Open Letter to Some College Art Professors

My Drawing Teacher is From Spain 2016. Acrylic on panel, 20 x 16"

My gut feeling (which is often art) tells me day after day that many, maybe even most, college and university art professors are not artists themselves, although they craft pictures or sculptures from time to time. They are more like ministers of obsolete dogma in a practically defunct religion, like radio preachers, pretending a common and lazy vogue Christianity to make a living. I would feel sorry for them if so many weren’t so damn arrogant.
But is it truly arrogance?
I guess not. Though sometimes their mannerisms come off that way. Can creative people even be arrogant? We are often self-loathing, sure, which breeds a tendency to be catty in some social situations. I used to think that my local college art professors stayed away from my painting exhibitions because they were arrogant. Yet lately, after much thought about it, I believe it’s carefulness born from avarice which goads them to ignore my invitations. And “carefulness born from avarice” can hardly make “new” or “inspiring” art. One thing I know for sure. Art should bring people together. Therefore college art professors who do not exhibit to the community are not artists, per se, but rather, as any institutional job description would verify, players of art. They get paid to teach, some even by example. They may make wonderful images, sculpt beauty, perhaps manipulate digital media with the same attention medieval monks manuscripted. But these makers of things cannot be artists until they bring people together. Not by the force of college tuition, but rather through the playful and painful expression of their own intuition.
In my small city we have an art guild renamed an association some time ago. It is supported through yearly memberships and a rent-free grant from the mayor and city council. Each spring for the past twenty years it has hosted a juried exhibition open to entries from anyone living in New York State over 18 years of age, provided he or she thinks the art worth a $20 entry fee, which buys a yearly membership. There are perhaps 30 fine and digital art professors employed at the college. Oftentimes the juror is selected from this learned group—most are credentialed with terminal degrees earned in their mid to late twenties. The juror gets paid a modest stipend, judges the work to be entered, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Best in Show, and up to five Honorable Mentions, all receiving a small cash award, peaking at $300 for Best of Show.
Rarely do these professors submit their own work to be judged, though it is encouraged by the association. Several give direction to their students to apply.
Now why is that?
Because few of them are artists.
Anyone can make art—kids, students, moms, dads, celebrities, even cats I hear. But artists should bring people together. Even if it’s just a group of other image-makers in a barroom or a poker game. The writer in isolation can make art if the work completed gives meaning in expression to other human beings. But if he doesn’t get out once in a while with other expressive writers to be human among them, then nada as an artist. Art should bring people together.
I know from the grapevine that many of these professors apply for grants and/or exhibition opportunities from international institutions, in order to build resume and chalk up apparently concrete accolades from the most abstract and subjective of endeavors. If art success looks good on paper, a better retirement package ensues. A big thing among art teachers these days is to “go on residency”, and those applications want “professional” credentials listed, and a several page C.V. (stands for “correctly vetted”), because institutions cannot judge originality and meaning in expression—only individual people(s) can do that. I think the university stifles originality across all disciplines. It is especially debilitating when it turns sensitive, creative people (new art professors) into ladder-climbing automatons. This distortion of art and art principle gets passed down to pupils. And then a vicious circle.
But on a personal note... How dare these professors send their students to have work judged locally, and yet not join the same game out of mutual respect!
And yet, I still do not think it is born from arrogance.
Perhaps fear.
What if one of these students won Best in Show? How would that reflect on the professor’s residency application? I say very well if said professor was applying for a residency in the art and practice of pedagogy.
Another point. Art professors are not artists until they show their art at every possible opportunity. Especially locally. My goodness, where do these people think they live? Vienna? Paris? A 3-month long prestigious art retreat in Appalachia?
No. They buy eggs at the same convenience store I do. And for the record, I also send exhibition invites to the convenience store cashiers, yet they never attend. Maybe they graduated from art school, who knows? I expect those people who teach art to support image-makers outside the institution who help secure art teaching jobs jobs into the next generation. Artists make the art history of the future. We bring people together. We show paintings to the local clan. In any Neolithic community I’d be considered one of the clan artists. Those making private cave drawings to be seen first by elders of other clans from far away would be shunned like bad medicine, or maybe even banished from the clan.
I want to make it clear to the art faculty at my local college. Shame on you! When we cold share a beer, listen to some music, discuss art and artifice like human beings gathered together at local exhibition parties, very few of you are anywhere to be seen. Off building resumes that nobody gives a damn about. Some students are exhibiting their work at the art association, and painters like me will be there too. I hope your pupils can detect the irony of your absence, and vow to take a path less traveled by, to become artists themselves one day. I believe college art professors have the power to make revolutionary change to the face of any modern art. For god’s sake, you all have summer’s off and can afford materials! Do you truly believe there’s a single clan in Melbourne or Prague that wants to see anything you make? Their local institution might pretend to, but the people sense that the institution, like the university, is a very broken construct. Much art is created in universities and exhibited at institutions, but very few artists are ever made there.