College Art Students Face a Challenging Future

Studies Show that Arts and Humanities Jobs are Harder to Find

Twenty million U.S. undergraduate students have recently returned to their college classes from spring break. Right about now, most of them are thinking short-term. They are thinking about reaching the end of the school year. They are thinking about summer.

            For seniors, however, graduation day means going into the workplace. American schools have about 70,000 undergraduate students in the visual arts, so about a quarter of them are in those graduation shoes. Although the statistics for art jobs are not optimistic, if anyone can outsmart the trends, it might be the art students. They are to be the future members of the “creative class” in society.

            They begin their careers with some glum data, however. One recent study found that recent undergraduate degrees in architecture and art rank highest for the unemployed: 13.9 percent for architecture (because of the housing industry collapse) and 11.1 percent for the arts. Every “soft” field of study (that is, everything in college that is not science, technology, engineering, or math) shows a tougher job market. Recent graduates with any kind of humanities degree show a 9.4 percent unemployment rate, according to Census data analyzed by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

            Clearly, college graduates with science degrees or who entered fields of growth—such as healthcare, business, education, or engineering—are most likely to find a career-related job right out of college. Unemployment for students with recent degrees in health or education, for example, is just 5.4 percent.

            These employment numbers can be looked at in many different ways, of course. For example, about 89 percent of college art students have found a job—not too bad, though the employment obviously mixes good and bad pay and jobs unrelated to art. Art students are not too much worse off than all recent college graduates, who report an average unemployment of 8.9 (a bit worse than the national average). What is more, college graduates still have a great advantage over the rest of the population. Americans with a recent high school diploma are 22.9 unemployed; high school dropouts are at 31.5 percent.

            The dour employment news is not hurting art’s popularity, it seems. College study of the various visual arts is among the more popular of 173 majors, according to Census surveys. Commercial art and graphic design rank 21 of the 173. Other art majors rank this way: fine arts (22); architecture (33); art and music education (48); film video and photographic arts (54); art history and criticism (81). Enrollment in the most popular fields of college study vastly outnumbers the others, since they offer guaranteed job tracks, such as the degree in accounting (4 of 173 in popularity).

            Art popularity does circumvent the problem of studying science, which by consensus continues to be the hardest of college studies. Some students simply have the science-and-math gift, or they have early school training that makes college science easier. The vast majority of college students find science to be very challenging. At the same time, many in the arts clearly feel they have a gift, too, but it’s in artistic ability. So why study science when the instinct flows elsewhere?

            Perhaps the only reason not to follow the art instinct is the cost of college. Every one must now think of college as an investment. Students need a job quick to pay off student debt, which today averages from $20,000 to $40,000.

            At this point, even the art student needs to remember that education is also about human development—that is, life skills. True enough, surveys of students show that the highest motivation for college (77 percent) is to make good money. There once was a time when students believed that paying for college was like a guaranteed ticket to a job. Students are more skeptical now, but college enrollment continues to rise. Meanwhile, student surveys also show that the second highest priority for college students (47 percent) is “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.”

            Among art school educators, human development usually has been as important as the skills. Robert Milnes, an art professor at the University of North Texas and president of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), recently told fellow art college teachers that the “whole person” is what they are trying to address. “Our job, like that of a coach, is to train young students to be professionals on one hand and to help them become better people on the other,” he said, using a sports analogy in his fall NASAD address for this school year.

            The rate of college art grads who give up art and design within five to fifteen years is very high, Milnes said. But as in sports, the picture is mixed: “Some [grads] will become quite wealthy, maybe right out of school even, but the great majority of our art and design students will, like college athletes, go on to fulfilling lives in which their major art or design activity during school may or may not be the most significant issue or their primary source of income, though they may always value their experience.”

            The odds of making it big as an artists are tough, though there is nothing that blocks college art grads from having a productive life. “The time we have with the students is about their development as well as expertise at a particular practice,” said Milnes, emphasizing that brighter side of what every art student can achieve. “Life values and decision-making skills have to be a good part of what we teach.”

Drilling for a “Lost da Vinci” Mural

Florence, Italy, Troubled by Researchers Tampering with Ancient Art

When Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes were cleaned in the 1980s and ‘90s, the restoration project received praise and criticism. Of the latter, critics said the massive touch-up ruined the antique authenticity of the Michelangelo paintings, making them look too pretty.

            This month, a similar debate took off in Florence, Italy, where a swashbuckling researcher has drilled small holes into a massive fresco by one Renaissance master to see if another fresco—done by Leonardo da Vinci—is hidden underneath. The project has evoked all the hoopla of a “Lost da Vinci.” It has also forced Da Vinci mystery hunters, art historians, and Florentine politicians into a debate on how far to go in tampering with works done 500 years ago.

            The missing Da Vinci mural is a mainstream topic in art history.

            Around 1505, Florence had commissioned Leonardo to paint a mural in its city hall, the Palazzo Vecchio, portraying the Battle of Anghiari. Leonardo got most of it done, but then abandoned the work. Later artists, such as Rubens, saw enough of Leonardo’s composition of furious combat between men and horse to make full sketches. Leonardo also left behind his own small drawings.

            Then in the 1550s, another formidable mural artist, Giorgio Vasari, was ordered by the duke of Florence to remodel the entire civic hall and paint new murals of a more recent Florentine victory, the Battle of Marciano. The mystery is this: What did Vasari do with Leonardo’s old battle mural? Did he whitewash over it? Or did he build a secret double wall to hide and preserve the laborious work done by Leonardo for future generations?

            In 1975, the famous art sleuth Maurizio Seracini, who investigates the authenticity of artworks, noticed that a green battle flag in one of the Vasari murals bore the words, “Seek and you will find.” Knowing his art history, Seracini theorized that in that area, Vasari must have built a double wall over Leonardo’s Anghiari mural to save it from destruction.

            Last week, on March 12, Seracini and his sponsor, the National Geographic Society, announced that by drilling 14 tiny holes in the Vasari mural and inserting medical optical probes, they found an air space and what looked like paint, brush strokes, and bits of material that could be the black pigment and reddish varnish of Leonardo.

            To get to that drilling stage, Seracini had to persuade Florence and the art history establishment that his theory was sound enough to risk damaging the Vasari murals. Seracini requested permission to drill in 2006. Last year a restricted drilling was performed (only in cracks and restored surfaces, and thus not marring anything original). Last week’s press conference in Florence declared that the minimal drilling produced “encouraging” evidence of a long-lost Leonardo.

            To fuel the excitement, National Geographic aired a documentary on Sunday, “Finding the Lost da Vinci,” which sets the tone for the publicity that will now surround future decisions on what to do next.

            “You can’t break the Vasari,” one citizen says in the documentary.

            “No, we’re not going to break the Vasari,” a Seracini team researcher replies.

            Fortunately for this drama, Seracini is at the top of his field. He runs research laboratories at the University of California, San Diego, and in Florence. They are equipped with the newest scientific tools to x-ray walls and analyze tiny particles.

            As an art world celebrity, Seracini has his supporters and his foes. In the latter category, a group of art historians has circulated a petition to stop further work. They say the risk of harming the Vasari is not justified by a mere hunch—the cryptic words “seek and you will find.” Some see Seracini styling himself as an art world Indiana Jones. This can make art conservation workers in Florence worry that his exploits will distract money and attention from the city’s many antiquities that need repair.

            Nevertheless, a lost Leonardo does trump about everything else in the art world.

            Italian officials, balancing the politics, must decide whether Seracini can drill further for definitive evidence. The mayor of Florence supports moving ahead. He has said that if a Leonardo is found, he would prefer that over a Vasari (who is better known as the first art historian, not a painter ranking with Leonardo, Michelangelo, or Raphael). In fact, the story of the mural began as a competition between two great artists of the day, Leonardo and Michelangelo.

            Both were asked to designs battle murals for opposite walls. Michelangelo got only as far as a “cartoon”—a large drawing on paper with charcoal—before the pope summoned him to Rome to begin painting the the Sistine Chapel. Leonardo, meanwhile, put up his Battle of Anghiari, experimenting with oil paints, but ruining some of it by using burners to promote fast drying. Leonardo probably got the full imagery on the wall before he quit and left for Milan.

            Oxford art historian Martin Kemp said that there is no guarantee that the discovered residue comes from Leonardo, since city halls had many wall murals. Still, “I think this needs to be resolved,” he told National Geographic News. “We can’t just leave it hanging in the air. . . . If it’s discovered, it would be one of the most famous discoveries of a century.”

            Then comes the obvious question, posed by writer Noah Charney, head of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art: “If Seracini succeeds, then we are faced with one more puzzle: How do we reveal the entire Leonardo without destroying the Vasari that lies above it?”

Surrealism in the Americas: Putting Painting Before Poetry

A Major Exhibit of Female Surrealists Revels in Visual Fantasy

LOS ANGELES—For the longest time, Americans have viewed Surrealism as a form of dream-like painting. The exhibit here of female Surrealists, “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,” confirms that common impression.

            It also updates the public to the fact that while the 1920s founders of Surrealism were European men, there is a line of illustrious female Surrealists as well—and a good many in the Americas. Some had been U.S. painters and art students who caught the 1930s European trend, while others had been Europeans who, at the onset of war in France in 1940, began migrating here and to Mexico.

            For Latin America, the most famous Surrealist painter was Frida Kahlo, a native of Mexico. Two of her paintings, one a self portrait with her former husband Diego Rivera (1931), and the other, Two Fridas (1939), are large and striking features of the exhibit. Other icons of female Surrealism—from Louise Bourgeois (sculptor) and Leonora Carrington (collagist and painter) to Lee Miller (photographer), Dorothea Tanning (painter), and Maya Deren (filmmaker)—are arrayed by themes across this expansive display at the Los Angeles County Museum.

            The exhibit, put together in cooperation with Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, shows 175 work about 47 artists. It continues in Los Angeles until May 6, when it travels to Quebec. The exhibit’s allusion to Alice in Wonderland is quite apropos, since the very nature of Surrealist art is to represent images of fantastical worlds, dream states or nightmares, and a reality that can be very psychiatric in mood.

            To evoke all of this, Surrealist visual arts had to use fairly traditional approaches to painting. Surprisingly, perhaps, the so-called movement began among poets. The term was coined in 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire. He was writing a pamphlet for an avant-garde play in Paris, titled Parade, and came up with the neologism “sur-realism” (beyond realism). He later produced his own “surrealist drama.”

            As it turned out, a young poet follower of Apollinaire was Andre Breton, who later claimed to have co-invented the term. Either way, Breton founded the Surrealist movement as a literary event in 1924, drawing especially on his medical work in psychiatric wards and Freud’s new theories about dreams, sex, and the repressed unconscious. The visual side to this new interest in odd associations buried in the unconscious—and screaming to get out—came from outside France.

            In Germany, the “Dada” painter Max Ernst was doing works that tended to mix human parts with machine parts (a kind of Dada specialty). Also, from Italy came Gorgio de Chirico, who brought to Paris his paintings of haunting public plazas of Milan with long shadows, lone figures, classical statues, and faceless mannequins (to become a kind of icon for Surrealism). As these visual influences converged, Breton held his first art show in Paris in 1921. It was actually Dada art, convened at Galerie Montaigne and debuting Ernst, who soon eclipsed Dada painter Francis Picabia as the Surrealist favorite.

            In 1924, Breton issued his first Surrealist Manifesto. He also founded his publication, Surrealist Revolution, which connected art and Surrealism in a famous article, “Surrealism and Painting.” He knew that modern art was more influential than poetry, so he wanted to bring the visual arts under his Surrealism banner. The first official Surrealist art exhibit came in Paris in November 1925 at the Galerie Pierre Loeb. Breton even persuaded Picasso to submit a work or two.

            Meanwhile, Surrealism developed a kind of subculture in Paris, dedicated to encounter groups discussing poetry, sex, and the unconscious. One day, the classically-trained Spanish painter Salvador Dalí arrived in Paris, too. Welcomed into the Breton circle, he began to out-paint and out-antic even Ernst, and eventually Breton banned him. Still, in December 1936, Dalí appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the superlative Surrealist. This coincided with the first big art show on the topic in the United States, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” at the Museum of Modern Art. (Ever since, ordinary Americans have associated "Surrealism" with  Dalí's hyper-realistic style).

            In Paris, Breton and friends matched the New York event with the even larger “International Surrealist Exhibition,” which gathered a Who’s Who of the “usual suspects.” This was 1937, the year of Surrealism’s highpoint in Paris before the war, which shifted the story to the Americas. Over here, Dali became popular. So did Ernst and other Surreal-like painters such as the Spaniard Joan Miro. In fact, many of the American painters working on Depression-era federal art projects tried out Surrealism before moving on to pure abstraction, which led to Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.

            In the wake of this, the female Surrealists kept intact much of the literal, or figurative, painting style of early Surrealism. They created new images, drew on folk stories—as Kahlo did in her Mexican Surrealism—and retained the movement's interest in meticulously painted tableaus, picture-stories that were mysterious, moody, symbolic, and iconic. They also were filled with themes important to women.

            All of this comes through at the “In Wonderland” exhibit. And that’s a good thing. Literary Surrealism and its subculture imploded, suffering from many of its worst features, such as narcissism, obfuscation, and even misogyny. What survives is the splendid visual products of an age and outlook. The Lady Surrealists—often working on their own, unrewarded and in obscurity—have helped preserve some of that important art legacy in the Americas.

“American Artist” Celebrates the Realism Movement in Painting

The Magazine Marks 75 Years of Keeping Classical Skills Relevant to Art

At American Artist, which is a lavishly illustrated monthly art magazine, the phrase “Sunday painter” is not a dirty word.

            For that matter, neither are the words “old master,” “self-taught,” or atelier, the French term for a small workshop composed of a teacher and students, typically learning classical art techniques.

            Celebrating its 75th year, the magazine continues to be a flagship for what it calls a continuing American “movement” for realism and representational work in drawing, painting, and pastels. It honors the European old masters and the great American realists. It also encourages everybody to learn to paint, an egalitarian approach that nevertheless argues that it is best to learn by imitating the genius of the past.

            To mark its 75th, the magazine has produced a March/April “special issue” that charts the history of representational painting in the United States. It ends with a look at “the state of representational art in the new millennium.” This panorama also tells the publication’s history. It was founded in 1937 as Art & Instruction, changing it name to American Artist three years later. The publication weathered the 1950s to 1970s, when abstraction and then anti-traditionalism became cutting edge in the United States. Having endured, American Artist has caught the 1980s wave that revived “classical realism” in painting.

            Even so, every art publication today faces challenges to keep readership and underwrite the staff and printing.

            In 2008, the Colorado investment firm Aspire Media acquired the American Artist Group (which has several “how-to” magazines on painting and drawing skill), and placed it under Aspire’s other unit (acquired in 2005), Interweave, one of the nation’s largest publishers of craft and skill magazines. In recent years, American Artist has gone beyond just magazines, expanding its “do-it-yourself” (DIY) movement of people who are eager to learn from the old masters. The magazine now holds weekend workshops with traditional instructors. It also launched the Artist Daily Web site and a video channel.

            In a competitive environment for art publications, American Artist is hoping to building on its “great brand,” said editorial director, Michael Gormley, the former dean of the New York Academy of Art, which was founded in 1979 as a graduate studio school for figurative art and art history. To claim some of its past glory, the magazine has revived its headline logo from the 1970s, a kind of compliment, Gormley said, “to our history and our readers who have stuck with this through the ages.”

            With its brand status, American Artist continues to be a clearing house for the nation’s many ateliers with traditional art teaching programs. This month’s special issue, for example, offers the annual Workshop & Art School Directory, a road map to outlets for training in classical arts—oil painting, sculpture, watercolor, pastel, colored pencil, graphite, printmaking, or charcoal. Typically, these media are applied to a list of classic subject matter: portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, and outdoor painting.

            For all art such ventures, the market is still a bit ambiguous. Only a few of the independent art colleges in the United States still emphasize classical painting skills. The same is true for many more art departments at U.S. colleges and universities. Students, laymen, or retirees who want to learn the skills of the old masters must typically search hard, or be ready to pay for specialized training. That support system largely exists in the surviving ateliers—the constituents of American Artist—that continue to unashamedly trace their heritage to the Renaissance, trying to plug the dike against “contemporary art,” a tide that excludes “Sunday painters” to emphasize ironic attitudes, shock-value, and conceptualism over skill.

            In some ways, on the other hand, the return to realistic painting is an embarrassment of riches these days. There is a great deal of it, in fact. In the large Chelsea Art Galleries district of west Manhattan, it is told, the dominant kind of art is representational, and the artists—many coming from top graduate schools, others self-taught over the years—are very good and are looking for sales.

            Though not having a monopoly on the realism spirit, American Artist does hope to throw a spotlight on the plenitude and quality of the new classical realism. In April 2013, it will hold a large “commemorative exhibition” of “a core group of artists we have identified as long-time leaders of our movement.” In conjunction, it will also hold a juried competition for new blood in the realist approach (with submission guidelines coming in May). The 2013 exhibit will be held at the historic Salmagundi Club (taking its name from a Washington Irving satire), a midtown Manhattan art club founded in 1871, and then travel to the West Coast.

            As an art education movement, magazines such as American Artist speak of “timeless instruction,” in other words, techniques and disciplines that have proven to work in the hands of any diligent artist. After those skills are mastered, the artist is free to be creative. After all, Leonard da Vinci said, “The greatest misfortune is when theory outstrips performance.” Picasso, too, justified his Cubist revolution on his mastery of classical skills. Since he had mastered them, he said, did he not “have the right” to experiment with a few rebellions? It’s still a good argument.

Killing Goldfish and the Peculiar Ethics of Contemporary Art

A Panel of Scholars Raises Concerns on What to do About “Hurtful” Art

LOS ANGELES—More than a decade ago, the artist Marco Evaristti explored the “killing aesthetic” by letting art gallery visitors in Amsterdam pulverize a goldfish swimming in a blender. Legal protest ensued, and the Dutch courts ruled that the means of killing the fish was instant and humane, while the efforts of animal rights groups to steal (or "rescue") the fish were a violation of property law.

            This is just one of the ethical dilemmas explored at a recent College Art Association (CAA) panel, where art leaders stated their concern about artists using “degradation” of human beings and “physical hurt” to animals as part of their art.

            The dilemma has got even the CAA's head office over a barrel. Its semi-official statement on animal abuse in art said that the CAA opposes animal cruelty, but also opposes all forms of censorship. As an unofficial CAA panel of scholars here in L.A. suggested, artists have a hard time policing each other when controversies arise. Meanwhile, the public has grown increasingly contemptuous of artists who use fish, sharks, pigs, horses, dogs, and birds—or fake bloody corpses at gala fund-raising parties—as fodder for seemingly hurtful artworks.

            Gerald Silk, chair of art history at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, convened the “Beyond Censorship” panel at the annual CAA convention, which brought 4,000 art educators to the Los Angeles Convention Center.  The panel seemed to suggest that many artists today are going too far. The dilemma is what to do about it, since all professions try to keep standards. Do artists claim to have special “privileges” that society does not give to other people? Silk asked. “Some of the material today may be disquieting,” he said, opening the panel session.

            The well-known story of Evaristti’s goldfish art, titled Helena, was among the most complex case studies. “Helena is far more complex than deciding to push a [blender] button,” said Jonathan Wallis of Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, who analyzed differences between "moral" law and legal statutes.

            Other animal-related works of art were no less difficult. One Latin American artist made videos of horses being slaughtered. Two other Latino artists employed a seemingly starving dog tied to a gallery wall or a hawk meeting its apparent demise in large conceptual art cage. Later, the artists explained that the dog was actually fed, and likewise for the bird. Nevertheless, in both cases, protest arose. Police closed the hawk exhibit and a global Internet “rumor” spread that the dog starved in the gallery.

            The distorting effect of Internet information, or that of “social media,” has become a serious new issue for artists today, said Donna Moran of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. With the Internet, a global protest about a “starving” dog can develop overnight. Also, the uncouth work of young artists may haunt them forever, even after they repent. The case in point is Tom Otterness, a successful sculptor, who is now being haunted by his 1977 Shot Dog Film, in which as an “angry” young artists he indeed shot his dog on video. Last year, the Internet revival of his past deeds led to the cancellation of a major art commission, and his future looks bleak.

            Moran of Pratt also said that young artists have quickly learned to manipulate the Internet to gain attention. They might introduce offensive art in order to raise protest, after which they claim censorship, sending that message around the Internet to rally news coverage and an unimaginably large mass of Internet supporters. This puts significant pressure on art institutions, far more than a single artist can do.

            Another panelist, Joe Zammit-Lucia, said the problem goes beyond the Internet to the corruption of contemporary art culture itself. The art culture seems to reward deviant behavior, said Zammit-Lucia, an artist, businessman, and advocate for animal humaneness. He cited a typical trick of the artist: do something offensive, provoke protest, and then call protestors hypocrites because society itself is worse than the art. This has led to two rigid sides. One side says anything goes in art, the other says that society puts limits on everyone, and that should include artists.

            Zammit-Lucia traced that new egregious art to modernism’s avowed anti-humanism, and also to postmodern “conceptual art,” which privileges extreme ideas over normal human feelings. As a result, today there is a breed of artists who specialize in “dehumanized” art, knowing that sensation sells, he said. These artists also know they can gain “moral cover” from the art world when society protests. Added to this, Zammit-Lucia said, is a distorted reward system: art education is ambivalent about dehumanized art, critics write cheerful reviews about it, and savvy curators show it to publicize their galleries and sell it to collectors. This is a “self-feeding cycle of morally questionable behavior,” Zammit-Lucia said. “We need a way to break the cycle.”

            He suggests that the art world, while not endorsing censorship, revive an age-old form of self-regulation, which is to ostracize offending artists. This would involve stating moral objection to artists who abuse their “privileges.” This is the old fashioned shaming of bad behavior. The public is already doing this.

            Here’s the rub, though. It will be much harder to ask millionaire collectors and wealthy art foundations to stop funding or buying such art, since they are guided by publicity-driven curators who endorse it. And it will only grow on the Internet, giving fame to some, while destroying the reputation of others.