This new semester brings me to that eventful time in my college career where the prospect of being unleashed into the real world seems more and more at hand. Everywhere around me I see art students who are realizing the oncoming reality of the working world, and I see them freaking out.
No, I don’t mean they are freaking out in the sense that they feel like the world is collapsing on them, or that they worry about landing a job once they graduate. This kind of freaking out affects their art and diminishes the capacity of self-expression to the “safe” and conventional traditions of “good” art, in hopes to appease the taste of others. In other words, the kind of art that is bland and shallow.
It is important to know how to draw, but being able to draw a pretty picture is only half of it. The art students who devote their time to the academia and technical foundations of art can make beautiful art, but this art is not unique. The art students who also pushes themselves and their content beyond what is expected, even if it is not popular, is making a true statement about who they are as an artist.
I do not fancy myself an art critic. Nor do I have the correct answer to what art is, much less “good” art. However, there is something to be said about art that comes honestly from the artist, as opposed to art that comes from what the artist believes others would want it to be. My instructors continually tell us that the purpose of these last years at college is to find out our own voice in the art world.
In essence, this time is to figure out what we are about and to find our niche in the world. True, once we art majors are unleashed into the world, most of us who find artistically inclined jobs will more than likely have to work for someone else who will tell us what to draw, sculpt, paint, etc. There are always rules to these kinds of things.
In general, the public takes art at face value. This is especially true in entertainment. It is easy to make entertainment. It is harder to make art.
I am not claiming that art needs any deeper meaning. The Dada movement proved that. Universally known, however, is that art is expression. It has been found also that true expression from the artist yields the best art.
I am surprised at the number of people I meet who do make conventional art because it is safe and popular. They can continue to make art that way if they so wish. But “safe” art never gave us a Picasso.