#hopefully I shall remember to unpin it lmao

[yournewfriendshouse]

so a little while ago I reblobbed someone’s work and they messaged me and said something like ‘thanks for giving my work your ‘real art tag’ and it occurred to me that pretty much no one on tumblr now will know how that tag came to be, so maybe I should elaborate?

so if you’ve followed me for a while, you will know that I am an artist and went to art school at some point. and at art school, or the art department at the university I went to (as with many others) the tenured staff there were in a constant battle about what constitutes ‘art’ and what is a ‘craft’. and the whole thing is gross because a lot of it has to do with the way the art world has been built around westernised bullshit and so is deeply entrenched with colonialism, intellectualism, chevanism and other fun stuf that says painting and sculpture are god, conceptual art is love, photography and printing are on thin ice; and things like ceramics and textiles are crafts—despite the long and rich history of civilisation using textiles and ceramics to express all kind s of things, and also to make their houses and bodies pretty... anyway we all know that is bullshit. but it actually ended up getting the awesome ceramics studio shut down a year or two after I graduated, which was a real shame. absolutely fucked.

so anyway I went there, and it was really hard for many reasons, but I got my degree.

and then I went on to make art that involved lots of glitter. my first (and only) solo show post uni was literally involving hand cut confetti. I did talks thing like…about how it is good to make art that is nice, actually (I did that talk while wrapping a present lmao!). I ran workshops at my house whenever I caught people saying they weren’t creative, and made them draw dots on a page for an hour while I asked them questions about what kind of problem solving shit they had to pull out of their arse every day in the hospitals and classrooms they worked in until they could admit they were in fact creative. because in my mind creativity isn’t just drawing and all art is real art. the paintings that dogs and elephants make is real art. confetti is real art, fan art is art. it’s all real art.

so yeah. that’s just the tag I use, because I facetiously got into a habit years ago of calling the most kitsch sickly sweet stuff ‘real art’ because I went to art school when everyone was obsessed with plywood and any obvious emotion in your artwork was critiqued to shit.

I don’t think anyone is sitting there and unpacking what I’m reblogging under that tag; hopefully you’re aware it’s not that deep. but just in case someone was wondering, I wanted to make it clear like…I tend to put fan art on my fandom blog, but if I did put it on this one it would be under that tag like it’s not me trying to make some kind of point lol, it’s kind of exactly the opposite. If I post art and don’t, like, put the tag on it, it’s because I forgot lol, not because I in all my lofty whatever deemed it ‘not real’ lmao

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