Is De-Skilling Killing Arts Education?

Would it be accurate to complete the idea and say that it is about marketing & networking instead? The personality of the artist is just as much for sale as the "art".

Nothing is objectively art; art is always in the eye of the beholder, but it's only real art to someone if they would want it even if no one else ever saw it.

Take a toilet nailed to the wall. If the person who created this thing would have done so if he had known that no one else would ever see it, if he would have nailed the toilet to his own wall at home knowing that he was the only one who would ever see it just because HE HIMSELF wanted to look at it, then it really is art to him. It's not any art that I'm interested in, but that doesn't matter. All art is subjective. It is a genuine expression of his own esthetic desires. It IS art to him.

But if he would never consider such a thing for himself, if it's only part of a show he puts on for others in hopes of getting paid ("it speaks to the inhumanity of corporate greed...blah, blah" he explains greedily), then it's just a commercial product. If it's nothing he would have any interest in without the audience, but it's about getting attention, not money, then it's a publicity stunt, not art. To the artist, it's not art. (If it really is art to the artist, it can ALSO be a commercial product or publicity stunt while remaining art to him.)

And if the wealthy customer would have no interest in it if he couldn't show off his "statement" to others, then it's not art to him, either. It's some sort of signalling, or a commercial investment, or whatever, but it's not art to him. And if potential buyers knew that it was not even art to the artist, what might that mean to them?

Of course, I can't be sure what really is in someone else's mind, but if I doubt that the artist would sincerely want this poo-covered crucifix in his own living room for his private enjoyment, nor that the rich people swooning over its deep meaning would care if they couldn't show off their depth to their friends, it means I'm doubting that this piece of junk is really art to anybody.

I have an illustrator friend who would sure love to know how to get paid.

Like obscure results in computer science, few will bother to do so. Of those few who do, even fewer can translate it into something that has any impact on the general populace.

Dali was one of the few surrealists that connected to a large audience. Kandinsky is one of the few Bauhaus people to produce art accessible to a larger audience. Andy Warhol left a huge impact on the public as well - but again, not many pop artists did. All the above qualify as modern art, and all of them are approachable to a wider audience.

I'd argue that we see the same in CS. And I suspect that "approachability" is a function of time - we forget about all the ones who had no success, and remember the ones who did. It'll be interesting to see what people say about modern art 100 years hence.

Furthermore, what is unapproachable about a collection of furnace ducts? It's not to hard to understand. Just a pile of ducts. Does art always have present you with a puzzle to figure out, or contribute to some theory? Why can't I say "Look, a pile of ducts. Neat, huh?"

Just took a quick scroll through a popular portal:

http://butdoesitfloat.com/The-question-of-integrity-will-get... http://www.xavierhufkens.com/exhibition/2006-09-antony-gorml... http://butdoesitfloat.com/The-bastard-form-of-mass-culture-i... http://butdoesitfloat.com/The-randomness-to-which-mutation-t... http://www.stephan-balleux.com/index.php?id=2

There is so much of this it will take one weeks to wad through just the quality work. And then there is a huge sea of ugly dog vomit. Just as with any product category, if you put enough crap out there, someone will bite. If everyone sees mostly crap, they think this is as good as it gets and bite en masse.

The schools producing dog vomit artists are providing a valuable service to the art market by adding variety.

Is there a lot of pretense trying to sell art? Yes, absolutely - but it never lasts. Good contemporary art is exactly what you ask for. A solid foundation of skills used to completely abandon any conventional display of these skills.

The programming language used to create a program does not directly affect the user.

The skill of an artist does does directly affect the viewer of art.

The variance in field of competences in commenters is tiny here, and to add injury to it, there's a strong sentiment of "STEM == Good, all the rest is crap"

I was a music composition major (and a religion minor, aka traditionally seen as unemployable). My focus in college was mostly romantic and neo-romantic choral and piano + voice works. I never pursued it as a career, and a few years after college, I fell into (and in love with) programming. The very, very first thing I noticed as I was learning various paradigms was the unbelievable similarity between writing code and composition. I'm not going to belabour that point because I feel that it's been expounded upon enough (code is a creative art, etc.), but what astounded me further was then having code discussions with music colleagues of mine that have minimal exposure to any sort of programming / computer skills whatsoever, and having them keep up and contribute as if it were just another division of the arts.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that intelligent people with creative, inquisitive minds can totally hold their own in conversations about topics they may not have a background in because when it comes down to it, there's a whole lot of similarity between art and code. Don't write folks off just because of their collegiate foci.

If we started talking about the relative merits of different types of paintbrush then it might be more analogous to fine arts majors talking about compilers. That's a discussion for producers, not customers, but the quality of art on the market is a question for customers, not producers.

Art that can only be "appreciated" by other artists is a bit of a wank, and I guess the analogy is programs that only a programmer can appreciate [1], like an Ook compiler written in Brainfuck or the Obfuscated C contest. It's okay for the occasional kick, but if you spend your entire career making stuff that has no utility and no appeal outside your immediate in group then you're wasting your time and might as well be making lolcats.

It should be noted that the vast majority of visual artists working today aren't producing wanky stuff that gets exhibits in galleries and never finds actual paying customers. They're out there producing pleasant-looking landscapes and things that people pay good money to hang on their walls. Or else they're graphic designers or working in the advertising industry, making good money doing something useful to somebody. Sticking a dead horse on the floor of a gallery gets you more headlines than flogging off a load of $200 watercolours of beaches, but the latter is the majority of the actual art industry.

[1] Note: not the same thing as a program that only a programmer finds useful, just something useless that amuses other programmers.