Art Degrees are Real Degrees.

Growing up, my least favorite thing to hear as a “creative type” was that art wasn’t as important as other subjects and, when I became an art major in college, that art “isn’t a career” and that an art degree is “not a real degree.”

In college, I would often hear other students say they were taking art classes “just for an art credit” and that they actually thought it was "bullshit” that they had to take the course at all because, of course, they thought that art classes weren’t as important as whatever subject they were majoring in, and some went so far as to think that art majors were lazy people looking to get an easy degree.

I hate hearing all of this even more now that I have had a BFA in Studio Art for 3 years.

I will be the first to admit that, before I started majoring in art, I thought the only way to be successful was to get a business degree, or a science degree, or a degree in ANYTHING except the arts; I thought this because everyone in my life was ALWAYS feeding me this lie. I had always been drawn to more creative things, like making music and writing and taking photos, and I think a lot of people saw this and thought they were doing me a favor by saying “those are just hobbies; you need to work hard to get a REAL degree so you can get a REAL job making REAL money.” They thought that, by telling me that degrees in the arts weren’t “real,” it would make me want to choose something more “real,” like business.

Which is what I did, until I learned that I liked photography and art history more than finance and macroeconomics.

There is a common misconception floating around out there that art degrees are all about teaching you how to draw, paint, sculpt, or take pretty pictures without teaching any useable life skills. However, I am here to tell you that this a fallacy.

One of my best friends from college, Sam, double-majored in biology and studio art, and, when I asked him how he felt about arts majors versus other majors, he told me:

“While earning a BFA in studio art and BS in biology, I personally found the art to be significantly more work than the biology, but that says more about me than about the programs. I had friends in each program that struggled to pass the introductory classes from the other program for general education requirements. So I can't take the idea that one degree is harder than the other seriously. Difficulty varies from person to person, for any task. Some might argue that it's utility, not difficulty, that makes one degree more valid than another. And I can see how the utility of biology would be more obvious, but I'd challenge anyone who doubts the importance of artists to imagine going a month without using or looking at anything designed by an artist. It's probably not something you could realistically do, but it would be a bleak experience.”

Earning my BFA taught me how to give and take criticism, how to communicate my ideas and express my views in an effective way, how to collaborate, and how to stand up for myself and my beliefs; it taught me how to view the world around me with kinder eyes and an open heart, how to enjoy the little things around me, how to care for and listen to others, how to have fun, and, most importantly, how to unashamedly be myself in a world that often encourages us to fit one particular idea of what it means to be a person.

All this to say — stop telling people art degrees are not real degrees. Stop telling your artistically-inclined kids not to get degrees in art, theatre, and music because they are “useless” and will make them “poor” the rest of their lives. There are so many cool things out there you can do with degrees in the arts (in fact, here are 38 of them); I am not saying you won’t have to work hard to get these careers, but I am saying that your degree will not be a hindrance unless you make it one.

As Sam pointed out, it is impossible to conceive a world without art — even our early Paleolithic ancestors painted in caves and made jewelry during their free time. So, next time you go to tell someone that “art is not a real degree,” think about the fact that little in this world would exist without the creative mind of an artist.

Photography as Art, Pt. 2: Photography's Place in Modern and Contemporary Art

In part one of this two-part series , we discussed how photography came to be recognized as a valid form of art within the art historical canon. As promised last time, I will still be discussing how photography is used in contemporary art and giving my personal take on photography as art, but I felt that I also needed to cover photography in modern art as well, since it did shape the way we use photography in today’s world. So, instead of including my personal opinion on photography as art in today’s post, I will instead be discussing it in a wrap-up post on Friday (yes, you get two posts this week — get excited). Once again, I will be including links to all of the sources I used in researching this post, and you can click on them for more information on the topic. For the sake of brevity, let’s get on with today’s talk.

Modernism as a movement took place from roughly the 1860’s to the mid 1960’s (this can vary slightly depending on who you are talking to, but this is the time span that is generally accepted). Modern artists embraced change and brought about the idea that art could talk about the self and reflect one’s own interests and experiences, whereas art prior to this period was largely commissioned by either wealthy individuals or by institutions such as the church. Artists began to use new materials, techniques, and mediums to express themselves, and they challenged the idea that art had to be purely representational and realistic (to read more about modern art, click here). Modern movements that embraced photography as a medium include Italian Futurism, Constructivism and Bauhaus, and Dada, and Surrealism (for more information, click here).

Within the Modernist movement, there is the Modern Photography movement, which took on the idea that a photograph was allowed to look like a photograph and, thus, Straight Photography was born in the early 1900’s. Straight Photography, as opposed to Pictorialism, abandoned the imitation of other art forms and sought to use photography in a way that was free of manipulation. An important figure in this movement was a critic named Sadakichi Hartmann, whose 1904 “Plea for Straight Photography” praised straightforward photography and the photographers who took this approach, such as Stiegletz, who by this time had moved away from Pictorialism in favor of the Straight approach (x). Other influential figures of this movement include Ansel Adams and Edward Wesson, who were part of Group f/64, a group founded by Adams that advocated for sharp-focus and clarity within photographs so as not to obscure reality. Modern Photography was (and still is) the block upon which many types of photography were built, such as Photojournalists, Street Photography, Documentary Photography, and Snapshot Photography (for more about Straight Photography, click here). As you can see, Modern Photography and Modern Art stand in opposition to one another’s ideals; one values moving toward realism, and one values moving away from realism. The argument can be made that photography is a large part of the shifting attitudes within the art world that brought about the Modernist movement. Photographers could make the same portraits mechanically and with relative speed that painters spent hours, days, and months making; painters were no longer needed in the art of realistic portraiture or landscapes, so they adapted to this change by embracing new techniques and styles within their work. Other artists, such as Man Ray and Andy Warhol, chose to include photography and photographic techniques within their work. Man Ray famously created “rayographs” (also known as photograms — but very punny, Man Ray) by placing random objects on photosensitive paper and exposing them to light, and Andy Warhol (who I will likely dedicate an entire blog post to one day) not only turned famous images of celebrities into Pop-Art paintings and prints, but spent a lot of time taking photographs, and he apparently wrote in one of his journals that he told a friend of his, "“I didn’t believe in art; I believed in photography.” (x) It would take a whole textbook to discuss photography in Modern Art, but I think you get the idea of its impact.

Let’s move on to Contemporary Art.

In the mid-1960’s through the early 1970’s, the art world shifted toward new ideas that fall under the umbrella term “Contemporary Art.” Contemporary Art as a movement has proven difficult to define, partly because it is so new and is still happening today (I myself wonder what people who look back on the Contemporary era will come to define it as and what it will come to be named in the future, since any current art is technically “contemporary,” but I digress). One thing that can generally be agreed upon is that Contemporary Art places great importance on the concepts and methods behind each artists’s work, and one thing that I found to be true to me about Contemporary Art throughout my time as a B.F.A. student is that Contemporary Art is open to the idea that anything can be art as long as there is a concept to back it up. Photography has certainly taken on a huge role in Contemporary Art, especially with the advent of the digital camera and cell phone cameras. We continue to practice Photojournalism, Street, Documentary, and Fashion Photography, just as the Straight Photographers did, and elements of Pictorialism continue to play a part in the work of contemporary photographers, and the added element of digital processes has allowed for further artistic expression and exploration within the medium. And, as ever, artists are constantly finding new ways to use photographs in combination with other artistic mediums, especially painting and printmaking.

One of the earliest movement in Contemporary Art is, in fact, Photorealism, a movement that came about around 1968 in which artists took photographs and tried to replicate them as realistically as humanly possible (this movement had a revival in the 1990’s with the advent of digital cameras and digital technology). (x) Photography has also been used in Performance Art, both to document it as it happened live and to capture performances that were specifically meant for the camera’s eye (x). Photography has been used within contemporary art to create new worlds (such as in the work of Andreas Gursky), to explore new identities within the self (such as in the work of Cindy Sherman), to create scenes that could have been pulled from the movies (such as in the work of Gregory Crewdson), to document the people and issues around them (such as in the work on Nan Goldin), and to explore the ideas of home, family, time, love, loss, and so much more. Currently, there is a rise in popularity of older photographic processes (now known as “alternative processes) being used in rebellion against the evasive digital processes that have taken over the contemporary world. Companies such as Lomography and Polaroid Originals are catering to this trend by selling cameras and film that hearken back to what are now the “old days” before the world went digital, and even digital applications have photographic filters that are meant to make the photographs you take on your cell phone look like vintage film photographs.

Photography, though it is new in comparison to other forms of art, has a history that is continuing to evolve at a rapid pace. It plays an important part in our everyday lives, and it is for this reason that it is such a popular medium among artists today.

I hope you got something out of this reading, and I hope to see you in my wrap-up post on Friday.

Photography as Art, Pt. 1: How it Came to Be Recognized as Art

In my last post, we discussed how photography is not necessarily, if ever, truthful, and how photographers, consciously or unconsciously, bend the truth to fit their personal narrative. This, naturally, leads to today’s discussion on photography as a form of art (so, if you haven’t read last week’s post, please, feel free to do so now). This post will be written in two parts — the first part giving a (very) brief overview of how photography became a recognized form of art within the artistic community and the second discussing my personal take on photography as art by discussing what constitutes art in the first place. Also, in my best effort to keep this post as brief as possible and to prevent accusations of plagiarism, I will be including links to the resources I used to write this post so that, with one click, you can have access to even more information on the history of photography (because who doesn’t want that in their life?). Without further chit-chat, here’s some history for you

Photography as an idea has been around since the time of the camera obscura, which used a pinhole to project an upside-down image onto a wall or other surface. Photography as we now know it came into being in the 1820’s when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce exposed a pewter plate coated in bitumen to light via the camera obscura to create the first permanent photographic image, and, from there, the medium took off (for more history on advancements within early photography, click here). At first, photography was seen largely as a form of science and was used for documentary purposes, such to take pictures of people or places. Another turning-point in early photography that made it seem like even less of an artistic endeavor came with the advent of the Original Kodak in 1888 Kodak Brownie in 1900, which were both commercially available so that the middle-class could affordably make images of their family and friends. This promoted the idea of photography as something any amateur could do because a large number of people could get their hands on cameras (oh, how times have not changed one bit).

The first group to lobby for photography as a fine art were the Pictorialists, who rejected the snapshots that cameras like those made by Kodak has made popular in favor of labor-intensive forms of photography that showed the medium to be more than a mechanical process and, instead, one that involved great skill and craftsmanship. Under the umbrella of Pictorialism were the Photo-Secessionists, a group of photographers chosen and led by Alfred Stiegletz, whose aim was to move away from the idea of photography as a realistic representation of the world and, instead, toward a painterly aesthetic (for more on the Photo-Secessionists and for examples of their work, click here). Stiegletz, with the founding of The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (later re-branded simply as 291), was the first to exhibit photographs in a gallery setting, and was critical to the wider acceptance of photography as a fine art (what a guy).

In 1932, thirty years after the beginning of Photo-Secession, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City exhibited its first photograph; a year later, the first photographs were acquired for its collection and photographer Walker Evans exhibited the first one-man photography show, both within the museum and within the medium itself; in 1940, with influential photographer Ansel Adams as the Vice-Chairman of the Photography Committee, the Department of Photography at the MoMA was established, and, finally, in 1943, the Musuem of Modern Art Photography Center was established (to view the Department of Photography’s official press release, click here; for a complete chronology of the MoMA’s Department of Photography, click here). It is at this time in the 1940’s that, in The United States of America, photography becomes officially recognized as a form of fine art.

Needless to say, it would take an entire class (very likely more than one) to go over the history of photography, how it came to be known as art, and how it has since continued to evolve and thrive within the world of fine art. Also needless to say is that, although I have BFA in Fine Art, I am not (currently, anyway — maybe someday?) an art historian; I am simply interested in art history and, specifically and for obvious reasons, the history of photography. Finally, I felt that it was important to give the historical context of how photography became known as art before giving a talk on how photography is used in art today and my personal opinion on what makes it art because, well, context is everything, and, to understand the present, you must first understand the past (erm, well… in theory, anyway).

With all that being said, I hope you enjoyed today’s brief history lesson, and I hope to see you in my next post.