Increasingly, I encounter students who cannot appreciate the long distance aspect of a career as an artist. There is a tendency for final year and recently graduated students to view themselves as the finished article. Perhaps this is not their doing; it may be the teaching environment that's at fault here. "Art Schools have now become nothing more than fun factories" was purportedly used by the Scottish artist John Byrne in describing art schools in Scotland a couple of years ago. Wether he said it or not, I can see the relevance of a statement like that. A lot of what is produced in contemporary art school is vacuous and transitory, a series of separate ideas rather than a long standing preoccupation with a narrower field of investigation; the artist as butterfly.
In addition, I find more and more people, including fellow Art School colleagues; generally those who maintain little of what you could call an active external practice (by this I mean one which does not align itself to a narrow or educated audience), who subscribe to the notion that anybody can become an artist, a statement often attributed to the German artist Joseph Beuys This idea clearly has it's roots based within a misconception surrounding a misquote; Beuys in fact stated that everyone is an artist, i.e. that everyone controls their own destiny and can critically evaluate and define their path through life:
"To be sure, 'every man is an artist' in a general sense: one must be an artist for example, to create self-determination. But at a certain stage in his life every man becomes a specialist in a certain way; one studies chemistry, another sculpture or painting, a third becomes doctor, and so on. For this reason we understandably need special schools.(1)
This statement from Beuys belies another contemporary mantra; "we don't need Art Schools, they're outmoded." Not according to Beuys, who I will admit was a contradictory thinker and much misunderstood as a result, but clearly he saw the value of a specialised education in a certain field led by established practitioner/teachers.
I think we do need Art Schools, if for no other reason to maintain something, somewhere, that are the polar opposites to the 'fun factory' that is modern life for the young. But they need to be rigorous and ask difficult questions of young artists and they, in turn, need to be determined enough to face those questions and realise that those answers may take a long time to find.
(1) Götz Adriani, Joseph Beuys, Winfried Konnertz (1979) Joseph Beuys, life and works. p. 255.