alizarin

Hi grad_wannabe --- I think you're absolutely right in what you said about one's place of study and the influence that it will have on future connections. I'm thinking that the situation is not as black and white as it had been described: it's not as though one's place of study would dictate his or her location after graduating. For instance, not all SAIC alums stay in Chicago, same for RISD and Providence. On the topic of buying students, I just can't get behind the language being used. If all of the top schools were paying us to get our MFAs, and if we went to the top bidder without any agency in the matter, then I would agree that we've been purchased. But in this circumstance, schools are lowering the amount of money that some people pay to get the degree and it's part of a more complicated equation in which the student decides among a variety of factors. True, costs are lowered competitively, but I wouldn't call it a meat market just yet.

Anyone get selected for VCU Photo? I was curious about something.

Can you get an apartment in NY for $800? I used to pay $1300 to live in Bushwick. Bushwick sucked then. It was up and coming. I've heard it's nicer now, but I don't believe it.

Everyone is right. You don't want to get in just to "get in." It is important to get in somewhere that is interested in your work and wants to watch you develop it. It is important to be with faculty that are going to be as encouraging as they are critical. I had a bad experience working with faculty that weren't right for me as an undergrad. I transferred into MICA as a junior painting major and things went well the first year and the faculty were great for the most part. I received the second biggest scholarship award that they offered in the returning students scholarship competition. As a result of doing so well, I was invited along with about 20 students from various majors to participate in a pilot program my senior year, where instead of taking five 3 credit classes, we would all be in a 9 credit seminar where we would work independently for the studio component and have weekly crits and we met to discuss critical readings once a week as a group for an art history/liberal arts component. The seminar had four faculty. One was a studio teacher who was highly conceptual, one was an art historian/ critic who was more or less into highly conceptual art, loved works such as re-enactments of grocery store checkout lanes in art galleries etc., another was a curator who had worked with Fred Wilson and other such conceptual artists, and the fourth was the school's resident philosopher. As a painting major this was the worst possible thing I could have ever gotten involved in. It became very apparent that the group of faculty had sort of assembled themselves and pitched the idea of this program based on their own common interests in conceptual art and boring rhetoric (boring to me, I don't mean to offend anyone who enjoys that sort of thing.) We were required to write a ten page thesis. I never really knew what I was supposed to write about. I felt like they wanted us to trace our bloodline back through art history and link our work to issues in contemporary criticism which was very hard considering the whole "death of painting" that had taken place. The more I critiqued with these faculty the more and more I edited my work down until it was almost barren of meaning to me. By the beginning of the Spring semester when other students were applying to grad school, I just couldn't wait for school to be over. All of the painters in the program were frustrated. Thank god a few of them still applied to grad school. One got into Yale. He was probably the most combative with the conceptual faculty and I think he was still working with some good painting faculty in his other classes outside of the seminar who were encouraging him and writing him recommendations. He was an awesome painter and deserved to go wherever he wanted to. I unfortunately was just trying to graduate as a transfer and didn't have the leisure of taking classes with the faculty that I liked in my final semester. Once I got out, I didn't pick up a paint brush for about 10 months and when I finally did I was only making one picture a year for about six years. The only good thing that I could see that came out of that program was that my anger and frustration coupled with the fact that my work had reached a complete dead end led me to an interesting and rebellious place when I started painting again. I have since fully recovered and have been working regularly for a little over two years now. I guess the point that I'm trying to make is that if that same seminar had been led by a painting faculty and an art historian who loved Philip Guston and Max Beckman like I do and a curator who had put together a Carroll Dunham / Lari Pittman show I probably would have loved it. I have a feeling that getting into the wrong graduate school would be very much like my experience as a senior undergrad at MICA. I was bitter for many years and didn't say a lot of good things about the school. It is only recently that a friend of mine has started attending MICA and has some of the same faculty that I had in my junior year that I have started to regain the many positive memories from my junior year. MICA was awesome. I wish I would have just taken their normal senior independent program with faculty from my department like the other 130 seniors did that year. I feel like I was sort of robbed of my childhood as an artist/painter being exposed to all of that tired jargon about consumption and surrogate simulacra or whatever they were talking about. I'd would really have rather argued about the meaning of the personal symbolism in Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" and have the faculty tell me that I was too heavy handed. Instead I had a disinterested art critic telling me to look at David Salle because he killed painting and no one cares anymore. Everyone keep your heads up and who cares what is cool and fashionable right now in the art world. The beauty of the whole situation is that we will be the ones to decide the future. If you're tired of the rhetoric, you can contribute in the effort to change it. The general atmosphere of pluralism in the contemporary art world is pretty exciting. I hope everyone finds their niche and a program where they can thrive. I only applied to one school this year. It was my back-up school on my original list. I decided I would be perfectly satisfied going there, but didn't get in. They weren't even ranked by U.S. News. They were listed at the bottom with all of the n/a rankings. Major blow to the ego. But I will trudge on. I don't really care what they think. I don't really care what anyone thinks. I like making my work and it alone inspires me to continue and always raises a new question that keeps me going. If I never sell anything again and never get offered to show, I will still paint because I have to so that I can go to sleep with a satisfied conscience. There is value in all of our work. I'm thrilled that so many of my co-workers who have never studied art or been to a museum, like my work. I guess that makes me low-brow, but so what. I am the proud son of a ditch digger and an administrative assistant who have one semester of college between them. My grandfather never finished high school. I could give a crap what an art history PhD thinks, or a bunch of people running an MFA program. I want to make art so I do. I've never wanted to make art just for others. I want to make art that serves me and for others to look at.

If you are a white male US citizen from middle - upper class you are basically screwed unless your parents make a big donation to the school of your choice. You might want to put down you are a half black/half native American trans-gender homosexual female. You probably don't even have to take the GRE with some lineage like that. (Sarcasm. . . not really)

I don't think this is bad news at all. In an ideal world, we would all be judged blindly on merit. This is most certainly a less-than-ideal world, however, which is why I was born with privilege that I did not earn, and was more easily granted access to the merits I carry today, simply because I am white.

I heard that the reason as to why they ask if you are a Ltino/Hispanic or not on every application I've come across is for such reasons. But then again, I am not from the US, so I don't know.

This whole thing made me giggle like a Japanese school girl.

The presupposition that affirmative action (and by extension, the acknowledgment of race) is somehow childish -- the antithesis of something as "important and prestigious" as grad school -- is incredibly offensive to me. Many things we take for granted when we talk about race today -- the understanding that racial discrimination is wrong, or the idea that race is a social, not biological construct, for instance -- arose in huge part from the work that was done in higher education BY people of color. People who, if not for affirmative action, would not have been able to participate in higher learning.

We shouldn't assume that we've reached a static understanding of race perfectly equitable to all people, PRECISELY because of graduate/higher ed research. One example I can pull from the top of my head is Roland Fryer, the economist at Harvard, whose work and life I won't summarize here but are well worth reading for the perspectives they provide on this topic.

Beyond this, we should question the notion that one's ethnicity and racial identity don't impact the research one is capable of doing. In sociology we learn about "access," and what that means in terms of membership in a racial minority/majority. But in every field, there are real obstacles that arise because of race -- black kids who don't apply themselves in science and math classes for fear of being accused of "acting white," Asian American kids who are pressured into those same fields not only by their parents but by their peers and societal expectations, for example. Even if race theoretically "shouldn't matter," even if race is arbitrary, even if it isn't "real" -- it creates very real feelings, very real problems, and very real consequences.

There are nebulous aspects of affirmative action, and I won't pretend that I'm arguing wholesale for either side (well, obviously I'm leaning one way). Just, please -- consider the ramifications of EVERYTHING you are saying.

I was just lurking around here but I couldn't believe when I read that. Comments like that are completely inappropriate and uncalled for. You may disagree with the wording that someone used (which wasn't a big deal at all) but under no circumstances should you insult someone's intelligence/capability/professional potential. You sound like a have quite a chip on your shoulder. This is supposed to be a positive environment. Very inappropriate and distasteful.

S/he wouldn't be the first or the last in the discipline. It's actually one of the things about the discipline of which I am NOT a fan. Not that anthro is any better but sociology strikes me as critical without being self-critical when it comes to issues of race or any of the -isms.




Really? A common expression? I have, honestly, never heard of the "affirmative action card" so I wonder if I have missed a cultural or scholarly evolution?

Man I love questions like this! And what do people mean by "card" anyway? Like it is just something that is pulled out when we need it? Like it doesn't effect our lives at all? You should make a great sociologist!

Isn't that sentence still missing an article?

@ alizarin: I tried to go to your link, but it didn't work

@mnchick: Your work is really lovely! It reminds me a little of Andrea Modica for some reason (and i love her!)

Hey guys, did anyone else hear from SAIC yet??

I haven't gotten any letters or any news yet (except for that impersonal rejection from Yale on their website, but that's old news).

The only things I get are a bunch of repetitive reminders to apply for financial aid. Is everyone getting a lot of these emails and flyers too? Does this even matter? Ughh..anything but silence..I can't imagine feeling this way until April.