longer been unusual - it has even become de rigueur - to see nonfigurative images adorning the offices of corporate presidents. One of the first to note the co-optation of modernism was Lionel Trilling, who, rather than abet the domestication of the modernist challenge, refused to teach it in university seminars. Compounding the avant-garde's identity crisis is the fact that its central principle of construction, montage, would become the standard modus operandi of the advertising industry. In its attempts to compel the audience to recognize the pseudo-uniqueness of its wares, shock-effects would become one of its staples. In sum, the historical avant-garde seemed threatened with normalization and obsolescence from both above and below. For all these reasons, Hegel's controversial thesis concerning the "end of art" would seem once again to have become extremely topical.

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'Kulchur Wars: The Modernism/Postmodernism Controversy Revisited', Richard Wolin, Labyrinths - Explorations in the Cultural History of Ideas

But, really, the art colleges have always produced shit, haven't they? From where I come from (the 80s), we just used to laugh at people who wanted to go to art school, and after having been recently - I thought I was an adult now, and that my predjudices were out of the way - just all of my scepticism was totally confirmed. The only real reason to go to college shows is to see what you can nick.

I can go on about this for hours but I think the best example was meeting a guy who'd been on a curation course at Goldsmiths and him talking about a performance piece he'd seen recently and I was like 'oh really? what was that like?' and he went 'well, it was a form in a space' and I was like 'BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA'.

Hahaha...

mistersloane said:

I can go on about this for hours but I think the best example was meeting a guy who'd been on a curation course at Goldsmiths and him talking about a performance piece he'd seen recently and I was like 'oh really? what was that like?' and he went 'well, it was a form in a space' and I was like 'BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA'.

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"Is not finished.....

....is finished."

I went to art college as an older student and it was a fucking sick joke. Can you believe I actually thought it was supposed to be about working in a 'stimulating environment that encouraged experimentation'?

Oliver Craner deleted a post about how the tutors are mostly crap and that was certainly true in my experience. If you wanted to actually get good marks on stuff you had to tick boxes and basically not create any extra work for them like having to think about or engage with what you were doing. Either that or they wanted to mould the younger students into tiny versions of their shrivelled, creatively barren selves, and/or fuck them.

So yeah, lots of kids go to art school and probably shouldn't but they also get bullied and coerced into doing a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with them. I saw the whole process crushing the potential for originality and self belief out of the more vulnerable ones. Group critique sessions that were more like some kind of cult indoctrination process, turning people round to the accepted way of thinking. And sure enough the ones that went down far enough were the ones that got all the resources for their shows and so on.

I think the tutors had to respect me because I wouldn't buy their shit, but constantly getting up their noses didn't do me any favours in terms of erm, grades. And good because the criteria for what they wanted were utterly rotten and stagnant. Walked out one day and never looked back.

"Haha, yes - or 'challenge perceptions', that's always a good 'un."

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Yeah, like Stallabrass said - each artwork challenges and smashes conventions which are conveniently back in place for the next artwork to do exactly the same thing.

"If you wanted to actually get good marks on stuff you had to tick boxes and basically not create any extra work for them like having to think about or engage with what you were doing. Either that or they wanted to mould the younger students into tiny versions of their shrivelled, creatively barren selves, and/or fuck them."

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Yeah, my girlfriend started a course at The Whitechapel and it sounds as though your experience mirrors hers - difficult questions were avoided or fudged rather than addressed and the whole thing seemed to be about bullshit. One of her tutors is actually a pretty famous artist (or artists) now and was fairly successful then.

Edit: should probably stop starting all my sentences with "yeah".

IdleRich said:

One of her tutors is actually a pretty famous artist (or artists)

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Would that be Bob and Roberta Smith, by any chance? I remember Louise thinking the name thing was really cool, but I'm not sure it isn't just pants-wettingly pretentious...

noel emits said:

So yeah, lots of kids go to art school and probably shouldn't but they also get bullied and coerced into doing a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with them.

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I lived with someone who was a fantastic technical draughtsman and painter- really enviably good, but he had little visual imagination. he could only really do life drawing. his talent needed some encouragement, even moulding.

after 6 months of artschool he was doing all this shit with mince in perpsex boxes

it was "about consumerism" IIRC

noel emits said:

Either that or they wanted to mould the younger students into tiny versions of their shrivelled, creatively barren selves, and/or fuck them.

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Two good reasons to become an art teacher

i reckon the standard of undergraduate art would be so much better if the tutors gave them much less freedom. For each Degree Show, they should set them a really specific theme, like 'Paint a picture of a tree', and see them try and do something interesting with it.

but, uh, that might just be my inner stalinist coming out.

i did see a really good piece at a degree show once though- a painting called 'God's Sneeze'; little butterflies and beetles and flowers covered in mucus-y gunk.

The thing is simon, in the situation I found myself in, if you did anything interesting or tangential with a given remit at all you would basically get all kinds of shit. It was incredibly lazy, I think most of the course leaders had just been there too long and lost any drive to do anything but meet a few quotas and cling to their tenure.

The OP was about post-grad shows though I think? There's no excuse for that.

incidentally, what do people think is the ratio of art-school graduates- to non-graduates in the commercial artworld in the UK? my impression is that you have to be have to art school to make a living out of your art, but that's just from anecdotal evidence.

it'd be sad if you have to go through all this institutionalised wankery to earn money from your art (I mean, how many authors did creative writing at uni?)