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Comment by kryten | Hacker News Reader

Do you really need to be taught art?

Firstly, it's subjective which means you can't necessarily be taught it and then be graded accordingly. Secondly, it's something which comes with only practice. Cramming it in a set time period in a degree/course utterly fails to consider the individual. Also, none of it is formal or deterministic. Art history perhaps, but that's not art.

My grandfather did terribly in art at school and was graded as an utter failure and his teacher told him he was totally hopeless. A few years later, driven by this, he made an absolute fortune selling his work and has illustrated many well known books as well. He's now dead, but in his last will and testament there was "fuck you Mr Brickett", directed at his art teacher :-)

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Do you really need to be taught art?

Of course you don't need to be taught art, any more than you need to be taught engineering.

There's no reason an aspiring young engineer couldn't just discover Maxwell's equations for himself, and then continue to derive the rest of physical law. It will just take him a little bit longer, is all.

Brilliant iconoclasts are the exception. Less-than-brilliant iconoclasts are generally called "failures", and they are quite common.

When I failed high school art (thanks to the mechanics of the International Baccalaureate, it's a long story), I was surprised and upset. But in fairness, I knew very little about the science and craft that supports art. I was an overgrown doodler.

My art teacher tried to console me by saying that many of history's greatest artists had failed out of art schools. He was unamused when I brought up a Godwinning counterexample of art school dropouts.

I knew trumpeter who got kicked out of his funk band because he thought he was Miles Davis. Turns out he was just too lazy to learn the fundamentals and was constantly noodling around instead of learning how to enhance the music he was playing.

Art is subjective, that doesn't mean there isn't valuable knowledge to be learnt.

Art school is no different than any other academic institutions; you get an assignment sheet with a breakdown of what you're supposed to do and if you don't follow those guidelines you get an F. The hardest part of this for most artists is the artist statement (the concept of the piece) and the defense thereof in critique. This is likely where your granddad struggled.

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