The interpretation of demography is one of very few ways we can orient ourselves amidst the blather of a political season that grows filthier by the day. So, since our futures are on the line, we shall take our lead from the statisticians as we attempt to parse, then understand, the ____ MFA class of 2008. This is what we want to do, and this is what we need to do. It is important that we classify the graduates as clearly as we can, and the best way to start is with what we know to be fact.
The class of 2008 is made up of eleven women and seven men. They all appear to be in their twenties (I didn’t ask, but there aren’t any grayhairs in the group). They come from all around the country and the world. So do their undergraduate degrees. And, well, yes. That’s what we got for certain statistics, so we shall broaden to faithful analysis.
From speaking with them at an epic and focused series of studio visits last month, I believe that the 2008 ____ MFA students’ day-to-day creative acts are concretely contained by the following concerns:
Several students are interested in organic phenomena and nature, which leads to questions of ecology and destruction as well as the line of rural-urban existence and its intermediary, suburbia.
Several students speak of otherness and foreign culture, which may hold the patina of exported or carried memory and its particular style of dreamed beauty, and often leads to proud or shameful narratives of oral histories, to politics, conspiracy, and at the extreme end, to grudges.
Hysteria or delirium is an avenue available to several students. It is produced by frazzling cocktails of drugs, computers, rootlessness, and contemporary capitalist culture, in varying measures, and it is reflected in a world of objects piling up around them.
Several students pay closest attention to issues of architecture, design, and engineering. They ply this craft through improvisation or apprenticeship, and their creations gather under the neat umbrella of precision and accuracy.
Anxiety, corporeal and cultural, affects several students’ approaches. They are drawn to questions of voyeurism and visions of bleakness from personal to cultural, and to swamps of disgust and grotesquerie. Unpleasant discoveries, either accidental or willed, inform their work.
Several students refine muscularity and pride, too, where positive body strength bubbles up for results, where an unbridled decisive act creates amazing power and, sometimes, clarity.
Performance and play engages several students. They insert themselves into their frames to be cute, sexy, witty, or intense, to comment face-to-face and to allow their art to be their mirror.
Bravo for bearing with the dry facts, for now you know what the class of 2008 is thinking about. It’s great to know what they are thinking about! This list gives only half the story, of course. Many of these students embody a number of these attitudes at once or, at least, a few of them, like a big Venn diagram that resembles the Olympic rings—a good, genuinely beautiful thing. To group them in such a way is neither condescending nor flip. I listened attentively to everything they had to say, and these are the beats they project in their words and output. I was delighted to spend time with them, and was eager to report their interests.
As we pause now to look at this panoply of hard work, let’s consider the fruits of their last two years, and be grateful for the pleasure.
THEY ARE FEW
Art schools, sometimes, are schools of thought, where many members of the gang grapple with similar problems. In the recent past one could look to the industrious magical realists at the Art Academy of Leipzig in the late ’90s (nearly forgotten now, for some reason), or fleet-footed and light-hearted Goldsmiths, in London, in the late ’80s, or cheeseball Gregory Crewdson’s hot and media-friendly Yale students, whose school reunion effectively took place with the opening of 1999’s Another Girl, Another Planet, at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, in New York. These groups were easy to hear and understand because they presented their messages in bold chorus, with enough to differentiate them from one another that people could stay interested and have a fave, as one does with the Beatles, or the Pussycat Dolls.
The MFA program at ____ in 2008 is not like the Beatles or the Pussycat Dolls. The candidates aren’t unified in pursuit of channeled goals. They do get along with each other remarkably well—I’ve happily heard giggles and “dude” floating over the drywall cubicles—and they aren’t vindictive, but they don’t seem to share any sense of what they’re supposed to do next. They aren’t unsupportive of one another, but they are unable to form a support network, for they can’t tell what they are in support of.
The institution accounts for some of this confusion. The university lacks an über-charismatic professor, a John Baldessari, or William Coldstream, or J.B. Jackson, a personality so inspiring and strong that many students embrace an acolyte’s status and ready themselves for a fun surf in the master’s slipstream. Beyond the faculty, the university doesn’t draw international hotshot dealers and curators who poke about the studios around this time of year, with their famous notebooks, ready to remember—slightly older people in smart clothes who, with a few swishes of the pen, can give the student their professional clue and their cue from the wings, their first leg up in New York, or Los Angeles, or London, or Berlin, or any place where commercial galleries and kunsthalles and collectors gather and young artists are nourished.
These are not necessarily bad things.
The inhabitants of the institutions account for some of this confusion. The graduates of 2008 belong to a race that is buoyant and healthy like never before. MFA students are multiplying at an astonishing rate, with thousands of them now—new ones, and more of them—every single year. Picture a seminar, a roundtable smoker, single-bulbed, with some sage softly imparting knowledge and starting conversation with a handful of confidantes. Then, picture a seminar with almost forty students in folding chairs or leaning against the wall, where a teacher can notice a student for the first time halfway into the semester, where a teacher can miss a student altogether. These programs are heaving at the seams. A lot of young people in America have art-angel dreams and harbor fantasies of the style and stylishness of art school, and professional artists have slowly acquired respectability among those influential guardians of adolescence, parents and guidance counselors. Admission policies adapt to the demand without hesitation…why wouldn’t they? And suddenly we are living in a world in which a higher art degree is as conventional as that in any other discipline, exactly as dull or as interesting on a first-date resumé or a job interview as economics or politics or science, a world where the scrappy and malnourished art student in outré garb is no longer an anomaly on campus, for the bullnecked athlete or toothy valedictorian is as likely as they to be wearing torn or paint-flecked jeans. Art students are no longer weirdos or enigmas. They are a well-established and comfortable population of their own.
This, too, is not necessarily a bad thing.
The nomenclature of “artist” is no longer synonymous with impairment or delicacy because they are no longer special cases and no longer represent a measly sliver of the cultural population pie. (The current marquee critics of the art-world lecture circuit are swinging this increasingly hoary anecdote around: There was a time [clears throat] when there were one hundred artists in the world and ten collectors, and yea, my lambs, it wasn’t that long ago.) In 2008, the job of young contemporary artist is an unextraordinary mass grind and, as such, it’s pretty much the same as everybody else’s day jobs. The artist is one among equally qualified thousands, and everyone brings home a check, at least enough to keep the lights on.
What, then, of the ____ MFA class of 2008? I do not think that they are an emerging school of stars who will storm the art world when the big dealers, with tans and subtle summer paunch, pull up their storm shutters for the season’s start this September. And I cannot tip you off to a work that’s a quick, slick investment, even though I frequently buy and sell art professionally. I will say that any one of them can make a living as an artist, as long as they continue to work hard, but who cares? Any one of them could make some sort of living as a professional athlete, if they continued to work hard at it. I am writing these words from a brown hotel room’s desk next door to an international art fair, a big money place where I have been lurking all week. And I’ll happily report that there’s room here for the souls of the eighteen students of the ____ MFA class, since much of their work is already superior to that of many young professionals gathered at this dumb convention. If you want to start competing, though the field is only getting bigger and it’s getting bitchier by the year, go for it! You could definitely get paid!
At this juncture, though, I am going to strongly suggest that the ____ class of 2008 take a very different approach to its art career.
Their splintered essence is their strength. Emotional complexity is a universal in their art, and this must not be taken for granted, for this is not a given in fast-moving, competitive, high stakes are times. It was easy and a pleasure to list their empirical concerns at the start because the students shared deeply-felt, complicated matters with me, concerns that they telegraphed clearly as they worked in their studios. The work is never pointless or hollow—quite the reverse. They insist on communicating the contents of their brains, and it’s enlightening to discover what they care about. More than this, it’s heartening to know that a conscience is driving the art that they make.There is no better time than now, since our futures are on the line, to make art that favors content over style.
Art is increasingly less a cultural force and more homogenous fodder for someone else’s force, be he the moneyman, the critic, or the dealer. Art is a very useful commodity to people who love money because artists’ ability to sell anything to anybody is at an almighty apogee.
Cleaning our hearts of this disgusting arrangement, there is no better time than now for young artists to divide into tribes, to build small nations from their giant whole and help design society on multiple fronts instead of feeding the machine bland, disposable coal, and there is no better time than now to burrow into a niche and silently figure out new problems for art to solve. There is no better time than now for young artists to stop undermining each other, and this group is leading that charge. This group has the ability to reject the mass-culture, mass-market existence that is fast becoming the norm exactly because they have stayed as confused as they are. No one has bullied them into making art a certain way, and no one has promised them fame in exchange for simplicity and stylishness. I’m left without any advice to give them about how to make money this fall, but I believe they are working in a way that is honest and may, eventually, be heard clearly, and be special. As I look at the work of this class, I see ideas that are on their way to getting weirder and more complicated, because competing in today’s grand commercial art race is less important to them than expressing their feelings in full. And that, like our Olympic rings, is an inherently exciting proposition, one that will help us learn to tell the difference, once more, between that which is great and that which is fleeting.