Wow! Good one. Yes, that qualifies.
What is "Fine Art"?
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Wow! Good one. Yes, that qualifies.
At my university, they went after accreditation by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (https://nasad.arts-accredit.org/) and I believe that this is when they upped their game across all courses. Yes, to obtain a BFA a capstone exhibition (solo show) is required and the student is responsible for the installation, not to mention returning the gallery back to its original state. Along with that is an oral defense and a pretty extensive Research and Defense paper (which I just finished writing.) Class critiques are a regular part of every studio class. Art history classes are required and at least 2 research papers in each class. These papers are tough. The professors are rigorous. I even got busted for having a split infinitive in one of mine. (I had to Google what that was.). We have a juried exhibition that we are required to submit work to. I‘ve done that for each of the last 7 years and usually get 1-3 pieces accepted. (I won 1st place in 3D two years ago but I don’t even consider myself a 3D artist. I got one piece in this year and, again, it’s 3D. Maybe I should change my focus.)
As someone mentioned a few postings ago, it’s not the remembering everything one encounters in a BFA program but just going through the process.
There, you have nailed it.
Thanks. If I post here the 3D piece that is currently in our juried show, there would be some serious head scratching and, likely, questioning whether it’s even art. If it was me, I would. But the conversation/dialog it is supposed to spark is made very clear with my artist statement (the longest one I’ve ever submitted but it was originally used in a History of Women in Art class so it was supposed to be verbose.)
Hahaha!!! Exactly.
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Exactly. Artist statements are often like those psychological descriptions of photos requiring a degree in Freud to decipher. They're mainly pretentious and say nothing, only there to impress the readers with ten dollars words. The Atget letter is descriptive about what the work covers. Simplicity. That's enough. No one cares if he was dropped on his head as a kid or had to photograph with one arm. Next is to look at the actual results to see if it's any good.
Is there an abbreviated 3-year course? Just in case.
Why not take the 3 year course and add say ten or twenty years to your life expectancy? With so many body replacement parts available that may be a great way for you to go.
An artist's statement, for me, is an attempt to explain myself to myself. I see that I bring a certain look to all of my work. What I have been struggling to do, for a long time, is to articulate just what that look is. I don't need to, but I want to get a better understanding of it. Self-analysis, if you will..
The statement evolves with time. As I learn, I gain a clearer understanding of what I have done. In addition, my work evolves with experience and exposure to others.
The statement evolves with time. As I learn, I gain a clearer understanding of what I have done. In addition, my work evolves with experience and exposure to others.
Is there an abbreviated 3-year course? Just in case.
I could have done mine in less than the 7 years it took me but I wanted to take my time and enjoy. I did take one semester off after my cancer diagnosis. Since I already have a masters degree they waved all the general education requirements and I just took art classes.
Perfect. When I was young, I would read stuff like this and read others giving their own take with equally confusing words and ideas. I thought there was something wrong with me, that I wasn't smart like them. When I got older, I realized that it was all a lot of pretentious crap with each person trying to outdo the other in giving meaning to the book, sculpture, or painting. A game of one-upmanship trying to impress others with false intellect confusing everyone along the way. Keep it simple. You'll be more believable that way.
I'm glad you passed the cancer situation so you can enjoy the art.
some are, others are straight forward and to the point, just like atget's ... dropped on his head and 1 arm ? that is sometimes important if specific hardships related to the work had to be overcome. it's important to have an open mind, it might allow a greater understanding and maybe insights to your own image making process. there is a photographer who has posted here and on the LF site who has vision issues, I would imagine if he wrote a statement and it related to his vision / seeing the world it would be mentioned.
TheFlyingCamera
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My point was not so much that he wrote bullshit artspeak in the early daybooks (I don't think artspeak had yet been invented in 1900) but rather taken as a collection, the Daybooks could be seen as an artists statement in diaristic form. A very long, unedited diaristic artist statement.
An artists statement might not be necessary for Edward Weston as a formal exercise, but that's also looking back in retrospect on a fifty-plus year career, and if you were to approach him and ask him to describe what he was working on and why he was choosing the subjects he chose, I'd bet you that he would have been able to articulate those ideas rather than just say "because Charis made me horny".
"Charis made me horny." is a perfectly valid artist statement. It can be rephrased in all finds of efflorescent ways but would amount to the same thing - and there'd still be nothing wrong with it. An artist statement doesn't have to be rarefied. People don't live rarefied lives and art is an activity - it's something that has to be done as much as (or more than) it is thought.
Motivation doesn't have to be ascetic and puritanical to produce good art. (or bad art, for that matter.)
you don't need 7 years, there are low Rez programs in photography as well. ..
in some programs it seems that older returning students have an advantage.
Tips for older MFA students going back to school - The Writer
Older MFA students seeking graduate degrees in creative writing prove that age really is just a number. Here are their tips for going back to school.
www.writermag.com
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im not sure how it excludes these things, and who cares what some art historian has to say, people make forest through the trees comments about pretty much everything, why is their educated opinion less valid when they say something about photography or someone's "art" ( btw I'm a trained art and architectural historian and I've never said that or heard anyone say that about artwork before, as Bullwinkle The Moose would say "I must take a size 7 1/2!). if someone wants to say the images &c transcend the tyranny of language not really sure what the problem is, I hope they actually do! and if they don't (and that was the point) at least it's good conversation while someone snacks on the cucumbers, cat food and white zin.
To be fair I only heard that from some school or other of Marxists when pushed repeatedly- the all art is political brigade. I can tell you who said privately but to be fair to her she was just saying what is implied by any school of aesthetics/ art theory. No matter what you say as the producer, the work will be co-opted into someone else's mind garden / theoretical framework- the artists statement isn't going to protect you there; ie its out of your hands once its in viewers gaze and they will do with it as they see fit.
I would say for those people who consider images to transcend language (as a crappy example) as a form of communication then the image is the artists statement. Trying then to "explain" it through words is entirely against the concept. It would be like having a synopsis of a wordless book.
Anything where you HAVE to do xyz in art production is at the exclusion of any concepts where you don't have to do it.
I myself don't really care- if I like your work and you want to tell me all about it then I'm all ears. If I.like your work but you prefer to leave it to me to think on it without context from you then that's cool too.
I would say its not just artists but art historians that have been "forced" to explain themselves too. The days when you could just hit ground running on your topic were replaced in some quarters by the demand to explain your "methodologies" / positions on things in a lengthy introduction before you could even start the subject you wished to actually look at.
you don't need 7 years, there are low Rez programs in photography as well. ..
in some programs it seems that older returning students have an advantage.
Tips for older MFA students going back to school - The Writer
Older MFA students seeking graduate degrees in creative writing prove that age really is just a number. Here are their tips for going back to school.www.writermag.com
Thanks for that link, a good read. I especially like the line: “May tells students to embrace the experience of being a student.”
This was just one of the attractions for me to pursue a degree in my 60s. I started working full-time 3-days after high school graduation, doing so for 42 years, and college was a part-time endeavor all the way through graduate school. It was 16 years before I had my bachelors degree (several years in there were military service.) College was always something I’d rush to from work, go to class, and then go home. I was never really part of the college.
Going for the BFA post-retirement allowed me to have the “college experience” (except for living in the dorms but I think I checked that box when I lived in army barracks) and to become part of a community, in this case, the art community. The fact that I was old enough to be grandparent to many of my fellow students was never an issue. I was accepted as a peer. There is something to be said for being in an intellectually stimulating environment and hanging out with young, energetic, and idealist people rather than drinking coffee with old codgers who complain about how things aren’t like they used to be.
Right now I am not considering an MFA because I have a few more projects lined up, but who knows?
Jim Jones, 9/14/06, post #55 in this thread:
"If we have to talk so much about it, it can't be art. The best of art is felt, not discussed."
You can't talk about art.
“It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.”
- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I am looking in again this morning at a nearly two year-old topic on a very widely-read photography forum of international reach.
It began as a poll. At this writing there are at present 70 sober replies to the founding post, and just over one thousand five hundred views.
My stupefaction deepens as it gains weight each day. The topic is a serious query: Which hand is on top (of the camera) when one is shooting in the ‘portrait', the vertical position?
This is an extreme, lands-end, low-oxygen exemplar of the base conundrum of art: you can't talk about it.
You can talk around it. And which-hand-on-top is the gross irrelevancy where aspirant-artists/photographers end up when they do so.
They arrive there through exhaustion of the accessible near/quasi-art topics: the equipage, matériel, technology, techniques, history, sufferings and sacrifices for, trade in, record auction prices of, trends, gossip, schools, and even some structures or components of art. There is the aesthetic geometry of composition. There is the color wheel. There is the Zone System. There is the Nautilus-y Golden Ratio. These things can be taught. But no person can definitively state what it is that sounds emotive resonance in another and why or how to do it.
It gets not much better with sophistication or academic formality: read any book of art criticism and find anything about the actuality beyond faint footprints and a spore of coarse hair snagged on branches.
This phenomenon has symptoms. Comments on an engaging photo, e.g., are oddly stunted : “Well-seen!”, “Good capture!”, “Excellent! Reminds me of the work of ...”
We lack the vocabulary to plainly say what it is or how it was done, and we can’t make one. What art is might solely be of or in the provenance of God; a mute, unutterable mystery, with another – talent - at the core.
This ineffability is recognized elsewhere. The Taoist has it: He Who Knows Does Not Say, and He That Says Does Not Know. Authentic practitioners do not talk about it; they can’t. They simply do it.
Talent is the first and last Zero and One. Beyond, all else is formula, recipe, like the auto-exposure algorithms built into cameras. And while AE makes perfect exposure, it does not make divinity.
When present, talent comes in degrees and sizes, and can be developed beyond its birth
weight, but the zygote must be there first.
And the blessed are few.
For the unblessed, this is cruel, heartbreaking, because encountering, recognizing art engenders the desire to make it. That seeing/desiring makes for an industry of marketing evangelism, is the engine of camera-selling, suborning the longing of the lorn to hope and channeling it into spending.
If spending worked, your orthodontist would be Sudek.
Cameras, like pencils, are accessible, more accessible today than ever before. Yet there is only the same amount of excellence in writing as ever was, “unleash your creativity” pitches notwithstanding.
Talent sees the art before it is made.
Some posit that it can be forced into being through determination and practice. This is the whole Internet-arisen career and being of certain preachers of Street Photography, like, oh, the Reverend XXXX XXX, and like the Reverend, they have a theology, scriptures, rites, acolytes, of course, the Pay-to-go pilgrimage. But they are not the Word; not even John the Baptist, preceding and announcing the Word. They are imitating the sandals, hair shirt, sacrificial honey-and-locust-eating lifestyle of the Word, and the widespread hope that it is so gives them a certain presence and makes them a living.
Art, the art-drive, also does not know categories in any medium. Categories are irrelevant to any work's standing as art.
Categories (like ‘street photography’) were from the first ex-post-facto, describing materials, techniques, locus or thematic content, subject-groupings, or means of approach. A Dewey Decimal System for archivists.
This is not to say that persons with talent do not go out with deliberation in a specific direction. They do, but it is the talent that says "look!", "see!,"knows the opportunity or the vignette or scene, or arrangement, or composition and says: make art here; use this, arrange that and do thus; stand there, and make it. Talent knows the art before it is made.
Talent provides the impetus for learning the tedious and prosaic details of gear-mastery in order to actualize, fulfill it’s vision, not vice-versa. Its imperatives drive creation wherever, whenever it flashes, beyond any predetermined thought: a writer, e.g., may say that the story he began “went where it wanted to go,” to places that surprised even him, though it was he who had held the pencil or tapped the keyboard.
Talk around art can be rewarding, collegial, stimulating, and drive the nascent to grow or the lacking to imitate. But this is only worship and wistful chat about bottling the godhead.
More than an analog: here, Robert Pirsig channeling Aristotle (or not, as some have it) posited that “quality” (art, seen in one way) is undefinable: we know, recognize it, but are unable to say just what it is.
… you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. (ibid.)
And thus frustrated, we arrive bereft at which-hand-on-top, and an industry, an economy that is fundamentally entropic: vast sums spent that, absent actual talent, result only (however perfectly exposed) in records - images of lessor or greater success with the odd accidental triumph or simulacrum.
And so it must serve.
"If we have to talk so much about it, it can't be art. The best of art is felt, not discussed."
You can't talk about art.
“It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.”
- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I am looking in again this morning at a nearly two year-old topic on a very widely-read photography forum of international reach.
It began as a poll. At this writing there are at present 70 sober replies to the founding post, and just over one thousand five hundred views.
My stupefaction deepens as it gains weight each day. The topic is a serious query: Which hand is on top (of the camera) when one is shooting in the ‘portrait', the vertical position?
This is an extreme, lands-end, low-oxygen exemplar of the base conundrum of art: you can't talk about it.
You can talk around it. And which-hand-on-top is the gross irrelevancy where aspirant-artists/photographers end up when they do so.
They arrive there through exhaustion of the accessible near/quasi-art topics: the equipage, matériel, technology, techniques, history, sufferings and sacrifices for, trade in, record auction prices of, trends, gossip, schools, and even some structures or components of art. There is the aesthetic geometry of composition. There is the color wheel. There is the Zone System. There is the Nautilus-y Golden Ratio. These things can be taught. But no person can definitively state what it is that sounds emotive resonance in another and why or how to do it.
It gets not much better with sophistication or academic formality: read any book of art criticism and find anything about the actuality beyond faint footprints and a spore of coarse hair snagged on branches.
This phenomenon has symptoms. Comments on an engaging photo, e.g., are oddly stunted : “Well-seen!”, “Good capture!”, “Excellent! Reminds me of the work of ...”
We lack the vocabulary to plainly say what it is or how it was done, and we can’t make one. What art is might solely be of or in the provenance of God; a mute, unutterable mystery, with another – talent - at the core.
This ineffability is recognized elsewhere. The Taoist has it: He Who Knows Does Not Say, and He That Says Does Not Know. Authentic practitioners do not talk about it; they can’t. They simply do it.
Talent is the first and last Zero and One. Beyond, all else is formula, recipe, like the auto-exposure algorithms built into cameras. And while AE makes perfect exposure, it does not make divinity.
When present, talent comes in degrees and sizes, and can be developed beyond its birth
weight, but the zygote must be there first.
And the blessed are few.
For the unblessed, this is cruel, heartbreaking, because encountering, recognizing art engenders the desire to make it. That seeing/desiring makes for an industry of marketing evangelism, is the engine of camera-selling, suborning the longing of the lorn to hope and channeling it into spending.
If spending worked, your orthodontist would be Sudek.
Cameras, like pencils, are accessible, more accessible today than ever before. Yet there is only the same amount of excellence in writing as ever was, “unleash your creativity” pitches notwithstanding.
Talent sees the art before it is made.
Some posit that it can be forced into being through determination and practice. This is the whole Internet-arisen career and being of certain preachers of Street Photography, like, oh, the Reverend XXXX XXX, and like the Reverend, they have a theology, scriptures, rites, acolytes, of course, the Pay-to-go pilgrimage. But they are not the Word; not even John the Baptist, preceding and announcing the Word. They are imitating the sandals, hair shirt, sacrificial honey-and-locust-eating lifestyle of the Word, and the widespread hope that it is so gives them a certain presence and makes them a living.
Art, the art-drive, also does not know categories in any medium. Categories are irrelevant to any work's standing as art.
Categories (like ‘street photography’) were from the first ex-post-facto, describing materials, techniques, locus or thematic content, subject-groupings, or means of approach. A Dewey Decimal System for archivists.
This is not to say that persons with talent do not go out with deliberation in a specific direction. They do, but it is the talent that says "look!", "see!,"knows the opportunity or the vignette or scene, or arrangement, or composition and says: make art here; use this, arrange that and do thus; stand there, and make it. Talent knows the art before it is made.
Talent provides the impetus for learning the tedious and prosaic details of gear-mastery in order to actualize, fulfill it’s vision, not vice-versa. Its imperatives drive creation wherever, whenever it flashes, beyond any predetermined thought: a writer, e.g., may say that the story he began “went where it wanted to go,” to places that surprised even him, though it was he who had held the pencil or tapped the keyboard.
Talk around art can be rewarding, collegial, stimulating, and drive the nascent to grow or the lacking to imitate. But this is only worship and wistful chat about bottling the godhead.
More than an analog: here, Robert Pirsig channeling Aristotle (or not, as some have it) posited that “quality” (art, seen in one way) is undefinable: we know, recognize it, but are unable to say just what it is.
… you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. (ibid.)
And thus frustrated, we arrive bereft at which-hand-on-top, and an industry, an economy that is fundamentally entropic: vast sums spent that, absent actual talent, result only (however perfectly exposed) in records - images of lessor or greater success with the odd accidental triumph or simulacrum.
And so it must serve.
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Most people don't care about the photographer's personal issues or life history unless they're already famous. Until then, it's the work that counts. Atget described the pictures he took. He didn't mention he cut off his left ear while in the process. No one gave a damn about his left ear at that point. (Yeah I know - it was Van Gogh's ear. No one cared about his ear either until he became famous.)
you don't need 7 years, there are low Rez programs in photography as well. ..
in some programs it seems that older returning students have an advantage.
Tips for older MFA students going back to school - The Writer
Older MFA students seeking graduate degrees in creative writing prove that age really is just a number. Here are their tips for going back to school.www.writermag.com
My friend Mel Greifinger who passed away recently was a commercial artist and illustrator all his life He had a natural affinity for painting and never took classes until he retired. He told me it was amazing how much he learned that he didn't know.
He painted one of me in it photographing some geese. It was a figment of his imagination and a cloned picture, of course, allowed in painting. The geese weren't actually posing, It was Mel's sense of humor. This is a badly exposed picture of the actual painting which I own.
Shooting The Goose by Mel Greifinger
Shooting The Goose Painting by Mel Greifinger
fineartamerica.com
Mel used a couple of my landscape pictures for some of his work. Here's one that he did. I can assure you that the model was not in the viewfinder of my camera or anywhere else for that matter other than in Mel's imaginative mind. Artists have all the luck.
Comprehensive collection of old photos by Eugene Atget. 1,000.00 OBO.
1984 Yamaha Virago. It ran when I parked it 2 years ago. 1,000.00 OBO.
BFA degree. Hardly used. Will trade for MFA + cash.
1984 Yamaha Virago. It ran when I parked it 2 years ago. 1,000.00 OBO.
BFA degree. Hardly used. Will trade for MFA + cash.
Art is like sex. Best enjoyed not talked about.
You are contradicted by the fact that people do talk about art. Many people talk about it quite well.
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