Having an MFA doesn’t make you an artist

Love it! Your segment in bold is so true, and important to remember.

When I was deciding on an advanced degree, I looked at several MFA programs.  Things I didn’t like:

-I looked at several slide shows of graduate work and it was kind of a lot of dismembered doll paintings and blocks on the floor.  I felt like someone like me, who loves color, humor, and beauty, would not fit it.  Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a problem except ...

-All but one of the schools I looked at had some sort of internal competition in the structure:  faculty gets to pick who gets coveted TA positions to help pay for school, and who gets a private studio their second year (often that was just one or two spots.) 

So I got the MEd instead.  I decided that I wanted to do something joyful and constructive with my creativity.

I’d go further. I think your BA (And I have one in painting)is BS. It makes me physically sick to think of PNCA (I went and got a BA, too).
It does NOT make artists! I’m recovering from what I heard there. I wont say learned there ‘cause besides some illustration classes(where crap was called crap and you couldn’t get away with laziness), I was taught nothing!
I vaguely remember my peers non-stop praising(totally fake) each others lame work (mine was lame,too)during critiques.
And teachers who are good artists but crappy teachers, throw out some random words here and there about my paintings.

And now MFA’s! Pathetic.

But be careful constructively criticizing these things. They even like and need that kind of attention, too.
Just Fuck Them and forgive me for not being polite. It’s hard to when I was young and trusting and now give them a chunk of my paycheck every month (And have for years).

So…

What next? degrees in snowboarding?!
Who are your favorite music groups?
Do any of them have Masters?

Thanks for writing about the elephant in the room.

I hope some poor fan of yours reads your blog and thinks twice before blowing his parents or his own future money on this “pyramid scheme”.

Just stumbled across a delightful video of a Mike Daisey performance which talks about how artists who are trained in schools tend to retreat into academia.  At around 3 minutes the rant about the ivory tower begins, and it culminates in this very funny bit:

“And, increasingly, people who teach people theater have never acutally worked in theater.  In a couple of generations, no one who is teaching will have been taught by anyone who worked in the acutal theater, and the entire enterprise will dissolve into a kind of intellectual mist that will have no connection to the kinds of things that are happening in this room tonight.”

Dave Hickey has famously commented on art professors. I’m closely paraphrasing but…

“And what are they going to teach you to make? They’re going to teach you to make 89 Dotson’s. If they’re a little older, maybe an ‘85 Dotson. If they could make an 89 Mercedes they’d be in New York… So you’re going to come out here, into this meatgrider of a market with your ‘89 Dotson’s? I mean do you have any idea how suicidal that is?! ... And you graduate with a quarter of a million dollars in debt, you can’t go to the beach and smoke dope - You’ve gotta work in a fucking Apple store… I mean, you’re gonna take all your parent’s hard earned money… [for an art degree] and [also] trade it for some dump in Brooklyn? That’s. Stupid.”

I think a general classical education, which teaches critical thinking, history (AKA: Mistakes-Someone-Else-Made-So-You-Wouldn’t-Have-To) writing, literature, art and sciences, is essential to being truly educated and capable as a citizen. And these days you don’t necessarily need a college to give that to you.

But art school? Take some private studio lessons from good, working, professional artists. Then go out and DO it. The last thing someone who wants to pursue any kind of dream should do is accumulate debt.

Debt = death for your creativity and freedom. That certainly includes higher-ed. In fact, at this point I’m not sure I’d recommend going to college at all, certainly not for a full 4 years.

An MFA isn’t worth it for the vast majority of people. The only exception is if you’re getting paid by a school to be there and you can get time to work on your own thing. That’s smart.

I had a writing/English instructor who said: “There are very very few successful fiction writers who have English degrees. If you’re taking this class to be a successful novelist, drop the class and write until you go blind. Then edit until you throw up. Then take a short break and do it all again.”

True for art too.

So true!

I’ve always maintained I don’t have enough angst to be an artist. Just a lowly B.A. and some space in a gallery to sell my not-art. 

I believe most advanced degrees are part of a pyramid scheme.  I wish someone had told me about Vocational School when I was in high school, maybe I’d be a welding non-artist!

There does seems to be a serious lack of educating about educational possibilities that happens.  It’s so unfortunate!  Also, while I don’t regret my BA, I do wish there had been more practical training offered—stuff that would benefit students in any major like résumé writing classes and the like.