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What function do art schools fulfill?

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#1

Do we really need them?

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#2

where else can we go to meet people who have vague life directions and a definite preference towards idleness??

(the fact that most of us do //resentfully// become productive members of society has no bearing on the glorious years spent idly daydreaming, taking naps, skipping classes, learning & unlearning & learning again - bodies, things, selves, otherselves etc which to a select few, can be extended through graduate school or sheer combination of luck, talent, opportunity that turns into non-productive members of society but productive members of art)

#3

In The Right to be Lazy, LaFargue quips “Under the regime of idleness, to kill the time, which kills us second by second, there will be shows and theatrical performances always and always.” Me and my students slaughter time and also decorate it. It isn’t noble. But it isn’t wicked…we take ourselves out of the violence of conservative campus life for the duration of our class. In class, no one is brokering, rushing (a fraternity), raping, or converting. This autumn, in her studio, my student considers the black rainbow as a new symbol to resist gay assimilation and this work originates from an assignment (a marker of the schooled world). She uses this free program as a space to incubate the perverse- a liberatory perverse. I hope to be an arbiter of perverse strategies as an instructor within a faulty institution.

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#4

“Why wouldn’t an arty bitch like myself just be an artist if she wanted to, instead of attending art school where she acquires debt and, um, an obsession with failure.”@CaseyJaneEllison

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#5

only free-of charge art schools are needed. all others fulfil the function of creating debt.

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#6

I really appreciate my undergraduate education (Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). I studied endlessly and feel like I did the best that I could with my resources at that institution. Essentially my education pulled me out of middle America and put me where I am now–New York, working a hard, freelance job with not a great salary by Western standards, and in a lot of debt. For years, I wondered what I would be doing if I hadn’t taken this path. Would I have had kids in my early 20s? Would I continue to be miserable and stay in Ohio? Would I have actually become a real adult, and not someone forcing adolescence ~30?

I think going to art school, albeit in an academic program, was the best and worst decision of my life!

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