It was all looking ok yesterday (Tues - 1st day) at Brighton, the other students were just as nervous and unsure of their abilities, and it looked like the course was going to be manageable, and I thought I’d like to study Aesthetics as I thought (stupidly) it meant something visual I could actually apply to painting, and since the other choice was Mentoring – having someone always looking over your shoulder – I thought this was the better option. How wrong I was. As soon as they put up the book list I knew this was just the same generic prescriptive BS as in the main book list. I did have a few drinks last night as I was so confused and just so unsure I’m doing the right thing. After all, who cares? Its not like being a cardiovascular surgeon and saving peoples lives or anything (not that that would impress my family anyway).
I really do have great reservations about the establishment of education every time I see a book list. I hope that if I stick with this course and choose the Mentoring option they don’t just guide me down the path they decide from the off that is right, not that I want the path of least resistance either, but I would at least like to be able to read the kinds of books that I am interested in and will further my own ideas: call me narcisstic or a coward if you like, but I’d like to think I have something else to offer the art world. When I got the first lot of correspondence (ahead of the letter with the offer of a place) I wrote this:
I may well consider turning my place on an MA course down on the basis that their book-list looks like it hasn’t changed for the last 10 (or 40!) years. Freud? Freud was a nazi to all intents and purposes. He’s currently being used to justify reparative therapy: ie “curing” gays. When he was around people still lived under thatched roofs with outside privies and going to work on horseback. The world’s moved on since then. There are whole new discoveries in neuroscience, and far from wanting to cure people the general mood amongst psychiatrists that is emerging is one that recognizes the chaos and fragility of the human brain and celebrates that diversity. And talking of diversity, the definition of “multi-culturalism” is narrow and misguided as well, concentrating as it does on black and asian people, basically RACE. What about those who experience the world differently because of the difference in how their bodies interact with the world. Does a deaf-blind child have their own culture? Does anyone care?
On the train on the way home yesterday I was pretty sure these ideas will be lost on art academics, as this is a way of thinking that is alien to them, they have been indoctrinated with certain ideas and beliefs and wont budge, and will shoot me down on every turn without even thinking there might be ideas outside their scope in the worlds of science and philosophy that may bisect the world of art and dare I say it CREATIVITY.
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