I spent two years in a private art college that was full of sad, depressed post-modern teachers trying to teach art. Their students produced sad, depressing 'artwork'. It cost me a little over $3000 per class, per semester, to learn how to scrub gloomy, sooty portraits onto newsprint and hang around with sad, depressed people - students and teachers and staff and faculty! It rubbed off onto everyone!! They boasted a more than 60% job placement rate, but they failed to tell you that most of those graduates continued working their ditch-digging jobs for many years after graduation to pay off their student loans.
I dropped out because they weren't teaching me anything I didn't already know, yet my work was always inferior to theirs. I saw how it was all going by the middle of my second year and then, by the end of it, I was done. I passed one 'teacher' whom I particularly despised in the halls on one of my last days there and he warned me that if I failed to show up for just one more class he would have to fail me. I told him I didn't care. I didn't! Oh, the horror stories I could tell you... all the pretentious wanna-be teachers ... in short, all that time and money was a complete waste. I can relate to a lot of the stuff that I read in your site.
But it's no better down here. In the Florida Keys, people's ideas of what art is seems to be metal geckos, watercolor palm trees, watercolor seascapes and computer enhanced sunset photos. People who own galleries down here are the very people who shouldn't.
Ron German, Jr
Key West, Florida
