Meanwhile, over at 2Blowhards, Michael has been taking art lessons, and isn't impressed.

I went to the first class last night, and was reminded of what a ripoff most art classes are. The woman teaching it seems nice and for all I know is a good artist, so I have nothing against this class specifically -- it seems like an OK version of the standard thing. It's the standard thing that's a ripoff (and that, in a sane art world, would be a scandal).

Last night's class, like about 3/4 of the art classes I've taken, followed this model: the teacher has set up a subject, whether a model or a still life. You bring a bunch of art materials with you. You draw and paint. The teacher wanders around, giving each person a little time and a few hints. You pack up and go home.

Like I say: what a ripoff. It's amazing the schools charge for this, and just as amazing that eager students put up with it. Would it be too much ask an art teacher to do a little actual art instruction? To have a little something prepared? To structure a series of classes so that the bit you learn this week joins together with the bit you learned last week, and you leave the term having acquired some genuinely new skills, and able to do things you hadn't previously been able to do?

Seems like a reasonable thing to demand. So why doesn't that get supplied?

… I guess I assume that what it represents is a coming-together of four things: asinine progressive-education ideas (let the student discover art for himself!), laziness and convenience, the continuing-ed business, and annoying modernist (ie., anti-technique, anti-skill, pro-self-expression) ideas about art. Do you think I'm off here? Or that I'm missing some other element?

I see nothing wrong about any of that, but maybe I can add something.

Consider that bit I did here about the Army, and how seriously they set about their teaching. Or consider, for that matter, the example of another kind of teaching that Michael does consider.

… Imagine, say, a cooking school or a cooking class. Now, imagine showing up, being confronted by a roomful of tools and ingrediants. And a teacher who says, "OK, class, cook! Every now and then I'll come around and give you a little criticism and help!" I know I'd be pissed. How about knife skills? Poaching? Grilling?

Cooking - and I'm guessing here but it seems to me, etc. etc. – still retains some semblance of pedagogic rigidity, in the sense that "good" and "bad" cooking are widely regarded as being distinguishable. If you cook an omelette (one of the few cookery things I'm quite good at doing) for a minute or two and watch for when it is done and then dish it up it, you can get a very good omelette. Cook the omelette for half an hour and then give the ruins ten minutes in the fridge, and you will absolutely not get a good omelette. I don't know any omeletteer who would disagree about that. It would be wrecked. Get your cooking seriously wrong, and you might even kill people.

If the Army gets its teaching wrong, it will definitely kill people. They teach right, or people die. In such a world, the mind of the teacher is going to be concentrated wonderfully on doing the job a certain way, the right way.

But what they hell is the right way of doing art these days? The artists have spent the last hundred years trying to explain that there is no right way, that anything goes.

And the irony is that Michael Blowhard – with his exuberantly wide-ranging willingness to appreciate and to enjoy, and to pass on by if he doesn't enjoy with a mere "well it's not my thing, but if it's yours, then fine" – is now doing his bit to reinforce this atmosphere, as well as to undermine it somewhat by asserting his tendency to enjoy more traditional, that is to say artistic-skill-based, varieties of art.

I want techniques -- the "art" and "expressive" end of things I'll take care of myself. Or I won't. But I certainly don't want some teacher I don't know trying to take charge of that end of things. But techniques? I'm eager to learn, and I'll pick 'em up where I can get 'em. Yet the art-instruction establishment doesn't want to give them to me, or even, apparently, sell them to me.

When Michael says "techniques", he's not referring to the technique for writing outrageous press releases, or the technique for how to dress on TV in such a way as to cause maximum anger to the bourgeoisie. He means brushwork, etc. So does anyone teach this old-school art technique stuff? Still?

I stay "still?" because in my opinion another reason why anything goes in painting these days (can of worms opening warning force eight to nine) is that painting has, in terms of its contribution to the real-world economy out there, been pretty much replaced by photography. Painting's days of economic glory and artistic centrality are over. Anything goes in painting for the same reasons that you can, within the limits only of the criminal law, do anything you like in a bombsite.

Short second last paragraph. Big subject. Which I'll get back to, but mostly in another place.