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As far as art not being taught in school,  it's my pet peeve. Just teaching math and science is like going to the gym and only doing curls.

I find that doctors that have a good art bg are good at analysis and holistic thinking.

For me, artists writing can be the most honest and clearest description of what they are doing. I often pick up collections of artists statements, because you are bypassing the critic. Having said that - we live in a society of academics. In the 40’s there were hardly any art schools. Now they are everywhere. So students and artists write about previous students and artists who also did work based upon previous works...

It’s a society of MFAs conducting esoteric research (look at some of my installations at junglelogic.tv)...and unfortunately the result is lots of JARGON. Try and write clearly. I have attached at the end of this a statement  by Doug Aitken that I particularly enjoy (his work is incredible). I think it is both complex yet clearly stated. 

2 things - and this is for everyone:

"Know your enemy"...i.e., even if you don't like something, be able to talk about why you don't like it, using design terminology.

I use the example of 2 designers talking to  an art director -

he asks, “why don’t you like this particular design?”

The first one answers, “Oh, I dunno, I just hate it, it sucks, you know? It’s like, too bright...”

The second one answers “ The colors attempt to be bright and colorful, enhancing the youthful energy of the ad, however, the use of complements is too harsh - perhaps using split complements the color would still be vibrant and contrast without clashing. Having said that, I’d recommend decreasing the scale of the copy and increasing the photograph - it will have more immediate visual impact, and once we have the audience’s attention they will be motivated to read the copy.”

You see the difference? That is why we have so many DQs - to have you practice critical discourse.

“Paint splattered across the page”...I get this a lot. You have to understand what the artist is responding to historically. For example, when you get into art history you will find that many artists responded to the new atrocities related to technology in  WW1 and WW2 by revolting against tradition...and when you combine that with Jung and Freud’s work in dreams and psychoanalysis, and interest in other cultures (sand painting, african art) you can start to see a pattern and methodology to the images artists portray. Illusionism has been out for a 100 years. The paint itself, the surface of the canvas, the investigation of pure color and form, these are historical chapters that inform us about  today’s visual environment.

As you can see the Art world is full of variety. They use a different language developed from different sources than the design world - I do find that some of the most successful designers "borrow" ideas from the fine arts world. Designer Hillman Curtis takes his design team out to the galleries often. Designers will take an edgy fine art idea and make it more palatable to the common viewer.

As far as velvet - it references kitch, tacky, lo-art lo-brow kinds of images - because it was used in mexico to make gaudy and tasteless velvet paintings.

Keep an open mind and take the art history survey and an art history seminar so the artists statements can be understood in their correct context.

The best definition of what makes something "art" that I have encountered is by Wollheim - in the intro to this volume he lays it out in a couple of pages...Basically art is defined by the process and the intent of the artist...a step by step process of analysis and reaction - and that is what makes a five year old's messy finger painting different than the 50 year old's painting -  they may look similar but conceptually are derived from different sources.

 I try and make it clear to people that art and design are much more related to philosophy than to decoration. You are working with symbols and context, not just pattern and color.

The book: Painting as an Art by Wollheim, Richard

About this title: "There are books aplenty on painting and art, but this is the first to explain seriously what makes painting an art, and it is our good luck to have it from a notable philosopher who is also on an intimate footing with the tradition of Western painting and who knows how to stand in front of a painting and spin tales that sparkle with truth. . . . Mr. Wollheim's interpretations are bold, revisionary and cogent. Only a philosopher of his rare gifts, and a connoisseur with his command of the art-historical tradition, could possibly have the confidence to bring off his feat of virtuoso...

As regards real art is about emotions and how it is portrayed...keep in mind that art hasn't been about emotion since the 60's, and if you go back to DADA and Fluxus, even before then. Maybe in the 40s and 50s with abstract expressionisim, or in the 80s with neoexpressionism, but much of our art and design is about references to visual culture and meaning, not personal expression.

I know, it's common to believe this, and it may be true for most of the students here. But you'd be slain in a critical discourse talking about art as an expression of emotion. be forewarned.

Statement by artist Doug Aitken:

DOUG AITKEN TALKS ABOUT ELECTRIC EARTH

In many ways the process of my work is an ongoing experiment to see how I can open myself to a larger field of experience and information. At times I live nomadically, wandering, going from project to project and city to city. I find myself moving through space and responding to experiences in a way that’s very different from the way you do if you stay in one place. A moment that might ordinarily just flash by now makes a deep impression on you. Your sense of time expands or contracts and you become extremely sensitized to things you might not have noticed before.

As I found myself in constant motion, I became increasingly attracted to in-between places, places that were not destinations, places that were somehow in limbo or were outcast and passed by.

Electric Earth is a compendium of these in-between places and neutral spaces. It's structured around a single individual, whom I imagined as being the last person on earth. He is in a state somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, and he is traveling through a seemingly banal urban environment in the moments before night-tall. As he moves, the world around him—a satellite dish, a trash bag spinning in the air, a blinking streetlight, a car window—begins to accelerate.

I wanted to see if I could break open the linear trajectory of his journey, Which I imagine as a kind of walkabout, and unlock a different perception of the environment he moves through. Taking a walk can be an uncanny experience. Propelled by our legs we find rhythms and tempos. Our bodies move in cycles that are repetitious and machinelike. We lose track of thoughts. Time can slip away from us; it can stretch out or become condensed. Sometimes the speed of our environment is out of sync with our perception of it. When this happens, it creates a kind of gray zone, a state of flux that fascinates me.

The protagonist in Electric Earth is in this state of constant flux and perpetual transformation. The paradox is that it also creates a perpetual present that consumes him.

Electric Earth appears to be situated in a single time and place, but it’s actually a Constructed, hybrid landscape composed of material gathered over time. In making it, I specifically experimented with treating each element, no matter how small, as if it were as important as every other element, and I tried to give every detail equal weight in the overall narrative. I wanted to see if I could create an organic structure— like a strand of DNA, where every bit of information, every chromosome, is critical—through accumulations of small events and actions. My goal was to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Time is also a critical subject of this work. I broke up Electric Earth into a sequence of spaces because I’m not interested in constructing something linear. Film and video structure our experience in a linear way simply because they’re moving images on a strip of emulsion or tape. They create a story out of everything because it’s inherent to the medium and to the structure of montage. But, of course, we experience time in a much more complex way. The question for me is, How can break through this idea, which is reinforced constantly? How can I make time somehow collapse or expand, so it no longer unfolds in this one narrow form?

Electric Earth is composed in a way that I hope doesn’t predetermine its meaning. It’s important to. me to preserve the enigma of actions and events. I am not interested in illustrating or making a statement about a specific place. The landscape doesn’t refer to a city like Los Angeles or New York, Rather, it’s an amalgam of different places that have one thing in common: They’re all in a state of continuous motion. The landscape in Electric Earth is stark and automated, but the electricity driving the machines is ultimately more important than the devices it drives, It’s what the protagonist responds to, and what puts him in motion in turn.

The deluge of information we’re confronted with today is inescapable, and I hope this work is seen as a document of its ever-increasing pace. You can’t rely any longer on the kind of perceptions that come built into a specific medium or genre. It’s not really possible to limit yourself to a single language anymore—like, say, the language of abstract painting, or Hollywood, or music, or performance. These have all become rigid systems on the one hand, and totally porous on the other. With each piece I try to work with the language of images and the tools that are available to me, and strive to carve some kind of personal perception out of this endless flow of information we call experience. We all strive for that, I think. Otherwise, like the protagonist in Electric Earth, we can easily become lost, and vanish.

“A lot of times I dance so fast that I become what’s around me,” So says the lone protagonist of Electric Earth, 1999, Doug Aitken’s hyperkinetic fable of modern life in the form of a sprawling eight-screen Installation that took home the International Prize at last summer’s Venice Biennale. An uncanny cross-pollination of genre conventions sampled freely from music video, documentary, and narrative film alike, the work forged a weirdly precise portrait of urban angst, wedding installation to the vernacular vocabularies of cinema and dance. In Electric Earth as In Aitkin’s previous Works, the landscape—here an anonymous expanse of urban wasteland—isn’t a passive backdrop for human action, but rather its driving force. The blinking traffic lights, panning Video cameras, and automatic car windows create an environment of jerky, accelerating rhythms that Aitkin’s young black protagonist begins to mimic, as If involuntarily. Projected on enormous screens in three adjoining rooms, Electric Earth Is itself an immersive landscape of motion and fractured information, which viewers are meant to experience as much as to watch.

Aitken was in New York in late March for the Whitney Biennial, where his installation is enjoying Its American debut run. We met for lunch in a crowded Chelsea cafe, where we talked about the deluge of Information we’re subjected to daily and how difficult it is to snap ourselves out of our habitual

perceptions of the world.

MAY 2000 ARTFORUM interview with Saul Anton