April 2012
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October 2011
44 posts
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Art School Culture: Fake It 'Til You Make It.
Art school people, like hipsters, exist in a realm where one constantly walks the fine line of irony and earnestness. Being popular yet esoteric is extremely difficult, but it’s essential to your social success! First impressions can make or break you in the hierarchy, and the best preparation is to do your homework before attending any exhibition/class/party. Here’s a few...
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Introduction To Ceramics.
Art School ceramics students primarily learn the craftsmanship of the ancient art of pottery. They will work primarily in the teacup and bowl genre. Ceramics exhibits are usually very minimalist and the artists present these teacups as art, rather than what they really are: vessels that are sometimes fancy. For many, clay tiles are about as abstract as it gets.
Sometimes a renegade ceramics...
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Fine Art Photography 101: Making A Pinhole Camera.
One of the first assignments given to fine art photography students is to construct a pinhole camera, a simple instrument used to take blurry photographs. Some cameras are very simple; others quite elabourate. Popular art class pinhole subjects include:
nudes outside in some field, industrial site or abandoned colliery
cemeteries (usually angel statues)
dead plants
buildings (usually old...
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Handling The Press.
If you are at an art school within a large university, you have an uphill battle to fight. You likely have poor funding, and are the object of much ridicule from more “serious” schools of thought or vocation. Engineers love to jeer at art students, saying they’ll never get real jobs. (They’re mostly right.) English majors are sympathetic to artistic temperaments, but are smug in their writing...
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Quotes From Actual Art Students.
“I don’t think that art can be taught. You can tell the difference between someone with the creativity that can adapt their medium to their vision and those who regardless of medium have no vision to apply it to.” - Anonymous
“I actually go to an Arts Academy. And there are about 50 students. AND SO MUCH DRAMA. I want to vom all over the place. Don’t get me...
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"Experimental" Photographers
A relatively persistent phenomenon of photography is the “re-discovery” of plastic lens film cameras. Once relegated by previous generations as “crappy,” Generation Y has adopted them as their belligerent statements that beauty comes in all formats. Most have also grown up not knowing the joy of chemical processing; the rich tang of vinegar as toxic fixer goes down the drain, so...
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Correct Artist-Adverb Usage When Describing...
Picassoesque
Pollockesque
Calderesque
DeKooninglike
Saarlike
Krasneresque
Jeff Wall-ish
Beuysian
Kandinskian
Gottlieb-y
Foucaultian
Greenburgian
Mondrianian
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Big No-Nos Art Students Make.
Eating in or around the fume hood.
Assuming the garbage in the cans in the drawing studio is still edible.
Wasting your perfectly good everclear as a solvent.
Using food containers to mix paint thinners.
Not adjusting the easel accordingly.
Getting hair tangled in the horrific cage sculpture they’re making.
Not making sure a work area is properly ventilated.
Dumping toxic chemicals down...
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Art School As Religion.
Although most art students traditionally identify themselves as “Buddhist,” “agnostic” or “atheist,” most fail to observe the similarities between art school and places of worship. In reality, the religious “world” and the art “world” are quite similar. As Roman Catholics have CCD class and Jewish scholars study the Torah and Islamic pupils pour over the Koran, art students devote their lives...
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How To Be Taken Seriously As A Photo BFA.
Carry around an enormous box of equipment wherever you go. By doing so, you can be counted on to have all of the necessary equipment on hand for those “spontaneous moments.” Carry around a garbage bag to change your 4x5 magazines. Keep a detailed journal of everything you photograph, including small test prints, quotes from your favorite photographers, and mindless doodles. Obsess...
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What Is The Difference Between Artists and...
You will most certainly encounter professors that insist the field of illustration is more commercial, which relegates it to an undesirable status in the Art Hierarchy, just above comic books and just below performance art. These are, however, the same professors who insist you draw endless still life tableaux, nude models, and “gesture” exercises until you get the proportions correct and can...
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Getting To Know Your Professor.
Art school tends to be a bit more laissez-faire about student-teacher relationships. A blind eye is turned to otherwise damaging situations because the old credo, “Life Imitates Art,” applies to their personal lives. Bad professors take advantage of students at every turn. They think nothing of sleeping with students, stealing their ideas, usurping jobs from students, giving students drugs,...
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What To Expect From Beginning Classes.
Think of your core classes an art school boot camp, in which you are handed a series of tasks with the expectation that you competently complete them, but with no real purpose. You will slave over these meaningless assignments for weeks, wondering why you are wasting your time, worrying that failure to reach the goal of the assignment will lead you to another major. This is the weeding-out...
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Must-Have Accessories For The Art Student.
Ironically kitschy glasses
American Apparel hoodies
Moccasins
Asymmetrical hair
Dreadlocks
Facial piercings
Op Art patterns
Skinny jeans to show off your malnourished legs
Dresses over leggings
Jeggings
Those braided hippie forehead things
Batik
Pashmina scarves
Ironic band t-shirts
Chuck Taylors
Beaded hemp necklaces
Owl stuff
Shrink plastic Etsy jewelry with nautical themes
...
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Which Art School Should You Attend?
There are assloads of art schools out there, and each one considers itself the most important art school. It’s not clear what the reasoning is behind this assertion, but it largely has to do with: superstar faculty (Tim Gunn - Parsons: The New School), superstar status (Art Institute of Chicago) superstar alumni (The Talking Heads - RISD; John Flansburgh - Pratt). Would you rather...
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