#anyhow I think art education CAN be good it's just...like any education it really relies on good teachers and a good curriculum

[loregoddess]

Ok I'm curious, could you elaborate on art school education when you have the time?

Mainly because my friend went to art high school and feels she wasted all the years there while I've been self-teaching myself for a few months by just messing around, so I was wondering just how different the two approaches are :0

Oh, I have lots and lots of thoughts on art education. I do feel that I need to preface this with the whole "my experience is not universal", bc all my feelings about art and art education stem from my own experiences of being self-taught and then getting actual formal college degrees in art.

The shortest version of my long rant, under the cut, is that there isn't a superior way to learn art. With art education, you run the risk of getting bad teachers who don't teach the subject well, and you can also run into teachers who aren't open-minded about approaches to art that differ too much from their own--the flipside, of course, is that there are sometimes amazing teachers who can challenge you to try new things you'd never had thought of on your own, or who have already made a lot of mistakes that they can tell you about so you don't have to make them yourself. With being self-taught, you have to figure out everything on your own, and sifting through online tutorials or reading books can be difficult to find "actually useful and well-explained" advice, but you do also get the freedom of doing literally whatever you want and really focusing what you learn based on what you're actually interested in. Each has it's pros and cons, but neither is technically better or worse, per se, although education of any sort comes down a lot to each person's situation in life, as not everyone has access to education or even the tools for making art.

For the long, long expansion of my thoughts and some of my personal experiences with art education specifically...

In short, I'm technically entirely self-taught, despite holding two different art degrees. Aside from some feedback I got from my 8th grade art teacher (who had agreed to look at my hobby art in her own spare time outside of class), I basically taught myself to draw entirely on my own, using various "how to draw" books, online tutorials, and just a lot of general experimentation and continued drawing on my own. Which meant I made a lot of mistakes, or didn't try out certain things, or got frustrated bc I couldn't figure out how to do something, but overall I had a lot of fun. The actual art classes I took in middle and high school? Well, I took a life drawing class in high school that taught me how to draw from life, a skill I never would have acquired on my own bc the process for learning that skill requires a lot of patience, and personally, I find life drawing to be extremely boring. My high school art teacher was also allowing blatant copyright infringements to occur in her class, which was something I learned years later when taking a media law class in college to learn about copyright law specifically, so I guess I learned what to not do as a teacher if I manage to become one, but I didn't learn a whole lot of actual art skills or even really improve my art in any significant way. I never actually learned anything like the elements of art and how to use them, or color theory, or any of that, in class or even on my own, but because I was constantly looking at lots of art online, and making art on my own and experimenting with new things, I ended up learning all of the "essentials of art" intuitively, sort of like how children learn the grammar of whichever language(s) they grow up speaking without learning the actual formal grammar of the language. Which I think a lot of artists actually do as they continue to make art, even if they don't realize it.

Anyhow, moving on. I personally really enjoyed my undergrad illustration degree. Now, to be fair, if someone was willing to pay me to attend college for the rest of my life as my actual career, that is what I would do bc I love learning, and I love the challenge presented by college courses. But do I feel like I learned anything new about art in those classes? Yes and no. I took a lot of art history classes bc I had never had any art history before college, and found I loved the topic a lot. The life drawing classes I was required to take felt like a waste of time bc I already had that skill from the one high school class, and I spent most of those classes fighting the teachers about why we should have less nude models (bc nudes are super easy to draw from life, but clothing is very, very difficult, and I wanted to learn how to draw clothing as a challenge bc I was bored in those classes). I spent one class teaching the entire class how to use Photoshop bc the teacher's method was absolute BS and I could do everything faster and easier than what we were being taught bc I had been using the program for years (the teacher even joked about how I had hijacked the class, to which I'm still not sure was meant to be friendly or malicious). The "Anatomy for the Artist" class I took was one of the most useful classes I've ever taken, and really helped me with drawing not only humans, but anything with a skeleton and muscles, since the teacher's approach made it so I learned the skill of using actual real-life anatomy as a means of creating art from the knowledge of anatomy (and I lucked out for this class bc I had an adjunct who was there to cover the actual teacher who was on sabbatical, and from what I heard from classmates I would have learned nothing from the usual teacher's approach to the class; I hope the teacher I did have found a good stable job bc she was amazing). Most of the actual core illustration classes helped me improve my art a great deal, but not bc they taught me anything--more so, it was that I had to create a lot of art for them, and find creative solutions to the challenges the projects would present (there were lots of "illustrate this abstract concept without using x, y, or z imagery" or "create an illustration within these specific parameters" which really required me to think about how to plan and go about completing the final project). Somehow, the actual "foundations classes" that I took--where I was supposed to learn things like design theory, the elements and principles of art, color theory, etc.--well, let's just say the teacher was on his way to retirement, and didn't teach any of that really well, so I still ended up going through my undergrad more or less on intuition and the art skills I had cultivated on my own. Mostly, college art classes were useful in helping me to improve my art, not because I learned new things (although I did learn some new things), but rather because I needed to make lots and lots of art in a relatively short time, and making art constantly is the fastest way to improve.

That all said, I still never really got the point of things that I kept seeing or hearing as common art advice. For example: "Use references." Okay? What does that mean? What does that look like? How do I do that? I was never taught that once, and it was only partway through college that I figured out that people meant "look at a photo of a real person to figure out a pose or something" and not "learn about the subject you're trying to draw so you have an understanding of that subject that allows you to draw it from your imagination how you want". And honestly the former advice is useful but...only useful to a point, so I'm kinda glad I never learned it bc it would have stunted my development and presented a roadblock. In either case, I was never taught how to use a ref or what "use a ref" meant in my formal art education, and by the time I figured it out on my own, my repertoire of art skills made the advice moot.

So what's all the long and short of this? Is art education a sham and useless? Well, not entirely, but maybe sort of. It really comes down to which teachers are teaching the subject, and how they do it. I only had a handful of art teachers who were really able to get me to think about art differently and push me to learn more and improve. But I also had a friend in my undergrad class who had never drawn in his life and he found most of the classes super useful bc he wasn't coming in being self-taught and already drawing. We were at different places in our art journeys, and so we got different things out of the college classes.

I do feel overall that the focus of my college classes was more productive than the lack of focus from my high school classes. Would I tell everyone who wants to get better at art to go to art school? Hell no. I got a degree in art because I love it, and because I had hoped to work as a video game concept artist (for which one does need at least a BFA to get hired by most companies). Of course, by the end of my degree I had figured out the video game industry in America was absolutely not a place I wanted to be working for my own health, but my frustrations with how my art education had been structured, paired with the fact that I spent a few classes actually teaching my classmates things, made me think I might make an okay art teacher. But even my wanting to be an art teacher still comes from a place of deep love for art. For those who just want to take up art as a hobby, self-taught is fine, and sometimes it will be better than getting stuck with a bad teacher who'll crush the enjoyment of art. Yes, I think a well-structured art course could help someone learn art and become confident in their art, which is part of the reason I want to try teaching it (esp. bc it took me years to learn some things that a good teacher would have just like, covered in a core class), but like...self-taught or school-taught, there isn't a superior way to learn art. They're both just very different approaches.

[weirdocat83]

obsessed with your tags, talk mdzs at me pls

Uh.

1) thank you, I really just put the random thoughts I have in the tags and/or accidentally steal other people’s tags

2) some thoughts about mdzs below the cut (I have a lot of thoughts about this novel) ye ask any ye shall receive. If you want to hear my thoughts on something specific plz ask :3

• My fav characters in MDZS are Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang. I love how WWX can be very complicated when he wants to be and has many layers and sides to him. Like, the fandom likes to simplify his character to someone self deprecating but always smiling but he is very complex. He acknowledges his faults and has only tried to do what he deemed right at the time even if he regrets what he does in hindsight. He isn’t infallible. He literally tortured a man to death (even if it felt right to do it considering said man orchestrated a massacre and tossed him into a literal pit of suffering to die in) and was a major player in a WAR. He’s probably killed more than he can count. I feel like a lot of people forget that the main cast is a bunch of war heroes that must’ve had insane kill counts. Including LWJ. It’s quite tragic that none of them really had any good authority figures to lead them seeing as the majority of them were at most 20~30ish and cultivators usually live extremely long lives (at least, that’s my assumption) anyhow, WWX is very aware of his faults, especially post-resurrection as he did kinda fuck up when he accidentally killed JZX. He acknowledges that and makes an effort to apologize and atone. That being said, his faults don’t stop him from being confident and above all likable. Yes he can be annoying but he does know how to behave himself probably better than most (unlike what many members of the fandom like to think). He knows his position well and that it is incredibly precarious (in both lives) but still manages to fit in well enough with essentially nobility that he is good competition for the best in his generation. He is a genius and a great leader and that isn’t stressed enough. Though I think one of the small details in his character that I think gets overlooked is how he “parents” A-Yuan in the burial mounds. Because for as immature as he is when he’s burying A-Yuan in the ground, he also knows that he isn’t the only one caring for A-Yuan and therefore is allowed to be silly but when they’re out at the market and A-Yuan asks for a toy he makes the mature decision to save his money (although LWJ spoils the kid immediately after). This reflects a lot on WWX because it shows he can be very mature when he needs to be but when he doesn’t need to be he’ll happily rely on others. It also reflects on his upbringing showing he knows how important money is (in contrast to the lans who are shown on various occasions to not really think about money much) Personally I love his character because he seems like a person I’d get along with if he were real (which, the incredible writing makes his seems very realistic) meanwhile my other favorite, Nie Huaisang, I love because he is misleading. Some of my favorite fictional characters are very misleading because of the masks they put up to fool people to achieve their goals. How a character will know more than they should but not let anyone know until the moment is right. NHS is someone who is easily underestimated because he seems helpless and unintelligent. And yeah, for a majority of his life he really didn’t care to further his education or really practice cultivation but later he takes this preconceived notion that everyone has of him and uses it to his advantage so nobody suspects a thing while he plans JGY’s downfall. It’s a scarily intelligent move and I think the fact that he takes pleasure in looking at art/books really adds to the fact of how intelligent he is. Most people see his art as pointless hobbies but I think it says a lot about the qualities of his character. I think a lot of people take for granted the patience it takes to make good art or the intelligence it takes to appreciate good literature. So when NHS's older brother dies under mysterious circumstances that just so happen to help the Jins? of course he catches on! He proceeds to keep his enemy close for over a decade until he finally gets his moment of revenge. Which, to me? Props, man. plus only one person even realizes what happened. WWX. 

Some things I don’t particularly like about MDZS (some people may yell at me for this and I'm sorry but this is my opinion): 

- how weird the yi city arc felt? It feels very out of place as we go on this whole journey to learn about all these people and what happened to them but after that they are pretty much no longer relevant. I only found out later that the yi city arc was initially intended to be its own story. So that might be why.

- how certain things are just *left* and never touched on again? We hear all this stuff about baoshan sanren but we never see her or really learn much about her at all. Similarly, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji’s parents? We hear all these things about them but never learn much at all. Which is weird all things considered when you look at it. It feels like a lot of background info for not much payoff. Yes, it gives us a lot of vital information on why things played out the way they did but it doesn’t stop the feeling that there should’ve been more. Part of me appreciated it though because it gives us no more information than the characters really have. Just passing information that is common knowledge but never really looked into just like many actual people have.

- how everything ended off. So we have that whole scene at the temple and then everything just… calms down? They all go home??? It felt anticlimactic. Especially with Nie Huaisang’s character as (in the novel at least) it sets him up to be the next chief cultivator despite being just as, if not more, sneaky than Jin Guangyao. And that’s probably intentional. The chief cultivator position was likely never meant to be a position of absolute good. It’s politics. But it is a bit weird that we never really see what happens to Nie Huaisang after, post revenge and all. 

[english-ext-2]

hello! just wondering about your thoughts on art degrees - are they really 'useless'? i can't think of any other way to study literature :( thank you!

I have many thoughts on this so it’s best to start with a disclaimer: I’m only speaking from my own experiences, am in no way representative of all Arts students, and definitely don’t represent employers’ perspectives (who might have very different opinions to mine).

Before I go anywhere, the following point is the most important: if you want to study literature, then study literature. There is nothing worse than picking a degree you think will be ‘employable’ only to realise you hate it (actually, what’s worse is becoming indifferent to it).

I’m clearly biased here, but Literature is good and not at all useless, and I would strongly encourage you to study it. I don’t want to say anymore else I’d go on forever, but that’s my position. The rest of my answer is under the cut because boy did it get long.

Arts in General

Firstly, arts encompasses a huge range of disciplines. In terms of diversity of knowledge, arts is far from useless. I’m at Usyd, where the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences is the largest by far. It’s divided into schools, then departments. A single school, e.g. School of Social and Political Science (SSPS), has several departments. My majors fall under SSPS, the Department of Government and International Relations and the Department of Sociology and Social Work. But you’ve got education, social work, philosophy, museum and heritage studies, archaeology, media and communications, linguistics, languages, a whole range of departments under other schools too. Are all these subjects ‘useless’? Nope.

In purely humanistic terms, people with arts degrees have contributed so much to society. Where would we be without novelists, film producers, directors, script writers? Monty Python was a troupe of over-educated nerds who put their Oxford and Cambridge educations to dictionary-altering satirical use (soz Terry Gilliam, I know you’re American), and we’re better for it. Our world would be poorer without artists of all stripes and the insights that sociologists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers, linguists, etc. have made. The ultimate strike: your teachers studied Education, i.e. Arts. Without them you wouldn’t be reading this, and I wouldn’t be writing it either. Even if arts degrees are semi-jokingly characterised as useless, they’re not. (Btw I aggressively do not enjoy the STEM v Humanities debate because it reduces both sides to shitty stereotypes and gives rise to godawful Discourse, has anyone heard of polymaths.)    

Types of Arts Degrees

You also have to consider the type of arts degree. Once I finish this semester I’m going to graduate with the pass Bachelors of International and Global Studies (i.e. your standard three year degree). In terms of tertiary education, it’s the most basic. I chose not to do a combined degree with, say, Law; nor did I choose to do Honours, which would’ve added an entire year to my degree doing a thesis. Arguably, arts honours and combined arts degrees are less 'useless’ than your run-of-the-mill three-year arts degrees because you supposedly gain advanced research skills and the, well, non-arts part of your combined degree (lol). (I would recommend Honours only if you’re truly, honestly looking for an intellectual challenge and are fully prepared to commit, not just riding along for the perceived employability advantage. A thesis is hard work! I have a friend in Melbourne who can testify.) Incidentally, your three-year arts degree will be an infuriating obstacle if you’re thinking of applying for grad school in North America since most universities only consider candidates who have at least a four­-year undergraduate degree. On another note, I actually once met a girl who was doing combined law/arts and took a cinema elective unit because she enjoyed cinema but knew it wouldn’t likely help her find a job.

Employability

But given the state of the job market these days, almost all undergraduate degrees by themselves are next to useless. A freshly-graduated 21-year-old with a single Bachelors and nothing else to their name, no matter the discipline, won’t be zipping up the salary ladder any time soon (would probably struggle to get an entry level job, never mind kickstarting their career). We’re a long way from the days when just having a degree was proof of your knowledge and thus qualification for the job. Higher education is more accessible, and employers’ expectations have changed. The substance of the degree matters less than the transferable, or 'soft’ skills you gain at university. I’m talking leadership, adaptability (a big one), teamwork, written and verbal communication skills, cross-cultural awareness, self-management, time management, problem solving. Your grades are no longer the sole determining factor in your hiring, and may even take a back seat to strong extra-curricular or sporting achievements, or your experience in various casual/part-time jobs. In some ways it’s a welcome change for employers to expressly state they value recruits as people with talents in fields other than academia, and it’s certainly more inclusive of socio-economically disadvantaged students who might not have done well in school but are nonetheless hard workers and have displayed merit in the 'real world’.

From certain other perspectives, the job market is still capitalism, and individuals are still in competition with each other. As soon as employers make it known they’re looking for “well-rounded indvidiuals”, the students with the most cultural capital and financial resources rush off to, say, intern at a law firm, a think tank, the state government, or travel overseas to teach English in a South-East Asian country, i.e. they grab opportunities to expand their set of transferable skills. Doesn’t matter if you’re an arts student; the wealthiest are more likely to have the means to seek out and actively pursue the experiences that’ll enrich their CVs and make them more appealing to recruiters. It takes money to travel, and you need to be from a certain social milieu to know of, if not apply for, valuable career-hopping opportunities (I kid you not, one guy applied to the organisation where I volunteer wanting legal experience because his parents were allegedly dentists and not in the Right Lawyer Circles to get him a paralegal position or clerkship). All of this is a long way of saying that doing arts is but one factor amongst many affecting your job prospects. 

To bring the discussion back to more pleasant grounds, big corporations (read: banks, consultancy firms, your Comm Banks and KPMGs) are recognising the skills and talents that arts students can bring to their companies. The critical thinking skills you gain from analysing those long-ass readings and putting them into practice are highly sought after because they show you’re not just someone who follows instructions, but can analyse, evaluate and synthesise information appropriate to audience, which applies to literally anything in any workplace. Usyd even has a program called ArtSS Career Ready that offers summer/winter internships with various organisations to Arts and Humanities students only.    

It’s implied in the above paragraphs but what it comes down to is that you’re very likely going to end up doing something that has only the faintest relation to your degree. A student who majored in sociology might end up in a consultancy firm; a history student at St George or Westpac. If you’re going to worry about what you’re studying, worry on the basis of whether you’ll enjoy it rather than whether it fits your projected career path. 

Arts Degrees in Context

So far I’ve spoken about arts degrees in very general, abstract terms, disconnected from the institutions that offer them. Does it make a difference if you study English Literature at Usyd rather than UNSW? (Usyd’s English department consistently ranks well in the QS rankings, 18th this year and the highest Australian university if you were wondering, with UNSW at equal 49th.) Though whether an English major from Usyd is more employable than an English major from UNSW, well, Usyd is ranked 4th in terms of graduate employability in the QS rankings but that’s not necessarily reflective of Usyd’s English department. Anyhow, the 'usefulness’ of a degree will rely on its quality, and that quality is directly influenced by two things: the degree structure, and the people teaching your degree. Both will of course vary from uni to uni.

Degree Structure

What do I mean by degree structure? I’m talking mandatory units or majors, and even mandatory internships. Take my INGS degree. The features that differentiate it from your generic Usyd arts degree are:

four mandatory INGS units 

three mandatory language units 

a mandatory one-semester exchange 

a mandatory major chosen from a list (double majoring is optional)

It sounds fancy but if you were a discerning arts student you could take multiple language units and go on exchange; the list of compulsory majors we choose from is not exclusive to INGS students. The real appeal lies in the INGS units, which are themselves an interdisciplinary mix but which in my experience don’t build graduate abilities any more effectively than any other arts unit. Exchange was good though, and certainly useful in the sense I picked up a range of transferable skills (if not applicable in professional contexts then at home; baking soda and vinegar are great cleaning agents.)  

My degree structure wasn’t revolutionary and didn’t necessarily equip me with skills that might make me more attractive to recruiters. Enter mandatory internships. Some universities in their arts degrees make practical experience (internships, practicums, research projects, etc.) compulsory. If this opportunity is already built into your degree and/or discipline, e.g. you have practicums if you study education, then it’s a huge advantage as you don’t have to go looking for one yourself. Macquarie University makes PACE units (Professional and Community Engagement) a requirement of graduating with an arts degree. Students get practical experience in the community with a partner organisation and undertake an “experiential learning activity”. I mention this because I’ve met Macquarie (and UNSW) interns at my volunteer workplace who’ve contributed significantly to various projects - experience that makes them competitive when they graduate. And yes, there’s a PACE unit for English! (I’ll admit that to Usyd’s credit they have the above-mentioned ArtSS Career Ready program.)  

tl;dr not all arts degrees are created equal, the better ones include mandatory practical experience.  

The People 

Secondly, the people teaching your degree. I have thoughts (Thoughts, I tell you) on education as a collaborative effort, which I’ll just boil down to this: your teachers matter. The people you learn alongside with matter. You don’t learn in a vacuum, and yes, while you’re responsible for your education and how much effort you put into readings, assignments, asking questions, and so on, your teachers and tutors play an essential role in how you absorb and understand the material. If you’ve got a lecturer who reads slides out at a catatonic audience, that’s… not helpful. If your course coordinator gives you one-sentence replies to lengthy, well-considered questions, that’s… also not helpful. But if a teacher can engage you with what you’re learning no matter the subject, you’re more likely to develop a genuine interest in it and to do well. Good lecturers and tutors crop up in unexpected places and often at random, and the best way to find them is through word of mouth. In employability terms, these teachers make for sterling referees. If you get to know them enough, they’ll happily vouch for you.

This answer has gotten ridiculously long but I hope it addressed and assuaged any doubts you may have had.