I watched this anime and I had a little spastic meltdown, which I will now inflict on you.
I will start by describing it
So it starts with this protagonist guy Yatora Yaguchi who has socially faked his way though school and high school, superficially, he is reasonably popular and successful; totally empty inside. High social capacity, not really, genuinely interested in anything. Careful, a climber, in low-level despair. Right on course for a functional degree and a job as a competent salaryman.
Out of nowhere, or maybe after a chance encounter, he takes an interest in art. Supported by some small initial success and a perceptive art teacher, over a short period of time he goes from being not that interested at all, to being in the art club, to rapidly gaining skill and interest, to deciding that he is going to go for an art degree.
The big university has a well regarded fine-arts course. The only way he can afford it is to get one of the handful of free spots and the only way to do that is to ace the entry exam, (which almost everyone fails, some people take it two or three times).
From there it’s a race against the clock as Yaguchi focuses on learning skills and discovering art. He sees himself as not being that talented, can relentless hard work and pure desire make up for a lack of talent? Can he learn everything about art and ace the big test and become a real artist?
THINKS LIKED
It was the awakening of an actual, human soul inside someone who was otherwise living in a performance of their own life like an actor inhabiting a role, and maybe the first time this man/boy who had never done anything that wasn't careful and planned did anything purely non-optimal and risky for its own sake.
I like the art teacher and I like the cast of oddballs and weirdoes who make up the various art classes.
I like the procedural stuff about training and technique, common to anime but I would have been happy with more of it.
I like the slow development of the protagonist into a somewhat less empty, and therefore somewhat more usefully-empathic and morally present individual.
I like that his close drinking buddies all knew he was shallow as fuck but didn't really mind, and that one of them is inspired to go to cooking school by seeing Yaguchi follow his dream and grow as a person.
I *think* I liked the somewhat odd cross-dressing/trans(?) best friend plot?
Its an interesting look inside the processes of art school and an art education, but oh my god did I find myself unexpectedly fucking DESPISING parts of this by the end.
NEUTRAL THINGS
Regarding the styles and types of art engaged in by the protagonist and their class, the in-fiction art, I didn't actually like much of it myself, it did not move my heart, and I was fine with this as I expect that from any mainstream entertainment.
I was ok with characters going "Oh, so inspiring" and "your art has really improved etc etc" when I wasn't a big fan of the art being looked at in question. I could still care about the story in which the art was embedded, so my complaints below are, I think, separate to that.
THINGS I HATED
Its complex as all of these things combined and interwove at some point, but to try it one-by-one.
The Japanese testing system
Hey! Lets test children to the point of destruction! And lets valorise their personal self-annihilation!
'Academic Art'
"Oh you won't have to make academic art on this course" says the teacher on the exam-prep course.
(Yes you will and that is all you will learn).
'Academic Art' is apparently a thing where they train examinees in particular.. patterns? I don't know how precisely to define it, but each university has its own particular obsessions, tendencies and fashions in its preferences so they train the Examinees specifically for the University they are applying for, like it was a written test. Perhaps they don't do this 'as-such', but I think they are still doing it in-essence.
WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY WITH THIS PIECE?
This absolutely disgusts me on every conceivable level. If I had to pick one thing in particular that crawled up my arse and screamed its this.
The looping of the language of criticism (flawed and shit anyway) with the production of art turns emotion into a performance of emotion (IN A SAVAGE TESTING ENVIRONMENT). I FUCKING HATE THIS.
'What are you trying to say, from an examiner, in a test with 200 people where only three are going to get in. Genuinely just shoot me.
Educational systems are primarily agreeability and obedience machines, and secondly analysis of skill and drive, so this definition of a visual static art, where this desperate and very young teenager is meant to have 'something to say', in an utterly silent medium, in which 20 kids in a room paint virtually the same thing, it’s a degradation of thought and emotion guaranteed to produce self-deluding drones who when they come to make art in the future, will ask themselves "what am I trying to say" from the examiner in their head. So everything becomes exam art.
(no relation to MFA culture at all there)
(was it all really the same thing I am complaining about?)
Total separation of 'genre' and 'Fine Art'
So clearly, drawing a dragon or something or something from your imagination or even something interwoven with your imagination, is not going to cut it. This is a silent rule, another one these young exam takers are being inducted into, a very familiar one to me.
'we want to see the products of your heart"
'ok, here they are, they are gauche, atavistic, genre and imaginary'
'well in fact we didn’t mean that at all, and understanding *that* we didn't mean that was part of the test.
What we *meant* was 'we want to see the product of an utterly neutral heart, with a fair amount of skill and drive but almost no real creative imagination, and we want to see that they have 'something to say' (as we would understand it, and about the vanishingly small number of things a teenager might have something to say about that would be coherent to a middle aged drone), and we want that expressed entirely though a still, silent visual medium, and we want it expressed with maybe a dab of 'cleverness'.
What you are creating here is modernism and total emptiness. The painting as 'text' where the quality and "depth" (as if even one of these people would understand anything of actual emotional depth) is decided by how 'cleverly' the teenager can command, ape, combine and recombine the known forms of modernism to produce something of not-too-much emotional content, not too much creativity, but it has 'something to say'.
Do I fucking despise art school and absolutely everything about higher fine art education and the kind of art and culture it produces?
I don't know but I fucking HATED this anime version of it!!!
We have to destroy (Anime) art school!!!
Extremely rough estimate here but about 9 out of 10 people I know who went to art school basically stopped making art. Art school barely teaches anyone how to draw or paint anymore. It does teach you how to talk the absolute bullshit that the whole parasite industry of art academia runs on though so that might be your moneys worth right there.
ReplyDeleteI want you to watch this so I can measure the tonality of your hatred of it.
DeleteBesides the insidious, conditioned judgement that anything created must have utility and value in a commercialised system of inhuman exchange -- and therefore can't be too much of anything in its own right, lest it not be useful as currency -- there's a sense of prioritising the map over the terrain. A sense of assuming -- much like Rabbit in 'Winnie the Pooh’s Most Grand Adventure' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3JYfbu8BiA -- that the map has authority. I suppose that when cultural expression and the protection of a space in which to propagate it is left in the sticky hands of the mass, it’s going to default to something safely accessible. Not that I can claim any knowledge of the particulars of Japanese education, but expectations ossifying into something presentable within a context of a particular, closed model of understanding… that seems a universal danger when considering the neurotypical urge to conform? The tendency to cluster, to measure oneself against an ideal defined around something replicable and confidently understood by all is powerful. Unfortunately for that tendency, life and creativity are not scientific or domesticated, are they? They can’t be measured against any one set of criteria, they emerge from the circumstances of the individual drive, the personal experiences, the interactions between people and expectations, the particular integrations that change based on where you’re viewing them from, how you’re adjusting your focus, etc.
ReplyDeleteSo long as categorization and a standardised framework are serving as something on which to hang and drape creative output, from which to launch it, it serves a purpose. A necessary one, arguably. But it’s like naming something and then assuming the name defines its nature, or denying a writer the means of playing with language; forgetting that the purpose of the system is to aid in navigating the actual space, you reduce that space to the parameters of the system. Do it too often, have the system feed on itself and reinforce its assumptions, and much of that space is left non-accessible to most, and those best able to explore are cast off unmoored; not good for them nor for the culture they would enrich.
"there's a sense of prioritising the map over the terrain."
Delete- I find this to be near-universally true in academic culture, the description being mistaken for the thing itself.
"I suppose that when cultural expression and the protection of a space in which to propagate it is left in the sticky hands of the mass, it’s going to default to something safely accessible."
- I see it pretty much the opposite. Fine art education isn't in the hands of the mass but of a tiny cult who gate access to the useful knowledge they have with deranged theories and general bullshit.
- I am somewhat happier with art for the mass than I am with art for the elite because the fact they need to gets bums in seats sometimes forces creators into an actually-original mindset.
"that seems a universal danger when considering the neurotypical urge to conform?"
- I don't really see an urge to conform as 'neurotypical'. We are social apes and often die outside the group. Wanting to fit into the culture is strongly programmed into almost all of us. To me it is is an element, or a drive, to be acknowledged and inwardly understood and its paradoxes managed.
- What pisses me off is an intensely conformist culture which *thinks* it is universally made up of rebels with 'something to say'.
- I broadly agree with the rest.
"I am somewhat happier with art for the mass than I am with art for the elite because the fact they need to gets bums in seats sometimes forces creators into an actually-original mindset"
DeleteAn interesting idea. I should probably clarify that the opposite of the masses doesn't, for me, necessarily imply "elite", merely unusual. Not a hierarchy or a deliberate exclusion, simply a rare preference. I also think that people are, sadly, a lot more likely to sit down when shown something comfortingly familiar. This recent article is interesting in that regard: https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
"I don't really see an urge to conform as 'neurotypical'. We are social apes and often die outside the group. Wanting to fit into the culture is strongly programmed into almost all of us."
True, and another example of clumsy wording on my part. The distinction in my mind isn't based on desire for belonging but on the capacity to subordinate self to the group. A powerful moment in my life occurred when I was twelve, on a secondary school playground. Two students started one of those dumb shoving matches, and every student in the school -- all 1,500 of them -- moved as one flowing crowd to gather round and gawp, moving because the others around them were moving. All except me. The only one not part of the mob. Crowd psychology doesn't seem to work on me -- which doesn't mean I'm anti-social, I'm as strongly dependent on emotional, social and intellectual ties to others as any human (as you rightly note). The quality that's missing is something... socio-political. I don't miss it, since other people seem to me to value petty, belligerent tribalism over the "long game" that I think better serves a people -- https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2023/03/sci-fi-optimistic-setting-sketch.html. A quote I found that I identify with: "Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass."
Gah, I don't think that second link worked. Trying again: https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2023/03/sci-fi-optimistic-setting-sketch.html
DeleteOnly semi-related but back in the Previous Century when I did an art GCSE, I discovered that grades were finite, so even if, say, 15 people turned in A* quality work, not all of them could get an A*.
ReplyDeleteThis was apparently unique among all the subjects, and I thought it was quite unfair at the time.
(I got an A.)
Good work on the A Kevin!
DeleteRe 'Academic Art' - would this feel less detestable to you if it was the art style of a particular master and his studio?
ReplyDelete'What we *meant* was 'we want to see the product of an utterly neutral heart, with a fair amount of skill and drive but almost no real creative imagination'
In two minds on this. Yes, I don't want more Modernism*, I want people able to draw/paint/sculpt &c a bunch of different things. But I can recall a distinct irritation with art lessons trying to get me to be more creative. My mind is simmering away anyway; you might be able to fuel it but you won't be able to spark it. But you can pass on a few techniques!
There's one of those irritating sayings: 'Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire'. All well and good, but a fire needs a steady supply of fuel and steady, careful 'pail-filling' tasks should not be discounted.
So, I'm not sure I strictly despise 'the product of an utterly neutral heart, with a fair amount of skill and drive but almost no real creative imagination'. If someone were to produce works very like that of Durer - well, I can understand not calling them 'Genius' but I would think it right to call them 'Master'.
Pastiche in the visual arts is distinct from literature in that it is (now?) lower status. As more of a reader, perhaps I'm used to thinking in terms of genre - Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster and Jonson can write tragedy, and we still see an occasional new tragedy. But turn to buildings and you get articles like this: https://placesjournal.org/article/trouble-with-terminators/ (first seen linked to on a Coins and Scrolls post).
For my part, I can't help feeling that you should be able to 'ring the changes' sufficiently on a building to stave off the 'de-stabilizing strangeness of simulacra' the article describes. But I'm not an architect.
And that's starting to sound awfully like "quality...decided by how 'cleverly' the [Artist] can command, ape, combine and recombine the known forms of [A Given School] to produce something of not-too-much emotional content, not too much creativity, but it has 'something to say' "
[Add to this a (vaguely Burkean?) 'Great Works-learn the Canon-be part of the continuing conversation' mentality on my part.** And an awareness of my own influences and the potential poverty of my own imagination.]
I am also reminded of the titular Francis Cornish, of Robertson Davies's Cornish Trilogy. Who studies artistic technique to such a degree that he eventually ends up apprentice to a forger (not the books are just about that). He is recognised in his own lifetime as an art expert, but not an expert artist.
But of course, even if I don't strictly despise, &c, I recall a year or so ago a series of 'new voices' curated and writing In the New Statesman. Not that I actively expected one to be Chaucerian, one to be Miltonian, one to be Austenesque (&c), but they still struck me as too jolly similar for the stated purpose of exposing 'New Voices' to have been fulfilled in a worthwhile fashion. Either the selector of new voices or the teachers of new voices or the inspirational material offered to new voices is at fault; perhaps all of the above.
Certainly, the artistic pedagogy as depicted by the Anime seems unpleasant for those within and unprofitable to a wider society.
Strangely, my mind goes to the Ecclesiastical as a solution. You cannot make Saints, only canonise them. In the meantime, ensure there are plenty of Bishops, Priests and Deacons (of a variety of rites and traditions) to preach sermons and conduct the rituals and do exegesis and so forth. Also, accept that there is no guarantee a Bishop will be a Saint.
*Though I read Waugh and Eliot quite happily. I acknowledge that they were not consistently (always?) modernists.
**If not to the point of only reading the Booker shortlist or Nobel prize winners. Though apparently the latter is an interesting experience, but struggling to remember who said that.
DeleteRe 'Academic Art' - would this feel less detestable to you if it was the art style of a particular master and his studio?
- Somewhat I think. If it was human-to-human and less corporatised. (Though in that imagined reality I, or someone like me, would probably still be complaining about 'those who follow the aging masters')
If someone were to produce works very like that of Durer - well, I can understand not calling them 'Genius' but I would think it right to call them 'Master'.
- Some of this I think we can agree on, some we will be divided by experience and nature.
- If Art School was 'Art Skills School', where they just taught you the craft & left you to be whatever kind of artist you like, I could live with it, its what I take as the toxic gating, hiding and (if we are to belive Scrap), eventualy forgetting of technique and craft behind a set of theories and attidudes I hate.
But turn to buildings and you get articles like this:
https://placesjournal.org/article/trouble-with-terminators/ (first seen linked to on a Coins and Scrolls post).
- I am sorry but I am not going to read that. From a brief scan its hard to tell if you are showing it as an example of somthing good or meaningful or of standard archtects-dirge speak. Apologies! 9Architectual language is just realy really REALLY drivelly and frustrating to read.)
Certainly, the artistic pedagogy as depicted by the Anime seems unpleasant for those within and unprofitable to a wider society.
- I want more people to watch this thing to see if I am actually right or just being insane.
Strangely, my mind goes to the Ecclesiastical as a solution. You cannot make Saints, only canonise them.
- I can live with this.
'I am sorry but I am not going to read that. From a brief scan its hard to tell if you are showing it as an example of somthing good or meaningful or of standard archtects-dirge speak.'
DeleteI had to take a few passes at that before it made a lick of sense, I confess. And having scanned some of the other material on that site, it's worse.
The useful stuff is in the last half, to my mind. It's an article that reviewing some of the arguments against building in older styles, finally concentrating on a partial facsimile of Mount Vernon called the Brant House.
As I say, useful for seeing what the arguments against are - but I find its finally conclusions slightly sneery and a bit armchair psychologist.
Hence, the bit above starting 'I can't help feeling that....' I can understand the article saying 'the world becoming a full scale mock-up of itself protects nothing' but it wouldn't be mock (to my mind) if an architect who really wanted to build a Baroque pavilion just built a Baroque pavilion (presumably for someone who wanted a Baroque pavilion).
Likewise, I know that (for instance) a design for a Chicago suburb is never going to look like or function like the centre of Siena or Bruges or what have you, but that doesn't mean orders of architecture or concepts can't be employed. (See also the debates over Poundbury and Nanlesdan, though these have an all-but-explicit political angle).
Hope that explains things a bit.
I am thinking about the above. Two of those were some long responses.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, consider how many Hitlers this sort of art schooling keeps out of politics.
ReplyDelete