Art Isn’t Easy

I read Christopher Knight’s article about the plight of art schools with some amusement (“Art for School’s Sake,” July 8). I was one of those who would have loved the chance to learn technique. Instead, I paid hundreds of dollars a unit at a “Good” (by his definition) art school, where students “are encouraged from the first day to stop thinking of themselves as students and to start thinking of themselves as working artists.”

In this atmosphere of self-indulgence and self-importance, we “learned” to paint using house paint on butcher paper and other such useless exercises. The “artist” who could make up the best line about why his butcher paper and house paint extravaganza was the most socially relevant got the best grade.

I would say that the lack of creativity Knight cites in his article may stem more from the game one must play to pass (generally emulating the personal style of the instructor) rather than that too much technique is being taught.

I walked out of art school some years ago. In 1998, I quit my day job. You won’t see my work in any high-profile gallery, but I make well above the national mean doing what I love, and to me that was the goal all along. In the end I had to teach myself, which seems to be what many of us who actually make a living with our art seem to have to do.

THERESA MATHER

Orange

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Knight’s hilarious send-up of pompous art critic essays provided a refreshing way to wake up on a Sunday morning. The absurdity of its content provided much laughter when discussed at my Sunday figure-drawing workshop. Our favorite part was when he characterized a “Bad art school” as one that focuses on the fundamentals of art like “life drawing, foundry work or principles of design.”

Our main source of confusion (and perhaps this was an intentional Swiftian trick to lull readers into believing his essay was real) was equating the teaching of sound, crucially fundamental knowledge (life drawing and design) with the most unimportant and easily teachable of skills (technique). These are two completely separate teaching paths and philosophies. I was taught loads of drawing and design at Chouinard Art Institute but was never once taught technique.

His criteria for a “Good art school”--practice over theory and treating entering students not as students but as fellow professionals--is no recipe for success, either. That’s exactly how Art Center has been run for decades (Art Center, much to the chagrin of many of its students, even has a current de-emphasis on figure drawing, replacing that time with the learning of computer skills), yet each year it cranks out hordes of artists whose work I’ll bet Knight abhors.

The best artists in the world have always considered themselves students. The day an artist stops being a student is the day he or she begins to die as an artist.

WILLIAM STOUT

Pasadena

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Knight’s lament that measurement takes place over creativity is true, but it is not limited to art schools. The entire standards movement in K-12 relies on standardized test scores to assess educational quality. It is predicated on the assumption that only those outcomes that are capable of being objectively evaluated are worthwhile.

The public is entitled to know if students in all schools at all levels are being taught well, but pedagogy has to be put into perspective or else it takes on a life of its own.

WALT GARDNER

Los Angeles

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It may do Knight some good to read “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Friere, a remarkable theorist who suggests that education is a humanistic process by which we are to emancipate people from oppressors, liberate minds and bring forth the true humanity in people, that of independent critical thinkers in a joint pursuit and interest to evolve in this world.

A music school that only teaches theory would not produce much in the way of musicians; a higher education in language that doesn’t provide an understanding of structure will hardly produce great writers. How would Knight teach critical thinking better than by the constant evaluation in and of the processes of creation, compositional, color and value choices, balances and volumes, and indeed in what an artist chooses to illustrate or express?

Do not pass judgment on our methods but please let us be considered only in the light of how well we manage to illuminate and/or share in our experience and that of our fellow human beings.

DANIEL E. FYFFE

Los Angeles

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Until I read Knight’s Perspective categorizing art schools as the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I was unaware that Sergio Leone was a famous reductive art theorist.

I subsequently discovered that he contributed a one-liner to an obscure art film posthumously written by Vasari: “Gina, da mi una Miller Lite, I’m painting the Sistine Chapel.” As the print is so poor, it is unclear whether he drank it or washed his brush in it.

DANIEL ROTHMAN

Venice