The OC on Art:
The conceit that seems to be taught in fine arts departments all over America is that if you have little or no audience, it just means you’re too far ahead of the curve. “After all,” they routinely say in music, “Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was booed at its premiere.” But no one ever seems willing to consider the other alternative.
Has our society in fact produced an unprecedented number of Stravinskys, or just a lot of self-indulgent jerk-offs? I know which way I’m betting.
Having hired a number of people who have been through Art School, I find the entire scam to be hilarious. Throw out the carrot of lucrative grants that are slightly more likely than winning lottery tickets, get unbearably pretentious morons to pay for something that none of the grand masters ever required, and leave them totally unemployable upon graduation. As an award-winning cruelty artist, I can only applaud this ruthless destruction of the spirit of some of the planet’s most annoying people.
Most art school artists I’ve met are frauds. I can’t tell you how many artists wanting to go into game art would show you a portfolio that didn’t have a single halfway-competent drawing in it, or anything that looked competent in any medium, except for the requisite 3D models built by someone else that they’d incompetently rendered with unsuitable textures. I found it particularly amusing when I could identify the model they’d downloaded from one of the public catalogs.
Art school is, like the lottery, little more than a tax on being stupid.