The pain of an art degree: 2013 vs 2024
Tracey Emin via Rene Magritte at Spike Island…I’m so sorry but I didn’t get this person’s name!
I did my Fine Art degree at UWE, and graduated 11 years ago. I undertook my degree unwillingly, and after 3 years of setbacks, deferrals, and working in a country-ass pub. I was still reeling from a pivotal point in my little bitty artist life - being rejected from *all* the important universities I applied for. It sounds spoilt, but it was genuinely the first time in my life, ever, that I’d been told I was effectively bad at art and I was literally crushed. Queue me working in pubs for a year, removing all traces of art and artists from my life for two years and not making a single thing, save for a birthday card of 50 Cent and Lil Wanyne snogging.
I deferred a place at UWE, which I deemed irrelevant, by pulling up in a car at the halls, crying and refusing to get out. Spoilt? Toys out of the pram? Moi???? Still got my first installment of the student loan tho x
When I finally arrived, after another year of art-life expungement, I just couldn’t be arsed. The magic of art had been taken away, I was living in a house of non-student friends outside of the city. I didn’t connect with anyone except Ishshah, who I did a sardonic send up of Lucas and Emin’s Shop with in the first year, before she left to raise her babies. After that brief moment of fun, the next three two were a battle. No one was ever in the studio, and there was an almost crippling overtone of conceptuality to the course and everyone’s work. Looking back now, it forced a time of experimentation and exploration, but it was all coloured with apathy and depression. My work was cynical and I intentionally used cheap kitschy crap, didn’t draw, didn’t paint. I categorically didn’t make the most of my time there and I’ve regretted it.
unreal bit of text treatment/colour combo…again I didn’t write their name down
Fast forward a fucking DECADE and I’m now making and teaching art for a living. It’s important to go and see what is coming out of the art machine right at the source, seeing what people make after their own experiences of uni, which I hope were more useful than mine (no shade to the art dept at UWE, it was aaalll me).
The work at Spike Island is much more varied now - there are text pieces, ceramics, fabrics, figurative work (god forbid!) but also: yes, there are still things made of cheap kitschy crap. There is still a huge amount of making things political, or meaningful, or conceptual, or weird. It is art school, after all. There are obvious links and spoofs, which makes me wonder - does everyone who makes art have a problem with the art scene, and the art that has come before them? Does everyone who makes art secretly hate that they are art school, as if it somehow makes them just the latest in a long line of people being churned out by art? Is everything destined to be a wry pastiche of the better, more famous work that has come before them? You only need to look at the petulant moans of some of the White Pube’s articles which would make you think: probably, yes.
The thing that struck me, after going to visit the much more joyful, skilful and I’m afraid to say, much better Graphics degree show at the Arnolfini, is how much money is a factor in Fine Art. It’s easy to make a slick-looking book or giclée print at your uni’s print department. It’s much harder to make an installation piece, with microphones and projection, with the paltry peanuts left of your student loan. Cheap kitschy crap is all that most people have available to them, it’s all they can afford - that was true 11 years ago, god only knows what it’s like for students now. I wonder if this is part of the intrinsic tongue-in-cheek references to the art world, the eye-rolling or embarrassment you can sense in some, if not most, of the work.
omg I literally didn’t write down any of these artist’s names, PLEASE get in touch if you know who did this!!
The other thing I came away thinking about was how unbelievably different it must be to finish a degree in 2024. I got my first iPhone about a month before I finished uni. I didn’t have Instagram, Tiktok was just a twinkle in ByteDance’s eye, and Tumblr still had porn. I had little outlet to share my art, and I wasn't being pummelled with countless bits of visual information on an hourly basis. Kylie Jenner wasn’t even a thing yet. I’m not saying this to be like “omg I’m so old, how times have changed” although yeah, but I can’t even conceive of trying to eke out your little baby artist soul in the world right now. I can’t imagine how you can even develop originality, shirk trends, invent true newness, when your whole life (or at least from young teenagerhood) has involved Instagram and other image-based apps with infinite scroll.
It made me marvel at what art is now, and what it will become, as artists are constantly coloured by visual trends, policed by censorship, encouraged to embrace AI, overshadowed by constant comparison. It feels like I’m being bleak here, but I genuinely have no idea how it will pan out. Artists need to spend their lives getting as close to a truth as they can. Some people spend their whole lives trying to paint the true quality of light on an apple in a fruit bowl. Some people search for truth in a video piece exploring queer love via images of meat on hooks. It’s not up to anyone else what truths an artist should discover, or how they should go about it. But the search for truth, the discovery of it, the exploration, experimentation, pondering and mistakes that come along the way: that is art. I worry that new artists, early career artists, even established ones will begin to forget the search for truth, the search for soul. The joy of authenticity. If you can’t tell if you actually like those trainers, or you just saw them on Tiktok, imagine the effect on your creativity, your artistic soul. Are you making a reel because you want to, or because you have to, or should? And why does all your work fit a 3:4 ratio instead of landscape? And why are you using an airbrush badly anyway?
Who knows what will happen next, for my art, for anyones, for art as a thing. It’s a feeling of wandering into the complete unknown, but one that you feel like you should know. Walking into a house that you thought was your mate’s at 4am, where everything is laid out kinda the same, but wait… wasn’t the sofa over there? What’s that weird smell? They don’t have orange walls do they? Are we…are we in the wrong house? Did we used to live here? Will we still live here tomorrow?
