Ten from the Top: things I could tell non-art students
Ten from the Top is the weekly column of the very honest and often snarky thoughts of District’s editor-in-chief.
I am an art student as well as an artist and they are two very different things. If you go to college to study chemistry or business you are going to learn how to do those things. But art students, we are in a whole different playing field, and so this is just to help clear up a few things for all the people who tell me they can’t even draw stick figures.
1. We expect to get jobs out of college: The starving artist is not a thing anymore. We are here to get a job, a really cool job where we get to make movies or play with paint all day but a job nonetheless.
2. We learn how to academically talk about art: Have you ever heard someone talk about art and they didn’t know what they were doing? Yeah, it’s really obvious, right? We are going to school to learn how to do it right so that when we say that something has an exaggerated contrapposto we actually know what it means.
3. This is the first time we get to be artists: With the exception of a select few who maybe went to an arts high school or had artists in their families, very few of us were celebrated for our art. Even if it was acknowledged positively it really wasn’t seen as more than a hobby. Now we are in an environment that is all about art and our collaboration and it’s actually cool to like art.
4. I am still smart: Ok, this is specifically aimed at that lacrosse jock in my AP Government class who said the now infamous quote, “art school, but you’re smart?” We are smart; we think, we engage, we innovate, we just maybe aren’t all that good at math.
5. Just because I’m an artist doesn’t mean I’m a good painter: Being an artist does not mean you are good at all the arts, it just means you are artsy. Please, please, please stop comparing painting and fibers or writing and photography. They are different and they are all art.
6. There is not a “right answer”: My friend from high school is studying analytics and mathematics and she can’t stand art. She needs a correct answer or a formula, something to know he did it right and could do it agin. Sorry, art doesn’t get that privilege but we also get to make up all the rules.
7. You can’t do this: You cannot paint a Jackson Pollock, you just can’t but you know who can… Pollock! Every person has the capacity to be an artist but please stop looking at almost any piece in the modern art wing of a museum and muttering under your breath that you can do that.
8. We are literally everywhere: TV shows you watch, clothes you wear, words you read, house you live in, car you drive, food you eat, posters you see, websites you visit: art, art, art! There are too many things that an artist somewhere touched to just ignore it.
9. We work incredibly hard for this: Now I am not discrediting any other college students work ethic in whatever discipline they choose, but you don’t know pain until you are unsuccessfully trying to draw straight lines at 3 a.m.
10. This is our passion: I have yet to find a more satisfying feeling than seeing my finished work on a wall or website or anywhere, really, and seeing someone else acknowledge it. Even if the feeling only lasts for half a second. I did that. I made them look and that I’m responsible for that moment of their lives because of the art I got to share. It’s what keeps us going as artists, that half second where the realization that we are making things bigger than us hits us.
