It would have served the students better had they been in a drab building, with a good northern exposure, mind you, and that money spent on giving them a far better education than the dreary and pedantic fools that are most art faculty.
Were I to be in charge of such an art school, much of the curriculum would be devoted to art history and recognition. A second part would be in the skills need to reproduce the great art of the past. The third part in transcending just the manipulation of the known, to achieving truly creative inspiration.
For this third part, the students would need an understanding of things not usually associated with art, such as science, mathematics, and statistics. The underlying purpose of this would be to expand their media to include phenomenology and illusion. To restore a respect for art as a form of magic.
Great art must in some way be hypnotic, not just complex. It must be able to fixate a viewer, and compel them to ask how was this done?
Today, much of art is crude efforts at basic emotional stimulation. To make the viewer feel something, usually out of just element recognition. To a great extent it is meager efforts to be offensive, with crass references to politics, religion, and pop culture.
Those of you who have visited a better city science museum have seen much better examples of proto-art. Imagine converting some of this phenomena into art of enjoyable illusions? Art which does not answer the viewers question of “how did they do it?” Art which tickles the senses and the mind and creates a sense of wonderment.
This is what ancient cave paintings did. And it is no wonder that they are still seen as the first works of art in the world.
Visitors who see the works of an artist should be as fixated as if they had been given a tour of the inside of a UFO. Every detail must be scrutinized and puzzled over, a mystery that might not ever be solved. Magic.
Wow! And I always figured art was something I would pull out of the trash instead of leaving it for the garbage man.
“Were I to be in charge of such an art school, much of the curriculum would be devoted to art history and recognition. A second part would be in the skills need to reproduce the great art of the past. The third part in transcending just the manipulation of the known, to achieving truly creative inspiration.”
You’d have teachers lined up from across the world to teach there - but you’d have to screen carefully to keep out the monsters who have taken over and destroyed art education in the country, turning it into a self-serving, selfish means of throwing temper tantrums at whatever one is unhappy about, or puerile “political” expression.
If even ONE gets in, it’s over, they’re like cancer. Next thing you know, you’ll have a union forming (this would have to be a private school), there would be political protests being held on a regular basis, and the general mood on campus would go from happy, excited and positive to moody, sneering, and sullen.
I’m not entirely sold that college, or at least the way we structure college, is the best way for an artist to learn their trade and their art. The greatest artists of all time were trained in the studios of master artists, and were started at a young age, and they lived, breathed, and worked art, along with lessons in the other disciplines, from a young age. They learned by taking part and helping prepare the studio and later help complete commissions for the master, until they proved they could compete and then became journeymen.
Today’s educational system is too pampered, too full of PC gook, to produce great artists. They are all engaged ina race to appease their art teachers, and their art teacher’s worldview and politics and sexual identity, and it’s producing poor quality artists and dreck art.
This school is just another cog in that machine. It will serve as any other private art school does - to pamper arrogant yuppie spawn, babysit them so they don’t burn down Mommy and Daddy’s McMansion (in LA, Mommy’s McMansion, dad was kicked out long ago), and take their tuition to pay for the professor’s indulgent lifestyle. It will be like any other private art school in the country, it will be blocks and blocks of angry, sullen, pierced, red-dyed hair, black wearing, silver jewelry wearing, dreadlocked teenagers smoking cloves or worse and generally clogging up the streets. Go to class? Why, maaaaan, the real education in in th streets, maaaaan, my professor said so.
Yay.
Why would you want to reproduce the art of the past?