After a few years of unemployment in the animation industry which had sent production overseas and to computers, also overseas, my wife mentioned that if I had gone back to school I would have a degree by now. Since I had three years at CSUN and San Diego State back in the day I had enough units to go to a junior college and get an AA degree fairly easily. So I did.
My degree was in Art which is vitally worthless especially at my age but when my now college-age sons would accuse me of never going to college, which I did, or that I dropped out, which I didn’t, I left due to illness (Chicken Pox, which at 21 is a real drag), I could tell them I was a college graduate, shut up and go to school.
Most of my classes were Art classes and in my Life Drawing class one of the older students, like myself, asked the teacher; “What makes something Art?” The instructor said he didn’t know, so I gave her my answer; “Art is 90 percent intent.”
The student wanted to hear that her homework assignment was as much “Art” as anything else but I disagreed, much to her chagrin. My believe is that Art is Art because it is made by an artist for the sole purpose of being Art. Much of what we consider great art today wasn’t considered art at all in its time. Today Frederic Remington and Norman Rockwell are highly collectible as fine art but they were actually magazine cover illustrators and Remington had a rather shoddy reputation during his lifetime. With the passage of time comes the passage of the memory of what the original intent of the artist was and only then can the work be judged on its own merits. No matter how great a painting may be, if it was originally commissioned as a magazine cover or a billboard advertisement it is Commercial Art not Fine Art. No matter how wonderful an art student’s assignment turned out it is a student assignment and not Art. It was not created by an Artist for the sole purpose of being a work of Art. What makes someone an Artist? An Artist is someone who creates for the sole purpose of producing works that expresses whatever he or she desires it to express, not for commercial gain, not what someone else wants and not to tell someone else’s story or sell their product.
My fellow student did not like being told she was an art student and that her class work was not fine art but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
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