This comment is art.

Art school graduates really are a pack of bitter old sods, aren't they? I've heard this rant so many times from so many different people; sorta makes me wish I'd gone to art school myself.

This was really great.

Should have explored the topic more because it's interesting but still, art school seems pretty evil.

I studied architecture in college. We sometimes had to visit 2 nearby art colleges libraries to get certain architecture books (for some reason they had a lot more books on architecture than us) I noticed that the art colleges were packed with cool attractive people hanging out smoking joints and whatnot. So if your goal in going to college is to party then art college is a good choice (I may as well have done it as I wasnt an architect for very long, now I'm a game programmer)
This is probably less of an option in the US however as you would accumulate crippling debt, we have free 3rd level education over here.

People bristle at the whole "arts/humanities is a ticket to the unemployment line" with arguments that art is super important, while missing the point that it's not the importance of it in question, it's the number of people these schools are churning out. This video does a pretty good job of explaining this, but I'm afraid my friends would still break out the torches and pitchforks were they to see it.

If you go there with a sense of what you want to do and are simply looking for time, resources, and space to work on stuff it can be a good thing (unless you're in the states, or a province other than Québec, where the price of tuition is pure donkeys). Too many youngsters go there without having formed a practice or even an identity, and this is why the video rings true. I prefer Henessey Youngman's clips over this smarmy tosser though.

When my graduation from high school was imminent, I looked into going to art school. My guidance counsellor let me know when recruiters were coming into town and I went to a few of these things where they show a movie or slideshow, pass out pamphlets and talk to you one-on-one about the benefits of going to the school they represented.

The only time I didn't feel like it was all just an elaborate sales pitch was the time one guy told me outright the chances of making a living as an illustrator or graphic artist were low and that the best I could probably hope for was to get some freelancing gigs, but I would still have to keep a regular job with a steady paycheck. It was probably the only truly honest statement I ever heard at one of those.

In the end, though, the deciding factors were the expense and the people I'd be attending classes alongside. If I couldn't manage to wrangle a scholarship or some grants my senior year, my parents would have had to take out loans and I would have had to have gotten a job wherever I ended up going to school.

Also, I had expected art schools would attract people more like myself, but the recruitment events seemed to pull in the very same assholes who treated me like shit all through school. For the most part, they were from rich or at least upper-upper-middle class families. They wore expensive clothes, dyed their hair exotic colors, wore wild makeup and often had multiple piercings in places other than their ears. And, boy, did they love to look down their noses at people who weren't as well-versed in art history as they were.

Add to those factors the fact I wasn't really enthusiastic about the idea of more schooling. I'm a lousy student. I always preferred to learn at my own pace and in my own way. I was afraid my parents would rack up all this debt and I would be surrounded by assholes and only get mediocre grades. In the end, I decided to get a job and see how I felt about college or whatever after a year or two.

I wanted to graduate early due to taking two years off in the middle, so I started doing 20 credits instead of the standard 16 at my college for my last year and a half. Not really being interested in much of the part-time fare, I decided to take some photography classes. My first teacher was very much a technical teacher, a photojouralist with a subtle eye, who showed us the processes and production of photography, the real 'how to' of it, and I fell in love with the medium. From Dark room chemicals to Digital manipulation. I wasn't very original, but it was a craft I felt I was improving at every day I spent at the schools photo lab. I took two classes with that teachers and loved them both. I also met Alice Wheeler, Nirvana's assigned photographer with Sub-Pop and almost had an internship with her (her dad died and she stopped corresponding me). It was a great time.

Then I went to the 'more advanced' classes, taught by an 'artiste' whose work included photographing his college-age stepdaughter spread-eagle nude and a line of young men with their pants down and mud covering their asses. He picked at me for being 'mediocre' and constantly hammered the idea of questioning to the point I snapped in class one day and called him a perverted old fraud and a miserable cunt. That isn't to say that my work wasn't mediocre, but that he was faking the whole thing by just saying 'why' a lot and hoping no one noticed.

So, I get this guy. My best time with art lessons were when I was being tought the actual technical skills and then left to my own devices. I happy shooting trees and tinkering in the darkroom, not blowing minds with my photocock. I think that is perhaps the greater tragedy, that too many folks will quit what is a perfectly good use of their time due to not being the best. Best or GTFO is not the right attitude to have about anything, really.

I went to art school but 'cause of scholarships I paid nothing, BITCH

Most art schools are little more than someone called "daycare for twenty-year-olds" for the ninety percent or so who are basically there to "express their feelings" for four years while hating, sneering at and mocking the remainder actually attempting to get careers going and hustling freelance work and so on. A certain percentage of that ten percent is going to end up dropping out going to find work because they realize they don't want to continue paying thousands of dollars a year to sit around and learn "art" with people who don't actually want to learn anything and have it out for those who do, considering them to be "sell outs" or some such nonsense.
There are a handful of art schools that are serious schools for serious people and will teach real art skills for real art jobs but the vast majority of them are jokes.

I didn't go to art school, but I do know that no one wants art from someone who isn't hopeless and desperate, because that would be shit art.

I had a weird smell association with this video. Just thinking about it made my nostrils burn like I was smoking a roach on the roof of the photography building again.