Diverticulum Infected by the Landscape 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 18"
Hi Blurt,
In September, my good friend Mike who paints, had a solo exhibition in the gallery where I was a volunteer resident. We live in a small town with a university campus. I finally got fed up with the art professors pretending to be artists.
Stuckism Manifesto pretend precept # 21:
Art professors who don’t attend a colleague’s painting exhibition aren’t artists.
Or more succinctly:
Art professors are not artists.
Last Saturday night I attended Sullivan’s closing reception upstairs at the Art Association of Oswego. There was a high school studio invitational exhibit downstairs, with record attendance stepping out to view both shows.
I’ll be leaving the Art Association in my role as resident artist/administrator in early October, and that day cannot come soon enough. I am an artist, not an administrator, which about sums up the entire premise that administrators (of any stripe) are not artists, and vice-versa. I’ve been taking this in for years, as Sullivan has for a couple of his solo exhibitions that I am aware about. In my small city of 17,000 residents, I have been fortunate to live on the perimeter of a university hosting 7,000 students, 540 professors and 2,000 staff. Millions of state dollars pour into my backyard each year. I get all the perks that 600 acres of groomed grounds will provide, and bossy Canada geese, except they don’t have access to the million book library, indoor bathrooms or water fountains, yet. I can also audit a class with the professor’s permission. And he or she can count me as an actual student to increase class interest and job security. A mutually beneficial arrangement. A lot of late middle age and early onset diabetics take up the college on this offer while they begin to wind down toward retirement, seeking a passion in something, anything, that will help keep them ambulatory another decade, maybe two.
A few years ago, I audited a drawing class with an art professor from Spain. A renderer of distinction, actually. A man who can draw a dog wearing different expressions, or a monkey with a wry look. Rumor has it he once sold an animal painting to Sting, and that must have sent his departmental colleagues into night sweats of professional jealousy. For most, if not all studio art professors, are pining for that big break. Representation, or even, sweet manna from heaven, fame! Some keep to this dreaming in modern home studios (built on teaching money) shelved with art accoutrements that Picasso would have secretly killed for in 1907. Some keep applying (and getting accepted) to galleries that use CV’s (Correctly Vetted) to take the drastic financial risk of hanging art on a wall. All of them lie like rugs each and every class hour to wide-eyed students eating up art history with hopes of themselves some day making it into the coffee table books they’re reading.
And the professors continue to get paid for it.
Artistically speaking, a whopping amount of hush money. Ninety grand a year, long summers off, two weeks of arbitrary holiday pay that no other American has ever heard of (Thanksgiving recess?), personal days, sick days, a beyond-matching retirement fund, and class pride.
Now I believe as teacher-workers, they are entitled to this, like I believe any person working for a living in a super-economy is, or is not, depending on what the local environment can shoulder. That is, college art professors should make what excrement sweepers make—either equal-a-little or equal-a-lot. As long as our federal and state taxes can afford nuclear submarines and troopers with anger issues, all incomes must be equal (barring seniority) for jobs that society requires. Time is the precious commodity, whether it’s pickle ball or ax-throwing tastes working to buy that time. So, yes, these college professor incomes are only wrong because they are tiered, yet unfortunately, not only by seniority. An adjunct professor can work thirty years teaching drawing with pay topping off at $3,500 a class. And a (resume-assigned) assistant professor of art can teach the same class for ten years receiving $13,500 per class.
Seeds for class envy.
For the record, the art professor whose class I audited stuck blue tape on the pubises of young girls standing naked before their peers, while a fifty year old man (yours truly) thought he was caught in some Schindler’s List outtake of Nazi abuse. It was creepy, sooo creepy. Not traditional European, underpants Pope kind of creepy. Just creeeeepy. Like Sting.
At an $82,000/year salary.
Honestly, this week I’m not interested in reforming the political economy of the United States, no matter how right it is to pop the bubbles that keep us trapped. Nor am I seeking an arrest warrant for an art pervert. I’m just really pissed that none of Sullivan’s colleagues (besides a couple good friends he has worked with) came out to view the exhibition. They just get paid too much to pretend any longer that they’re artists. They are academics and should always be recognized as such as long as they remain academics. When I was a line cook, I was not an artist. Grading art history papers does not make one an artist. Struggle can help if one is struggling as an artist to make the art he or she hopes to make. Just making art does not make one an artist. My granddaughters make art, however they are not artists. Why? Because they have not yet made the choice not to be artists.
I have chosen to be an artist. I don’t want to teach people and I want to beg for my living. Presently I beg my wife for a living, and if she leaves me, I will beg for her alimony. And then I will beg for a garret and charity and influence that will sell my paintings. There is degradation in that choice. Hard truths for me to adjust to psychologically, let alone any art professor making 90 grand a year with summers off and regular bouts of administrative brain worms. Art professors don’t know an artists’ life. And I don’t pretend to know much about art professorship either, except for this: Only shitty teachers (maybe shitty people) would avoid a colleague’s expression of heart and soul without even a paltry excuse for not attending his Saturday night exhibition.
So much more to say on this subject.
For now I’ll head over to the Art Association, clean up a bit, and finalize my purchases of Sullivan’s paintings. It’s what artists do when they can’t afford it.
Actual Stuckist precept #20:
Crimes of education: instead of promoting the advancement of personal expression through appropriate art processes and thereby enriching society, the art school system has become a slick bureaucracy, whose primary motivation is financial. The Stuckists call for an open policy of admission to all art schools based on the individual’s work regardless of his/her academic record, or so-called lack of it.
We further call for the policy of entrapping rich and untalented students from at home and abroad to be halted forthwith.
We also demand that all college buildings be available for adult education and recreational use of the indigenous population of the respective catchment area. If a school or college is unable to offer benefits to the community it is guesting in, then it has no right to be tolerated.