art students -- describe some of your peers' lamest artworks - Art School Confidential (2006) Discussion

[–] mutilated_sideburns 18 years ago

i have to share something i did when in art school.
so our final was coming up, and we had about two weeks to work on it. maybe even more, i don't know - i stopped caring about my studio class. anyway, two nights before, i figure i should start working on my project. so i look up a list of trends from the 90s on wikipedia and print out pictures of those things. i put all the big pictures in the middle and have the smaller ones dwindle out on both sides, and then cut it out and folded it in the middle, putting it up in the corner like the vietnam memorial. i hated that project and i hated that art school, so i didn't really care. i knew it was bad, but i also knew i had to work on something.
the funny thing was, my piece got the best reception in the class. we would put our pieces up around the room and go around and critique them, and when we got to mine, everyone exploded in chatter about how awesome it was to grow up in the 90s. i was surprised and pleased until a smart girl commented about how bad the piece actually was. i was a tiny bit pissed (no one likes a direct insulting comment, even if they know they deserve it), yet at the same time rather glad that the whole human race isn't as distracted as i thought. i had a hell of a time trying to mumble out something that sounded vaguely like a reasonable interpretation.
i got a C on it. i'm glad i didn't get anything higher or else i would've lost my faith in humanity.

p.s. i'm looking at other art schools to go to, and was wondering if anyone had suggestion of a good place? i'm interested in calarts in particular, does anyone go there?

There seems to be an alien pubic hair in my gin. Never seen it before in my life! Have you?

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[–] pickledsocks 17 years ago

My sister goes there and hates it. She's a creative writing grad student and from what I hear, it's very artsy and pretentious. Her students in the freshmen comp class she teaches are always complaining that they don't need to learn to write since they're dance majors or whatever. If you don't want somewhere pretentious the only thing I can think of is a regular college with a good art program. I'm an art major at a regular college and it's not really anything like ASC. I guess it's like any of those specialty schools. I'm a comp sci major, too and I think the geekiness at Caltech would probably be overwhelming. It's all about moderation.

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[–] goodbyekitty_7 18 years ago

So I don't actually go to art school yet, however, I'm going to be going to art school next year and I was going to an open house for the art center at the University of Western Ontario. Honestly, it was the most pretentious art I have ever seen in my life! I hated all of it, and right then and there I decided I would not go to that school. Any way, one of the art works was nothing but a pile of sand in the corner and one of my friends who was with me walked right through it by accident and I convinced her that she had ruined the art. She got all upset about it and it was rather funny. Honestly how is a pile of sand even art? Christ. Next year I'll be going to the Ontario College of Art and Design so I guess I'll have to get used to this pretentious crap.

oo I have another story, the other day I was forced by my school to go to this little art gallery. It had THE MOST STUPID art I have ever seen. One of the pieces was a cosmo magazine with all the faces of the models covered with the faces of missing native women. Now I guess its an alright concept but the worst part is the pictures weren't even in color and were printed off on some *beep* ass printer and then were just scotch taped really obviously onto the magazine. Then she asked the art gallery to provide a chair and a table so that she could call it installation, even though she didn't even set up said chair and table. I thought it was sooo pathetic. I mean she's suppose to be a professional artist and shes doing something I wouldn't have even done in grade 9.

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[–] mpavlovi 18 years ago

i'm also guilty of this. it was for a freshman year "core" class (called "time and light")...i don't remember the exact instructions for the piece, but it was something along the lines of combining movement, color, light, and sound. i ended up painting some flowing colors on a piece of plywood with a hole cut in the middle; in class, i put a cheap desk lamp through the hole, played some nature sounds from a "sounds of nature" cd, and spun the plywood around.

in my defense the project assignment was incredibly lame.

and the kicker is, mine wasn't the worst one. close though.

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[–] tvc_15 18 years ago

I am only about 3 months away from starting my first year at Savannah College of Art and Design for Illustration- I am very aware of bad art and I make sure that nothing I do is bullsh*t. while searching for colleges, at SAIC (Chicago)I came across alot of horrible student art...there was a dirty white T-shirt that was ripped up and hanging from a wire hanger on the wall. and there was some writing in french across the front...i kid you not. there was also a display with severed limbs made poorly out of paper mache in a red room. Hopefully the people at Savannah have some talent.

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[–] imdb2-32 18 years ago

More full-of-it-failed-talentless-artists stories, please.

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[–] filmfan86 18 years ago

Geez, from some of these stories - it sounds like any old schmoe could just chuck something together and call it art - long as they have something artsy and pretensious to say about it!

reminds me of that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is trying to put together a BBQ - but its all wrong, and he gets angry and wacks it with golf clubs and the Isabella Rossalini character comes up and says its art.

This is slightly unrelated - but I remember a teacher once told us about studying philosophy, and how they had the question - does god exist? She said how they were writing for hours, then this guy turns up halfway through, spends two minutes writing, then hands it in and leaves. Everyone else wrote long, detailed, meaningful answers - and he wrote "no" - and got a high distinction!

"Everything in this room is eatable. Even I'm eatable. But that’s called cannibalism."

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[–] Molytic 17 years ago

I'm currently a Sophomore majoring in sculpture, but even in the time I've been at art school I've seen enough crap that it would make you want to cry (From either laughter or pure horror)

First semester during my foundation courses we had a teacher who was extremely conceptual, and we had a project to do something like a memory box, in the same vein as Louis Bourgeois or Ed Kienholz. Anyway we had 6 weeks to do it, although he wanted us to spend at least 4 weeks concepting it and making mock ups. Most of the projects were these nifty little boxes with some neat stuff in it. However this one kid comes in, we all hated him because he was kiss ass, and just a plain douche. Anyway, he goes into a room for the final critique with a bunch of crap. And we go in to see after he's all set up, and all he has is a bit from his record collection, and small portable record player, and some screen printed images of his record collection, and a picture of africa. He puts on some lame music (He's a DJ) and proceeds to tell us that this room is his box, and we are his memories, but it takes him 40 minutes to say this. The teacher gave him an A, but he gave everyone an A, even the kid that had nothing done, and half assed everything, and still does. Which made that scene in ASC so much more entertaining/maddening.

Another Story was from about 3 weeks ago I guess. We had a small weekend assignment to make a sculpture using 100 yards of line. The stuff being presented was so-so, however kid made this terrible looking structure out of Balsa wood, and he was so lazy that he didn't remove the price stickers from the sticks. However the class has to critique and say how they feel about the work before the "artist" can say anything, which is essentially like giving the student a buffet of meanings he can pick from so he can later say "yeah, that's what I meant with this piece" when it comes time for them to say what the piece is about. So the teacher questions him on the stickers, and before he answers (with a sort of upset look on his face) this girl comments on how the stickers represent the structure of the piece, that the whole thing was very geometric and the stickers emphasized that meaning of structure. Anyway, the student looks relieved and and he just says "Yeah, that's exactly what I meant!" I of course said "Or you just decided not to remove the stickers because they're a hassle to get off". I received the stink eye from several people.

Same project, another kid pretty much just took his pubes and taped them to film slides, and proceeded to show us a slide show of his pubes, with the, obviously premeditated, novelty "Family Picnic" slide in there for comedic relief.

Finally this was a piece a sculpture senior had done for his final thesis, that I thought was brilliant. It was just a can of cranberry sauce poured out onto a plate, still in the shape from the can. Why was this brilliant? Because he did it, and the teachers spent 20 minutes critiquing, when they asked him what the meaning behind it was, he responded "I did it to show that they teachers here will critique anything, and the vaguer it is, the more they'll have to say about it". I enjoyed that a great deal, the same way I enjoy Duchamp's "Fountain" and the whole Dada art movement, it was all a joke, and the artists themselves knew this and flaunted the fact.

It's funny though, as it seems a lot of artists dislike this movie, and they tend to be the one's who try to pull this kind of mess off as art, while the artists that do enjoy this film, are just the bitter artists that can relate to Jerome by having a good knowledge of Fundementals and talent, but being forgotten in a sea of trendy modern sh*t. Now I love a great deal of Modern art, but still I also am a strong supporter of having a strong foundation of fundamentals, and honestly in most cases, Style is just lack of Technique. You can tell when someone knows their stuff.

Though I would like to mention that I am guilty of bullsh*tting an entire project as well, and it too received fairly high acclaim, however, most of the acclaim was from my peers about how well I bullsh*tted it to the teacher.

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[–] 17 years ago

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[–] largewoodenbadger88 17 years ago

im an art major in college now but, last year in my senior year of high school i was put in the AP studio art class straight from the beginning art class. this teacher really liked my work, and i was a junior in a freshmen art class for none other than dukes and chuckles. it was the first year my school had this ap class, when i got there the class room was a hallway, and the only other student in the class just painted shrooms the whole year. the teacher lied to me and told me that it was independent study so she could go off and run personal errands all the time and left me to fend for my self in the hall.

once in that class i got berated for one of the paintings because it had thick outlines on the image of two hands playing a guitar *gasp* while this other kid got praise for the vibrant colors on his shrooms. which were just thickly laid down colored pencil with no shading or overlapping.

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[–] 17 years ago

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[–] DeadKennedys 15 years ago

Haha! I start grad school at SAIC in a few days! But in creative writing, not art. :)

One of the pieces I saw there during open house was a baby doll with a dildo attached to it. A condom was rolled over the dildo. I'm not sure what this was supposed to symbolize, but I had to bite my lips to keep from laughing. On the other hand, there was some very cool stuff in the gallery.

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[–] green-eyed-lady29 17 years ago

Freshman Year:

On the day we had our first nude model:
The model was really overweight and she was just...odd looking. I think that our teacher picked someone out of proportion just to make it harder. So this student next to me CANNOT draw ANYTHING. So there is no way he's going to draw this, and even he knows it. So he draws everything around her and leaves a big empty space in the middle that doesn't even look like her shape. And in the middle of the empty space the paper is all smeared and wrinkled. ((During the class he tells me that he's planning on drawing her in the next day)). At the end of the day, my art teacher skips over my somewhat impressive drawing and starts praising him for his "inventive composition" and all this other crap. And he totally pretended like it was his plan all along to take the abstract route. And after that he was considered one of the best artists in class. He stopped caring about drawing things well...because everyone always thought he intended for his art to look bad.

Luckily, my story has a good ending. He ended up being lazy because he was getting so much praise, and he hardly ever showed up to class..and when he did he was late...and my teacher totally called him on it. Sweet revenge.

Great topic!

Every time you vote Republican God kills a kitten

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[–] dukeb0y 17 years ago

I got to add, about my first nude model.

I usually pick a seat sit in the back ,movies, church, school, wherever. So I pick the farthest corner, of the studio, and draw.

I'm 18, and during the break time, the model sits right down next to me, not a stitch on. For a quiet kid from farm country, I was a little nervous!

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[–] HEPBURN1 17 years ago

This one girl at my old college, for our final piece of work, just took pictures of her and her girlfriend in their underwear, making out. I wasnt there for the crit cos I was forced to do this runway fashion thing, but apparently it looked like she was going to get away with it. Until one boy asked her what was the difference between her work, and porn. One aggressively feminist tutor agreed, and the girl had no answer.

I have also been guilty- we were meant to do something that you could install anywhere in the college, and I just bought a sketchbook,wrote 'everything you need to know to be an artist,' on the cover, left the inside blank, and put it in the library. After dealing with teachers who praised people who worked for 2 minutes on their work, all the while overlooking mine that took hours, I had a theory that the less work I put in, the better my grade. I was proved right.

In terms of famous art works, theres one in the Tate, that is just a glass of water on a glass shelf. It is called something like 'the oak tree.' Next to it is a written dialogue between the artist and an interviewer talking about the piece. He basically says that the glass of water is not a glass of water at all. It is an oak tree. When the interviewer quite rightly points out that it looks like a glass of water, the artist disagrees, and maintains that he has made an oak tree. When asked if anyone could create this, the artist says no, claiming that it took him a long time before he could create the tree from the glass. Sometimes I just stand back and look at peoples straight faces when they read it, trying to make out that it is something other than bs. Which I guess is what the artist was trying to prove in terms of peoples approach to art today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aC_2vUolLA

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[–] HollyHop 17 years ago

This was a suggestion from my art teacher of how to use symbolism. She draw a teddybear stuck between two branches on a tree to show how to symbolize a traumatic childhood.
I couldn't really trust her judgement after that.

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[–] cheepnis 17 years ago

who else has some?

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[–] spicy_mchaggis-2 17 years ago

In my class there was one guy that was a total hack but from what I can tell to this day he really thinks his work is the best stuff and is really proud of it. Basically, in design classes he took pictures and made them weird hues and then used the pixelate filter in photoshop, amazing......

In painting classes he painted really crappy anime figures and then would pretty much throw every trite punk rock reference into it and maybe use a little spray paint for good measure, horrible style, horrible composition.

His senior thesis was pretty much just a good peppering of this stuff printed off on squares of paper that were supposed to be "record sleeves" they really didn't look like record sleeves at all and all the titles were stupid emo band rip offs that were supposed to represent his life. It just didn't work. I learned a few weeks ago that since he has way to much friggin money that he inherited from a relative that he is now going to parsons? he was an interesting guy

also from that same class a girl just took pictures of herself throughout the semester and then posted them around the top of the wall in a long line. she really had no reason or point behind it she just did it.

luckily my teacher wasn't a hoser and saw through this crap unlike most of the posts on here

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[–] bringonthelucie 17 years ago

I'm responsible for this one. I'm a High School senior and during Junior year, I had to take an Art History and Appreciation Class and as a final project, we had to recreate or do our own piece of art either in painting, photography or sculpture.

I chose panting and I was going to recreate the front cover of Watchmen, but somewhere in the beginning of the whole process, I got frustrated and I was listening to music at the time and so I just decided I would improvise and I would choose colors and forms according to the mood that the songs were giving me.

I can't remember how long it took me, probably less than a few hours. And maybe the concept of the process of it wasn't so bad, but the end result was complete crap. It has no real composition, harmony or anything.

When I presented it, I got a lot of nice comments, especially from my teacher who thought it was brilliant. I don't know if people were just trying to be nice to me or if they actually thought it was any good but all I know is, I don't like it and I haven't thrown it out because I want to remember to not ever do anything like that again.

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[–] dramagirl13 17 years ago

I'm not exactly an artist,but I am a Musician. I play the violin.
so a couple years ago I was in an youth orchestra, I was 16 at the time, and the director wanted to find a soloist for the upcoming concert.
we each had to prepare an audition piece, so i chose this really beautiful concerto by Bach.
I did fine, i didnt make any mistakes, but the conductor chose this other girl who played, this corny little kid piece called "Johnny's hoedown."
only because she was an "overcomer"
the tip of her right pinkie, is crooked, and they called it an impediment.
YOU DONT USE YOUR RIGHT PINKIE FOR ANYTHING BUT BALANCE!!!

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[–] rexcraft7 17 years ago

LOL>> I LOVE THESE - although i didnt read the whole thread yet (just a couple pages), these stories are actually making me WANT to go to an art school lol. they sound pretty messed up

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[–] DeadKennedys 17 years ago

I used to be an art major, but I switched to creative writing, and there's just as many pretentious hacks in that field as there are in art. I knew art wasn't my strongest subject after receiving a B- in a basic drawing class. I've got a few creative writing pretentious douchebag stories to keep you all amused...

1) I was in this advanced fiction workshop in the fall semester of '07. We were all seniors and graduate students. There was this one girl there who turned in a piece that was reminiscent of what I might have written in fourth grade. Punctuation was nonexistent in some places. Grammar mistakes abound. She received a D on it. Later, when we were talking outside the classroom, she lamented that she didn't deserve a D and that she was a great writer. Also, she said she writes the way people talk and that punctuation is optional. I'm a nice girl (usually) and I just told her, "Why don't you take a poetry class? You can get away with a lot more in there." The sad thing is...her second story was even worse. Believe it or not. And if that doesn't make you smirk, how about this: she used chatspeak in her story. I'm dead serious.

2) There were some people whose stories (in my advanced workshop again) were great. Then there were those who stunk worse than a rotten fish. One in particular was a fantasy porn. It was poorly written. Like in the first anecdote, grammar and punctuation were obviously optional in this writer's mind as well. My story had been critiqued before her's. I worked my arse off on my story for years and it was brutalized in workshop, whereas her story was considered innovative and imaginative. My friend didn't cop to this kind of "experimental" writing either, so he called the fellow students out on their stupidity. I really questioned humanity.

3)Best of all...I worked for the school literary magazine. We received our share of garbage. We viewed our share of trash, too, during the open mikes. One of the most memorable ones concerned this fellow who brought a telephone/answering machine to the front of the room. Into the phone, he kept saying, "Ladies and gentlemen" while the machine repeatedly said, "So glad you called." This exchange went on for about five minutes. When he finished, he turned to us and said, "That's art."
I scratched my head at that one.
At the release party for this magazine, he brought a trumpet to the front of the room, but didn't play it. He just toted it around to appear innovative. He did encourage a few off-key notes from it during intermission. Before the event even started, he sat on one of the tables and held an umbrella over his head, trying to look all dadaist or something. He was an odd bird.

That's all for now folks.
After reading your guys' stories, I'm glad I dropped out of art school, though I'm not sure whether creative writing was much better or not.

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[–] robotboy1984 17 years ago

I study film(which also covers video and TV) and Photography at Deakin University in Burwood which is in Melbourne, Australia. For one particular class we were encouraged to mix our photography instillations.

1) A white infinity symbol, made from chicken wire and papier-mâché. Projected on either side were images of nature by two slide projectors. At the very end of the infinity symbol sculpture was a box covered in black cloth. There was a hole in the box and people put their hands into it and felt inside, what they were feeling was a penis shaped jelly vibrator. Can't say I didn't like it or have a bit of a laugh. Not sure what it meant and the guy who made it wasn't a bad bloke. Also the sculpture was the size of a person in terms of its length and width so would have taken some time to create and by some time I mean could have whipped the whole thing up in about 5-10 hours so not quite a rushed piece of work but hardly something that had been agonised over for weeks.

2) Admittedly I created this one I'm about to describe for the same class and assignment. It was a display of everyday objects like a lunchbox, a bottle of soft drink, a DVD box, a cereal box, a yo-yo, a CD, a video game (SNES cartridge), and some playing cards. Each object was spray painted metallic silver (to make it minimalist and also to give a futuristic quality). On each object was an image of the then Prime Minister John Howard. It was put on a board and arranged like it would be if it were being sold on a late night TV infomercial. Each of the playing cards was spray-painted and each had an image of the prime minister and each card was scattered on the board. Essentially mine didn't take long to make. I had to find these objects that I wanted e.g. I wanted the lunchbox to be just perfect in terms of 1950's kind of nostalgia. I had to find the right images of him make them the right size for each image print them out and glue them on. Essentially I was trying to ask the person looking at the display to ask should we be idolizing politicians, the people that affect every aspect of our lives, over people who are sporting celebrities and basically throw a ball in a hoop. It was open-ended, people could view it either as asking should we give more credit to politicians? Or was it being ironic and saying the Prime minister was not someone to be idolized. At the time it was done he was up to some naughty naughty things.... Anyways it got me a good grade and it met the requirements but yeah not exactly something I'd show in my folio.

Anyways everyone did out there kind of stuff, and like in the film most of us got decent marks regardless of effort or time etc. As long as you could argue when it came time to present your work then you got a good mark.

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[–] cheepnis 16 years ago

any new ones?

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[–] 16 years ago

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[–] 16 years ago

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[–] earthair_firewater9 16 years ago

during my portfolio class in my final year of high school we had to make extremely personal and representative projects.
here was this one guy's:

on a white piece of printer paper (8 1/2 by 11 oh dear) he had drawn in pencil crayons a landscape. like green hills with blue clouds, the yellow and orange sun peeking out from the top left corner of the page, and this hill that had a tree (think stick with a bush on top) on the top of the hill, with a path leading to the tree.
now this wasn't bad enough but it was his explanation that's so memorable. he started going on and on about how hes like the tree and needs to be lead up to and that THIS was his "perfect place" and if only the rest of the world was like this, it would be magical.
honestly we all thought he was bullsh!tting us...until he started TEARING UP. voice thick with emotion and eyes watering, he begged us to try and understand that the world needs to be more like his picture.

god, i hope for his sake that he was stoned.

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[–] JohnnyStaccato 16 years ago

First of all, this is the best thread I've ever encountered on the IMDb message boards, you guys are wonderful...I'll share my own experience.

I went to a video production competition at my college, there was a movie that was quite clearly a rip-off of Bergman's The Seventh Seal, except vaguely bowdlerized to be less-philosophically challenging and more positive/up-beat/life-affirming (basically dumbed down). It gets worse--the entire thing was done in Elvish (the fantasy language), not as a joke or parody, but totally straight. Finally, the real tragedy--the damn thing won the competition, because the judges are exactly the type of pseudo-intellectuals who ignored the originality of the other projects for the pretentious homage.

I sort of know the people behind it, they're a group of should-be grad students, guys who look forty but are actually in their late twenties/early thirties, who I wouldn't doubt have been dicking around at the school for way too many years with no intent of ever leaving. I think some of them may have even already graduated, but I guess they've really got nothing else, truly pathetic...a Pyrrhic victory for them.
_____
Suddenly, thud! My mind tottered like a jinkyboard in a windstorm...

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