I am a studio art and history double major at NYU. With all the history classes, date-memorizing, theory-producing, and research-doing, I still consider my art major the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do.
“But you’re just painting,” I’ve heard people say.
First of all, it is a fallacy to assume that contemporary art is drawing, painting, and sculpture. Sure those still make up a lot of artists working today, but now there’s a “new” concept of film, video, audio, performance, digital painting, digital manipulation, and photographic art. (I say new because painting, drawing, and sculpture has been around since our cave-dwelling days, meanwhile photography, the oldest of the aforementioned mediums, has only been around since the 1830s. Really, 190 years isn’t that long.)
But art school, honestly, is hard work.
Not only do art students have to spend tons of money on art supplies (I’ve compared with my friends, it’s more than textbooks), we have to haul all of our stuff back to our tiny dorms where they now take up half our space.
Then when you get to class, it’s never just drawing. Every bit of work you do is graded on how much effort you put in and how developed your thought process is. And trust me, professors can tell if you half-a#$ed it. Pretty much, this means spending anywhere from five to forty hours on a piece. If you’re oil painting, sculpting, or working on an oversized work, this time must be spent in the studio.
And now, since the rise of Modernism in the late 19th century, not only do you have to display skill and style, all of your pieces have to have meaning and thought behind them. And you better believe it has to be a new thought, or at least a new way of thinking.
And then there are critiques. A whole class period is spent on pointing out everyone’s mistakes and shortcomings and you have to get up there and defend every second of your thought process and method to the class and the professor (who, at least in my school, is always a working artist). You generally end up leaving feeling dejected and not as good as your classmates.
On top of that, we also have readings. As a history major as well, I do a lot of reading, but I would often trade my art reading for three times my history reading. Art theory is hard and our readings span anything from classic literature to post-modern French philosophy. A professor said that his readings are generally the hardest a student will ever get. The readings are dense, long, and hard to understand. And the whole point of our reading assignments is to confuse us. We’re given all of these insanely complex packets in order to force us to think of something new. Generally, for one art theory class, I have to budget about five to six hours to read forty pages.
Not just anyone who’s good at art can make it through art school. You have to be able to deal with failure and criticism and you have to be able to change your way of thinking, and most importantly, you have to love it.
This is not to say that chemistry, physics, law, and English degrees are not hard. This is only to say that art degrees and art students really should not be given the bad rep they have. We really work just as hard as anyone else and we deserve to be recognized as such.
