Should I do a masters?

MFA programmes and a video by a not-wrong but certainly annoying american.

This video, made by a channel called ‘the Yearbook Commitie’ as part of their series ‘Scorned by muses’, is a bit patronising to say the least. The host has been invited to view a masters exhibit of paintings, after he made the low-hanging comment of “while there seems to be endless masters of fine art, there are no masterpieces”.

It’s the type of comment I would have rolled my eyes at in uni. And this seems to be the case, in the video, the students don’t have much confidence in their voice, apart from one girl who says frankly far more intelligent things than the host was saying. But yet she did end up talking herself in a wild dance, making no conclusions. The more she went on rebutting him - veering into statements that wouldn’t make any sense to anyone but a fine arts student currently neck deep in Deleuze and Guattari, and the dizzying language it takes to even attempt to catagorise what a painting does - the more he could stick his heels in and give off the air that “this doesn’t make sense to me therefore it is bad”. Throughout the video he gets different students perspective on the masters programme, and they struck a chord with me, lost in this narrow but highly specific world, like an extremely niche hobby, they carry a nihilism about how to translate any of this to the world or make anything of it in the market of ideas and culture. In uni it would make me laugh, “we’re all insane arseholes”, as I saw this little incubation of pretention and grand statements, minds so open they might fall out. Our ivory tower, our fantasy land. I knew it was not the real world. But it also wasn’t necessarily a lie, it was just so specific we got shut off from the world outside.

I have been out of my undergraduate degree for nearly a year now, still making art almost everyday, trying to learn wherever I can; from my job at the Library, from podcasts, from youtube videos - sometimes made by students of fine art-, from books, from going to openings, talking to other artists, trying to get my friends over for a critique. I try to learn from my flatmates and the patrons to the library. From my friends who never did fine art but instead did sensible things like nursing and engineering and finance. I want to meet as many people as I can and ask them what they think, of art. And while the host is entirely too patronising of these students, their brilliant paintings, and highly specific field of research (which is technically what a masters degree is), he does hit at an idea that is common. The illegibility, the saturation, and more importantly the isolation, of Fine Arts academia, is what stops it from ever catching a pulse of the current culture; to anyone who hasn’t been there, it seems stuffy, elitist, or just unintelligible.

The host ends the video with the comment “So it seems for these contemporary painters the grand narratives have truly ended. History itself has ended. And what of the art academy? It’s a closed loop. A factory which produces teachers who will teach the next generation of teachers. The academy then becomes an end in itself. A safe harbor for the artists who might want to ignore the stormy sea of history. A place for those not brave enough to batten down the hatches and take the helm, but history continues and with any luck it will leave the artists behind and fashion the world anew.”

What a c*nt! My very bones need to disagree with him. These painters are beautiful and pure, hiding themselves away and focusing only, and intensely, on painting. But then why haven’t I gone back to do a masters? I remember when I left art school, there was a bit of a tizz from a friend about how they were all “shunning” the institution by not going back for postgrad. All I thought in my decision was “I can’t actually remember if I learnt anything, I guess I’ll see what I can teach myself”. Not to make grand statements far too big for my boots but, I wanted to make work that existed primarily out in the world.

But then theres this moment in the video where the student says “i think the most you can hope for from a masters program is someone to talk to”. And thats it isn’t it? It’s not what you learn, what you do, thats only part of the equation; its the people that make it, the community, the shared interest, encouragement, support, and ideas. It’s true of anything. And so I’ve ended up back at a maxim I love to bring out whenever someone lets me on a soapbox for a minute: People are the Point.

It is ultimately true that artists ‘out in the world’ need the beautiful obsession of critical art theory to eventually read their work and bring it to the high brow cannon, and to be able to learn what it is their work is actually supposed to be doing. And the artists in the MFA and the PHD programmes need the artists outside of them to show them the world and the culture and what it values, to give them the ‘history’ as its happens, to show them its not over. We depend on each other, enrich each other. An ecosystem of work that digests and shows each other new ways of looking at theory or memory or the world around us. It all counts.

The titular question here isn’t really the point, but I guess I could conclude; Should I do a masters? I’ll see what people are doing.