ABOVE: left, detail of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks; right, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. The Chronicle of Higher Education says art students are now trained to be “half-baked social scientists,” rather than serious artistes. Zing!

The world is going to hell in a handcart. Art students these days would rather slather themselves with paté and shave weasels inside a plexiglass box suspended in the Tate Modern foyer than sit quietly with a bit of charcoal and sketch the wonder of nature. Art schools have abandoned craft for flash, trashed their still-life seminars, embraced theory and concept instead of good, wholesome drawing and painting. It’s true: we read it in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Apparently you can buy water in bottles now, too, instead of digging your own well. And those horseless carriages are awfully popular these days. It’s a crazy old world, dontcha know!

The Chronicle, which might as well rename itself Harrumph Weekly, for the number of these ridiculous kids-these-days essays it runs, says that art schools are getting weaker on craft and skill and emphasizing superficial individual expression and theoretical wankery. OK, point taken, there are art school students graduating right now who couldn’t sketch a bowl of pears if you put a gun to their heads, but let’s have a little perspective. That which is new is not automatically inferior to that which is old. The world already contains an awful lot of oil paintings depicting bowls of pears, and perhaps it’s OK to take a breather for a bit. We’ve worked on charcoal sketches of voluptuous nudes for, oh, about a billion years, so perhaps we can have the conviction and the patience to experiment with this video art thing for another decade or so and see if it pans out. They’re really into tradition over at the Chronicle, but they seem to believe it’s awfully fragile.

Also, that Joyce reference in the headline: totally original thinking, guys. Bravo.

LINK: The Chronicle of Higher Education > A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess [via ArtsJournal]