Ikea, the Mecca of stylish furniture that falls apart before you finish the last payment (sooner if you move it) has hired Forsman & Bodenfors to create the best web interfaces for sales I have seen in years (here is the website). It isn’t the animation which many have done, nor the simplicity of the layout or the contained and orderly navigation. It is the fact that these and other aspects have been done so seamlessly that the everyday consumer can enjoy the “shopping experience” in ways that they don’t need to be aware of. It is almost the futuristic, animated, informative, do-it-all site that web 1.0 2.0 and sadly 3.0 will all brag about offering.

This is the future of sales, advertisements, weekend grocery flyers everything. It’s not a question of if but when.

Art Professor giving advice before final portfolio review

You need to experiment, let go of any notion of a style or look. This
is the time to open yourself up to as many new ideas as possible

Same Art Professor’s advice at final portfolio review

Focus, you are all over the field with these works. There is no cohesion, sense of direction or look.

What can you say about Art School Confidential that hasn’t been said by the small percentage that have seen it already. Reviewing this film is kind of like reviewing tap water, the people that will ever drink tap water already have tasted & formed opinions about it and telling them what it is like is pointless or insulting. As such the people who would ever want to see Art School Confidential have done so and I am sure most of them fall into 1 of two categories:

A. I love Terry Zwigoff (director of this film, Ghost World & Crumb) or Daniel Clowes (comic artist behind the films Ghost World and Art School) and anything they do to show the quirky lovable misfits of this would is worth the cost of admission.

B. I went to art school and whatever both lets me relive the joys of that time and the horrible down the rabbit hole mind torture it was is worth the cost of admission.

Everyone else, I would think, just kept on walking by the movie poster. Which is fine cause if the two groups mentioned above have long since made piece with about anything its living and sharing a culture in the ghetto. It’s celebrated as highly as any form of success that pulls them out of it is denounced. So in order to keep this honest here is the following review for the film before I get into Art School as a whole.

Art School Confidential is two films, one sarcastic humor in the vein of Animal House toned down (first half), the other dry art suspense in the vein of the last half of Basquiat. Either one should have been made into a full film, together they make boring confusion. The humor side of this frosted mini-wheat is what I would have gladly consumed not out of distaste for the wholesome fiber side but due to the predictability of it (I and I think everyone else saw every twist and turn that meandered in the last 45 minutes coming long before it happened). It is both honestly inciteful with its caricature observations of the people behind the doors as well as the activities held within. Also it is humorous in a non gratuitous cum in the hair sort of way. You can laugh and sympathize all in one breath regardless of collegiate major. A entire film should have been made of the first 50 minutes. Either way you like your mini-wheat you will be entertained by one half and bored by the other. Its a rental with great quotes that only 1% of the people you run into will ever get.

That having been said the Art School on display in that film struck a all to honest chord for me and many people I know, if you have never been to any art institution or haven’t had friends or family do so this is what you could largely come to expect both pro & con regardless of what level of funding or prestige the school has. I have seen both community college and top tier and can say aside from the density of the library, availability of the equipment, quality of the visiting artists and size of the studio space they are largely the same down to the drawing horses and cabinetry. There are a few things that the film did get quite wrong. so much so that I feel that a comment is warranted with tongue firmly planted.

1. Never in my life outside of the extinct species that is Public School Art Classes have I ever seen or heard of everyone in the class getting A’s. As a matter of fact every Professor I have ever met treats the A grade in much the same way as a medical practitioner views Top Tier Broad Spectrum Antibiotics, they should be handed out rarely and only to those that fall within a certain criteria of symptoms. Most Professors either swing the letter A around like a club in hopes of intimidating or browbeating students to do or go wherever they have planned, or they view it as a archaic pointless and distracting relic of a Capitalist combative society and feel the need to give everyone B’s never the less. Neither of them seems to have ever required the financial assistance of a grant that views anything under a 3.4 as unbefitting. The few who don’t subscribe to these two extremes are often Grad students who just want to keep a job, get along & feel the sooner they take the stigma out of it the better, Non-American Grad students do not seem to apply. Needless to say in Art School you get 1-2 grades a semester, largely dependant on how the Professor feels about you or your hairstyle and they could care very little as to how you feel about your grade regardless of what the film states. I used to joke that I never worked so hard to get a F untill I tried to put one between a B.A. I once had a Professor who would write the letter grade on the back of the canvas with a Conte and thought that I and others would be spurred on by receiving a C+ then a C++ and ultimately a C+++ for our efforts. All the while seemingly oblivious to the fact that in College grades do not reflect either a plus nor a minus so people would just receive a C. If asked what could be done to alleviate the need for the C altogether and visit the bliss that is a B let alone a A the reply was little more then “Focus and work harder”. Imagine a math class in which you get the answer right but receive a C due to lack of diligence to find a original or more complex route to that answer. If that was the case today 1 out of 10 mathematicians would table the slide rule and take on marketing & public relations career.

2. Critiques in Art School rarely ever get as catty or vengeful as the film give the impression. possibly out of professionalism at a young age or out of retaliatory fear who knows. I only had or heard of a handful of verbal assaults or knock-down-drag-out fights. Largely this is civil and quite intuitatively illuminating for the artist in question. Either that or just dead silent.

Everything else is pretty dead on, especially the nude models. The men are largely older and pasty white and often chat up the females during breaks while in the buff. The women can have piercings you thought existed only in myth, jungle that would cause Dr. Livingston to shutter at and a grimace that you couldn’t scrape off with liquid compound. Once a Professor thought I had some fixation with cutting off women’s heads in my work. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was due to the fact I would paint what I saw and had a hard time composing more then two images in which the subject looked as if she wanted to come after the viewer with a butcher knife. Then there is the time when you are in a drawing class when the un-named subject walks into the room and toward the undressing enclave everyone starts doing basic figure warmups one for a female model and a different one for a male. Everyone having assumed that the person that just walked before them in their cokebottle black rim glasses, jarhead cut hair, gray baseball style shirt which covers a flat barrel chest and Green slacks that cover Popeye shape calves is a small male. Only to get 4 or 5 warmup sketches done before a obviously female personage walks from behind the curtain and the room warms up by 5 degrees. The only sound you hear is twenty people ripping their sheets from the stack then rolling them into balls while wide white eyes that would amaze buckwheat dart around the room

Art School, the price of admission you seemingly can not afford not to pay………..