[pure-silver] Re: (NOT!!!) Photographic Words Of Wisdom
- From: Tim Daneliuk <tundra@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:58:41 -0600
On 12/10/2012 04:22 PM, Ivan Shukster wrote:
Bob
What a load of non-crap in your posting. :) I have taught non photographic
topic at college level and my wife fine art at several colleges and one
university Plus we ran a commercial fine art gallery/ gift shop/ nature
store.
In every thing that I am self taught I have only learnt either what I needed
to learn or what I wanted to. In a structured school learning environment
one must also learn other things which may or may not interest you but make
you a much more rounded and educated practitioner in your field.
My wife is trained as a print maker so she does take issue with the limited
print field where the prints are large runs of reproductions of work done in
other media such as paintings.
Ivan
Professional student and Ph.D. dropout here (happily)....
At the risk of offending ... I too have taught university of a part time
basis, though not photography. The academy these days is a fairly
unimpressive undertaking. I have seen the product of the
various art schools around the country and I'm frankly not much impressed.
Schools like Columbia get students to shell out well north of $100K so
they can go work as PAs for minimum wage. If they actually learned
something as PAs that moved their careers forward, it would be one thing,
but this rarely happens. PAs just end up being cheap labor to set things
up and clean up messes for the most part. In the end, a good many grads
have to go learn to do something else for a living because their
verrrrrry elite art school teachers told them that "real" artists
don't do commercial work.
I have also seen shows by these art professors and most of them - there are
few exceptions - are bad bordering on horrible. They absolutely could not
make a living with their "art" and - I'm guessing here - ended up teaching
rather than practicing the craft. The truth is that if they were as good
as they think they are, they'd be making a living as artists, not peddling
false hope to students.
As to compensation. Price is a measure of scarcity. Absent market
manipulations
like limiting editions to try and artificially keep prices up, prices
tend to gravitate toward market value ... how rare the object in question
is relative to the demand for that object. That is as true for art as it is
anything else. And there's the rub ... most humans can make some level of
art that they find satisfying. A good many of them can even do it well enough
to get other people to buy their stuff. It doesn't matter that it fails to
meet the high and mighty arty criteria of the art school instructor, the fact
is - whether anyone likes it or not - there is a far, far, far larger supply
of photographers than there is demand for their work, and THAT is why prices
are- and will remain low. Contrast that with, say, a symphony level violinist
where there is a much smaller pool of talent and (relatively) more orchestral
demand. That's why "art" photographers do other stuff to sustain their first
love and good violinists make six figures. It's simple economics.
Finally, as to the merits of the academy. There is certainly a place for
formally learning the technical aspects of any artform and the schools mostly
seem to do this well. You just don't need to got to Eastman or Columbia to do
it,
you can get most of what you need from a good community college for much less
than
$25K/year. The rest of what is taught in the art academy is ... yawn. Art is
a reflection of the worldview of the artist. When a significant percentage of
the faculty is filled with commercially failed artists, you see them
transmitting a very
dark worldview and and an embittered sense of entitlement. The students would
be better served to learn craft and then go live their lives richly to
inform their worldview. THAT produces wonderful art.
Yes there are exceptions. Yes, there is fine faculty. Yes, there are part time
professors that are full time artists who are superb. But - on average - the
artistic
aspirant, IMHO, would be better off spending a year or two in community college
and
take the remaining $100K or so to travel, shoot, practice, repeat, until they
fall
over.
In the immortal words of the great jazz guitarist Joe Pass (who never went to
Julliard but likely gave master classes there): "Don't play scales kid. Play
tunes. You'll get more girls that way."
P.S. Outside of classical musicians, I cannot think of too many of the great
artists of history - past or present - that got that way by going to
art school.
P.P.S. In fairness, the academy broadly has become an education scam in far
too many disciplines. The glut of Ph.Ds produced during the draft
avoidance era, meant that they needed students themselves if they were
going to be employed. So, they sold the culture the myth that you
must have a degree to be a successful person - tell that to my plumber
that makes $80/hr. So, the university system more-or-less became
a refuge for the draft dodgers of the 1960s/70s which led to a glut
of teachers and then students - many of whom had no business being
there.
To make everyone happy, lots of ridiculous and generic majors were
created
so anyone could get a degree. The results were predictably awful across
the entire academy. If you want to see just how truly awful things have
become, I *HIGHLY* recommend Roger Kimball's "The Rape Of The Masters"
which
is flatly the best book on art criticism I have ever read. He just
SKEWERS
the academy...
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