The only good thing abut an art school is also the worst possible thing about an art school, and that is the relationship between mentor and mentee. It is a complex relationship, not least for the fact that is by and large a forced fabrication of an absurd system. The absurdity that I speak of revolves, of course, around the fact that art cannot be taught. One can be schooled in the ways of the art world, yes. But the practice of art making has more to do with being an ascetic person of faith than an institutional academic. That much is obvious and beside the point. The problem with art schools is that they predominantly seem to connect unprepared acolytes with uninspired masters. Both are reasonable positions to be in. If I was already a formed artist, I wouldn’t want to enroll into an art programme. Conversely, if I was already a successful working artist, I would have the time or the willpower to work with young people who mostly have no clue what they want to do or are here simply due to a misplaced expectation of social accolades.
Let’s start from the latter. Being a mentor in an art school is an unforgiving task. The most honest thing a mentor can tell her budding mentee is to quit. No, you are not going to learn anything that you already don’t contain within yourself, and no, nobody cares about you or your art. You will spend the next five, or two, or god knows how many years trapped in this circle-jerk bubble of an institution ony to be spewed out into the real world with little to no real world know-how. Mind you, this is no fault of the student. It is a matter of simple logic: if I enrol into an art programme around age eighteen, my only frame of reference in life is going to be that same art programme. Good art interacts with the world in unexpected and frightening ways. Unexpected and frightening to the one making it, I mean. How am I expected to gather and share new ways of interacting with the world when all I’ve seen is copies of falsehoods upon falsehoods? Again, this is all beside the point. Once the mentor dumps all of this hard truth on her mentee, and goes through the faculty disciplinary committee procedure for making the student cry, they can begin to talk about the work. Listen, your idea is trite and derivative, but if you keep at it for long enough and catch a lucky charm you just might make it to the point of showing it to somebody. Just one question before we start, and pardon me for intruding in your personal matters, but are your parents by any chance rich? What do I mean by rich? Nevermind, let’s continue. Let’s say that in an ideal world, the mentor really does want to help the student achieve his goal. Let’s say, for the purpose of the argument, that said student knows what their goal is. How do they get around working together? I’ve yet to meet a mentor who had a degree in art pedagogy and or psychology training; just as I’ve never seen a student who didn’t see their mentor as just another point of authority to be maneuvered around.
As obnoxious as we so often are, art students mostly go to art school to seek guidance. Even if it’s just a vapid pretence, I would argue that the will to become an artist remains a noble undertaking. To create something out of nothing else other than the nothingness you harness in your soul. My half educated guess would be that we the art students board our chosen institutions lugging more than the average amount of emotional baggage in our carry-on. We are, on some level, expected to do exactly that, and then to transform the heterogenous contents of this bag into a homogenous enitity that has all the makings of a commodity. To take this dubious metaphor even further, now imagine this suitcase of emotional baggage wrapped tightly in numerous stretchy layers of self-doubt. Simply put, most of us are in shambles, and those of us who project the most security are probably having the worst of it. That’s the kind of person the art school mentor has to deal with. Let us also remember that the she is not mentoring only this one student, but oftentimes around five others and possibly more. Nobody has that much stamina or mental acuity or, for that matter, compassion. Therefore it is natural for the mentor to select a few whom they consider favorites and bunch up the rest into the category of irritating to-dos. Having myself been one of these irritating to-dos, I can report back that being in that position can be soul crushing. Having your mentor drill into you the fact that you’re a lazy, talentless turd is no fun. It dilligently scrapes the little self-esteem that might have been left on the surface of your person. The other way around also doesn’t work, when the mentor is graceous to the level of indifference. The student regurgitates the same tired tropes while the mentor dutifully nods in flaccid appreciation of efforts made. That’s when complacency sets in. Complacency is what gives contemporary art the bad rep that it deservedly gets.
This brings us to an impasse. The mentor is too drained and unprepared to give a fuck, and the student has not yet lived through enough shit to be able to fucking give anything back. The absurd part that is that art school has absolutely nothing to do with the real world and there shouldn’t be anything forcing it into these categories and habits. I don’t yet have a solution to offer, but a little more honesty could go a long way
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