os190308 The old man leans back  

Art student fantasies

The old man sits down in his favorite easy chair and reaches for his pipe and tobacco. He fills it, lights up and leans back. His canvas is in front of him, glistening with freshly-applied paint strokes, bright in the morning light filtering in over the north-facing, sloping windows. Somewhere a crow caws.

It’s good, he’s thinking. Yes. Good. Thoughts of his upcoming show flit through his mind, mentally anticipating this painting and others displayed under bright lights in the gallery. People gather around him, congratulating him and sipping their wine as he answers questions.

He draws on his pipe. It’s such a good life, living on one’s art this way. It’s been worth it. Fifty years of struggle. True, there were hard times, but it’s been worth it.

Or, picture this.

With a clap of her hands the lights flash on and there, before her, is her latest project – a water-treatment facility in Sacramento. A long, curving wall, 360-feet wrapping around a huge reservoir wall.

This may be my best yet, she’s thinking. Or, maybe that airport in Dallas. No, this is better. People can actually get up close and see the details. Yes. This is my best.

Or this:

Every time he sees a Tesla, there is his masterpiece – that tail-light he struggled and fought for.

Or this:

She always buys that brand of cottage cheese because every time she opens the refrigerator door, there’s her art!

These fantasies were inspired by the news yesterday that the Seattle branch of the Art Institute franchise shut its doors in the face of the students who had enrolled there. I’m tempted to say it serves them right, but I cannot because we paid tuition to AIS when our younger daughter enrolled.

She got out, but not without scars that would affect her for the rest of her life. And my wife and I, too. We were sold by their marketing and sales staff. So, too, were parents and adults who wanted a career in art and bought into their program – paying outrageous tuition fees and investing uncounted dollars in supplies and lost wages.

When I read the news, I thought of the time in California when the great exposition was finished and they furloughed all the craftsman – carpenters, masons, etc. – and Sam Goldman hired them to come down to southern California to build the sets for a great film.

Six-hundred fifty students, the news report said, were shut out of AIS. Some were foreign students, and they will have to go home if some alternative school is not located where they can enroll in a hurry and continue their program.

What a waste of talent. Even a minimally-talented art student has value if they have a dream. Unfortunately, their dreams are only that – dreams and fantasies about what they think is an art career for them in fashion design, film-making, digital arts and etcetera.

While it’s true some of them will find jobs more or less like they imagined are waiting out there (like my new customers, the Anderson/Medaus), few will live their dreams.

There is no such thing as a career, said one of my former students. It’s she and her account of the 360-foot wall that I used, above, to imagine what a student is thinking. Her remark was meant to underline the fallacy put forward by marketers of art schools.

Her point was that advanced education, if it involves art, merely gives students a different mindset, a peculiar way of seeing things sometimes.

Another one of my former students said, “But that was always the case . . . that place [AIS] was a dumping ground for alienated tattooed kids who hated their parents and had some juvenile idea of making it big in the arts . . . the initial partial scholarships sets the hook, makes the parents proud and the kid into a believer that they actually had talent . . . you and I know that the BFA kids end up working at an art supply store or a frame shop . . . most never earn enough to pay back the $100K loan.”

What would I do, the reader may ask. What makes me think I have a better vision? True, I am old, like the old painter in my opening fantasy. In my ‘teens I envisioned myself designing record-jackets and movie posters. What changed my mind was the lifestyle of my college professors. They seemed to have a secret, what I came to understand was a mind.

My mentor suggested I teach college art because it was a life of the mind besides a life of making nice designs and interesting objects of art. Besides, there was a war going on, and I’d be drafted if I tried to get a job in the design field.

My mind is still living, and I would suggest to those 650 orphaned students that they should scrape away the scales from their eyes, take off their rose-colored glasses and do what industrial leaders have done to get themselves in the position where they can collect $22,000 tuition fees from a targeted age group with stars in their eyes.

Everyone does it in a consumer society. It’s the leaders in a producing society who are smart enough to survive. If I could sell those orphans on opening a productive company aimed at doing something for a needy country like the USA to help save Earth’s human life sustainability through education, I’d be worthy of the name of professor, or at least a public intellectual.

Yes, I’d convince them, if possible, to startup my International Print Center Incubators, something even Elon Musk or what’s-his-name, the guy that started amazon, wouldn’t have thought possible.

It’s in the balance, Al Gore said, and getting deeper in shit, I think.