Bout time

Let me just take a minute to congratulate and then immediately criticize what is happening in Thesis this semester.

I am thrilled that we finally started to act like we have a THESIS show happening in April. The last semester felt like we were all prancing around the idea with our thumbs up our asses, discussing OTHER artists works and wasting time being FORCED AT GUN POINT to go to galleries and write about them as if we had nothing of our own to do. We acted like April was a far off place, something that we didn't need to pay attention to. We talked about art critiques, and had to read and write BOOK REPORTS on a novel ABOUT CRITIQUES (more or less) as if we aren't all painfully comfortable (that doesn't make sense) with how they work first hand and have been for FOUR YEARS now assuming no one in high school gave any opinion or direction to our work.

Thats where the criticism comes in. What the fuck was with that first semester? Sure, two semesters is a long time for one class but now it feels like we are running around trying to get forty kids (ART kids, no less) to all agree on things rarely anyone has any experience in. Plus most of us have no idea what our final thesis will even end up looking like. We spent most of a class just figuring out how much space we will all be able to take up in the gallery and what to call the fucking show. Of course now I lead myself into a trap - if some people dont know NOW what they're displaying then if we were figuring this shit out last semester even MORE people would be clueless during the whole process. Well there is a solution to that: dont make the first semester feel like an art history class. We should have been doing this shit at least half way through last semester, not now when the first show is in two months. People have to figure out what they are doing and MAKE it all while dealing with creating posters and getting money for a show they only now started thinking about.

I understand going to galleries is essential to the art student; my painting teacher explains it by saying an artist never seeing shows is like a musician never listening to music or an actor never watching movies. However, we've all been DOING that every Goddamn year here. I doubt no one has ever gone to a show prior to Thesis. If they actually have not seen a show and needed Thesis to get their asses to one then fuck them, whats their problem? I guess you might tell me that it's important in the thinking process and would help those that have not ye...Shut up. If they're stuck and want inspiration then I'm sure they will go find it without it being a requirement for the whole fucking class.

Here's what Thesis class should be: preparing for our thesis show. Period. That involves writing about it, handing in rough drafts, talking about our ideas, getting the show together, yadda yadda yadda. It does NOT include watching art films for no reason or creating blogs just to seem like we are all in the 21st century. It does NOT include days and days wasted on seeing awful gallery shows in New York just to give us a frame of reference for our own show. Everyone is scrambling to make decisions and work with each other in that hour we get in class with this show looming just over the horizon. We've got to get two thousand dollars just for this crappy show. 2 thousand clams. 2 thousand bones. Half a which goes to feeding the ungrateful little shits that are going to wander around opening night pretending they aren't there just to be seen by other little shit hipsters like its a right of passage to absorb every feeble attempt at art th....I'm getting off point.

Look...Bottom line is that the whole first half of this class was a waste because it was given to us as a waste, and now we're paying for it. That sucks.