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Comment by pasabagi | Hacker News Reader

As somebody who's done a lot of life drawing, and a lot of classical stuff in general, I see the reason why it's no longer central to the curriculum. Ultimately, drawing is just another tool, just like stonecarving, crochet, or dance, and life-drawing is a practice that is good training for a specific use of that tool - portraiture - that was the economic lifeblood of art until daguerreotypes came on the scene.

So really the odd thing is not that they stopped doing life drawing classes. The question is, why did they continue for so long? It would be rather like doing an engineering course where a core competence was the construction and maintenance of steam engines.

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> life-drawing is a practice that is good training for a specific use of that tool - portraiture

> The question is, why did they continue for so long?

Well, as said in the original quote, it's apparently also good for internalizing a sense of weight for animation. So presumably they continued at least in part because it's good for things that aren't as obsolete as portraiture -- animation isn't the only way to make money in art these days, but it's not exactly in low demand.

I'd wonder why they dropped it, but at a guess, it's some combination of low demand (first they make it non-required, then students who don't realize the broader applicability stop taking it) and higher cost (you need to hire one or more models).

Well, the Slade is a fine art school - so animation is sort of the 'bad end', where you give up on being a 'real artist' and get a job. But yeah, definitely a lot of the animation/cgi stuff tends to lean a lot heavier on the classic sculpture/draughtsman skillset. That's actually one of the things I really enjoy about it.

I think the arts are in a weird situation because they're sort of like an ascended craft. Basically, when the bread-and-butter of portraiture died, art had enough social clout to be able to survive without it, doing just art, without any particular service attached. That rapidly unpinned art from any particular set of skills - so now you get artists who do dance, or cut holes in buildings, or send postcards.

So while some of the traditional craft side of art has value to other industries, it's not really that important to what art has become.

Computer Science (usually at least in my experience) both teaches programming and expects proficiency in programming.

My friends who did mechanical engineering had to take classes on tool making.

Meanwhile nowadays you have metal sculpturers who cannot weld.

My friend who was in art-adjacent school did had to do huge amount of technical exercises. It is just not true that artists nowadays don't learn fundamentals. They do, plenty of them both directly relevant to what they will do and not relevant. Pretty much all art schools spend a lot of time on it.

Not the same ones as you would pick perhaps.

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