A few notes to art students about their career prospects in the arts given at Cape Fear Community College, April 15.
• Social networking media has increased the opportunities for students and young artists.
• As technology makes it easier and easier for everybody to make stuff, creativity, originality, and clever problem-solving emerge as core professional skills unique to artists.
• The trained eyes of an artist are often an overlooked asset.
• Distinctions between fine and commercial art are exaggerated.
• Artists have the potential skills and training to explain how the pieces of our complex world fit together.
In the recent past, it was not unusual to see an artist showing her work to a potential buyer, gallery owner, curator, fellow artist, or head of a college search committee by holding up a sheet of slides and pointing out details. The setting might be on the street, in the foyer of a gallery, in a coffee shop, in the office of an art director, or in the cramped confines of a hotel room serving as an interview space during the College Art Association's annual meeting. I can recall these scenes well because I participated in all of them. This is what one did before laptops and digital media. If someone liked your work then maybe you'd leave the sheet of slides with them for further review. Maybe you'd even get the chance to project them on a wall and talk about your work. If you were really lucky this would lead to a face-to-face meeting in which you'd bring in actual work.
If the above seems quaint, limited and a bit ridiculous today, it certainly seemed to me to be so at the time. Networking and making contacts was a very long and drawn out process. If you were a "people" person you had a natural advantage (most artists I knew were like myself, introtroverts who did not easily promote themselves). Slides were expensive, too, and often you sent them in the mail or dropped them off on a receptionist's desk with a fair certainty that you probably wouldn't see them again. Today, the Web has made communication and contacting businesses and individuals that you only slightly know easy and relatively straightforward. For artists, the Web presents a cheap way of reproducing, displaying, and sharing art images. Blogs and other social and business networking media offer artists amazing opportunities to present their work and ideas.
The more technology becomes easier to use, the sharper the focus becomes on originality, creativity, and new ways of thinking and problem solving. In other words, technology is now in the hands of almost everyone on the planet (mobile phones are really small, powerful computers) to select, change, and shape as the user sees fit. How one uses technology, to what end and purpose, are among the big and exciting challenges young artists have today. Just because Pixar has taken a certain approach to animation and storytelling doesn't mean you have to follow their lead. Just because Hollywood has created a formula for success doesn't mean that's the only way to make a movie.
Artists have expert eyes. We see in ways that are truly unique. We have the training, the patience, the interest in observing. Or, as the business world loves to say, we see "out of the box". That can mean outrageous, funny, offensive, insightful, penetrating, amazing — anything but conventional or formulaic. Some businesses love to say they embrace independent and unconventional thinking but when they're faced with real challenges, they back down. Believe me, I've gotten plenty of encouragement to "speak my mind", only to discover that that was the very last thing a committee, a business, a client really wanted to hear! Other businesses understand the world is changing at a rapid pace and that they need creative types to help them understand what's going on. The same goes for education, government, and nonprofits. We can't control who will or won't be receptive to our ideas. We do have a professional obligation to say what we think.
There really isn't much difference between the fine arts and commercial arts. It's taken for granted that everyone has to make a living to be effective, to fulfill their potential, to do the things that make us human. A lot of past distinctions just don't hold up. There are great pop songs just like there is great pop imagery. Of course, most of it is junk, too. If you know something about art history and the history of images, you'll probably develop a strong standard for excellence and quality. If you've got that, you'll be less inclined to be fooled by the latest fad, the latest cool technology, etc.
Many of these issues are important today because American culture has a way of dividing things into brands, categories, sexes, demographics, trends, races, genres, politics, lifestyles, etc. rather than seeing our way of life (with all its imperfections) as a whole. By contrast, the unity of a culture is instantly recognizable as you physically walk the streets of, say, a small Italian town, when you see how buildings are built and look together as a whole, how people add personal details to their homes and gardens, etc. This is not to suggest this culture is somehow better than ours — it's only more visually coherent than ours. Most traditional cultures have this visual unity. Because ours is (and always has been) a rapidly evolving one, we need artists to help us figure out what's core to our culture.
