Boodachitaville » education

It Is Time For Fake Art

admin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:24:38 +0000

Thanks to the popular trend of alarmist, panic inducing, emotional reaction inciting journalism that has become the standard for any discussion of current events, I am allowed, as you my loyal readers know, to give full vent to any fears, concerns, discomforts, or outrages caused by anything that strikes me as being different, unusual, or in anyway threatening. This is a great boon to me, for without serious journalists freaking out over whether birth weight is related to the development of leukemia or what the loss of sea-grass will do to the world I would never feel free to declare the need for the public to take radical steps to change a situation that few other people have ever even noticed. Indeed, if not for the constant panic that our news agencies attempt to keep the general public in I would be too wary of demanding that you, my loyal readers, join me in creating fake art.
And that is exactly what I am demanding of you, my loyal readers, that you immediately set about creating fake art.
For you see, dear reader, we are being inundated with a plague as dire as any other plague that has faced us since the loss of our vital sea-grass, the plague of the artist.
That is right my friends. We have too many artists. And they are wrecking lives, the economy, and art itself.
Somehow over the last thirty odd years or so a massive portion of our population has become convinced that they have a creative vision. And that is nonsense.
While this is a nonsense that people in previous generations may have believed at one point or another in their lives, they recognized that the proper outlet for their delusions of creativity was in the appreciation of what real artists could do or in small creative efforts that could be hidden away from public view.
But now we are nearly being swept under with all manner of people who are self-described artists, thinkers, and idea-men, people who are in reality merely desperate to prove to themselves that they are something special and have something that is worthwhile to share with other people.
These folks are found all the time now putting up art shows that are practically indistinguishable from each other with every piece they produce looking like a piece of garbage that Jackson Pollock threw up on. You see them all the time, carrying their sketchpads in their messenger bags, wearing their “Che” t-shirts (like Che Guevara wouldn’t shoot the freaking hippies in disgust at their bourgeois background) and everyone of them thinks that what they are creating is ART!
Well I say bullcrap! Just because you have a beret, a tattoo of a barcode, a scooter, a job that pays nothing, an organic hemp thong, and a gallery at a pizza parlor doesn’t mean that you are an artist!
Unfortunately the liberal arts college education that most of these “I’m a graphic designer but what I really am about is using photography to capture the language of the trees” types have had prevents them from realizing that the sheer level of suck proves that what they produce is not art. It is almost impossible to prove to those kinds of people that “the idea” is not enough to justify them satisfying their creative impulses, but rather that they need to learn how to freakin’ do what they are doing right!
And it is time that we, the not creative, prove it to them.
If we, the regular people of the world, gathered together and began to produce “art” (and it doesn’t matter what kind of art) and pretended that what we were doing really was art (even though we know that it isn’t) and began to demand space in galleries for our watercolors of kittens and flowers and sculptures of people we knew in high school then perhaps when everyone is unable to distinguish between our poorly conceived and hastily executed trash and the “art” of the wannabees, then maybe some of those darn fools will leave behind their jobs as baristas and get a job welding pieces of metal into something useful.
But it will take you, dear reader, actually putting pencil to paper and drawing what you think Superman would look like as a priest, or beating a trash can with a rock, or performing a song about the injustices of the PTA to a coffee shop of hipsters to make that worthless sack of pretentious culture droppings with the dreds to stop working on his screenplay and get that job as an accountant.
Don’t let me down.

-Bob

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What Uncle Phil Wants You to Know About Higher Learning.

admin — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:52:41 +0000

Dude! I just saw Uncle Phil on TV again!!

Holy Crap! I mean, I never actually liked The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and couldn’t wait for it to be over back whenever I had to show it when I used to work in television, but man was it neat to see Uncle Phil again. (The only thing I really liked off of that show was the stellar, incomparable acting of DJ Jazzy Jeff. Man, he was awesome.) No I never really liked his character, Uncle Phil’s character that is, Jazzy Jeff was awesome. But Uncle Phil was too… professional. Too much of a Ward Cleaver or an Andy Taylor type of sitcom dad and not enough of a Dr. Cliff Huxtable for my tastes. Way too knowing and wise without nearly enough wacky sweaters or pudding pop endorsements. Perhaps if he had had a successful stand-up comedy career prior to and following Jazzy Jeff’s triumphant domination of the television airwaves I would have been a bigger fan. Oh well.

In fact I only remembered the guy because I saw him just now. He was on another pretentious, pandering commercial for a “school for working adults.” St. Michael and the Angels, I love those things!

Of course, just like Uncle Phil said in the commercial, the educational system has failed you. It isn’t your fault you are failing in life, it is the educational system. They just haven’t recognized your talent. That is the problem. And now that the educational system recognizes that they are going to fix things. The solution is on the way and that solution is technology.

Yes! Now through the power of the information age you will no longer fail to understand things because now instead of having to sit through classes you can just go online and watch the. Now instead of handing in papers you can email them. And the best thing about it is that you can do all of this whenever you want. And that is the key to learning.

See you may have thought that the key to learning was gaining understanding but it is not. The key to learning and practical knowledge is doing a series of assigned tasks over a period of time. It is kinda like an assembly line. That is why we have an educational system set up where we all learn one set of things over a period of a year, then another set of things over the period of a year, and so on. Because learning is like an assembly line. The road to understanding is to work through a process.

That is why you can go take a class with hundreds of other students whom you may not even see because you are online and work through a text or study guide while listening to lectures and gain understanding about a subject. You can even be graded by a Scantron to prove that you gained understanding because understanding is born from having covered and retained material and nothing more. And when the Scantron says you have gained covered the material then of course you are prepared to utilize it and be certified as such. There really isn’t even a need for teachers because really the only way to understand is to review material. I even begin to wonder why we have teachers at all.

I mean of course there would be a reason for them if gaining understanding wasn’t just a process that could be applied with assembly line systematization but rather was a personal journey that can require different types of effort and different lengths of time but always required someone who already had understanding guiding and leading the individual all along the way to understanding. If that was the case then of course the teacher who guided the pupil through study would be necessary because they and others like them would be the only ones who could determine if the student really understood what they studied and had talent in the field or was just marking time and doing assignments just the way they were told so they could get the highest grade possible.

But that can’t be. We have the World Wide Web and that proves that understanding can be transmitted seamlessly through a computer. This blog proves it every week.

Right?

-Bob

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How to “Look Smart.”

admin — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:46:02 +0000

Today I want to talk about a very important thing. Looking smart.
Of course it is widely known that, unlike the European, every young American wants to “look smart.” Nobody currently knows why but everyone wants to look smart. As any high school nerd, respected mid-

Someone who quite clearly, looks smart.

level liberal arts college professor, or Pulitzer prize winner can tell you it certainly doesn’t help you with the opposite sex. If you need any proof just watch Gilligan’s Island. The Professor, who although clearly the only PhD on the island and the only male who did not physically appear to be a Looney Toons reject, never once got in any episode as much attention from Mary Anne or Ginger as Gilligan got. And I am certain it wasn’t just because Gilligan was the main character!
But still we all want to “look smart.”
And I certainly want to “look smart.” That is the only reason I am doing this blog! That and Eric makes me…
But my weapons are limited. True I like to pretend to care about stuff and get a thrill out of talking about old bands other people haven’t heard of. But I am not going to wear tweed and glasses or start sipping Merlot, or cut my hair. Also I refuse to agree so wholeheartedly with a group’s consensus that it appears that I had already come to their conclusion long ago and am now incredulous at the fact everyone else is only now agreeing with me!
That really only leaves me one avenue to “look smart”; the Drop. You know when you use an oblique cultural reference or obscure word that most people you are speaking to do not immediately recognize and are unwilling to admit ignorance of, but that you present in a manner that assumes people already know what you are talking about, usually in the form of a question? It is really powerful if you use it right. And to do that requires planning ahead.
So here we go!
Words and phrases I intend to drop into conversation this week to make me “look smart”:
recidivism
Albigensian
laconic
sophistry
holistic
Asperger’s syndrome
Gene Simmons
diagonal
quiescence
wu xai
deleterious
funktastic
verisimilitude
gin
peanuts
Manaecheanism
mandala
je ne sais quoi

And BAM! instant “Looking Smart!” See! Not an attractive woman for miles around! Works like a charm.

-Bob

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