I always feel guilty seeking to justify to students why they should persist with completing their degrees, whether BA, MA or PhD so I don¹t. They often say they want a degree so they can get a decent job and balance that with their creative practice. They say they see me, with a job and an artistic career, as a role model. I point out to them I left school at 15 with no qualifications - to be a hippy. Other than being an artist and coincidentally securing various positions because of my artistic activities, including my current one, I have never had what I consider a real job in my life. I¹m just a good for nothing artist at least in the eyes of the taxi driver or plumber I often encounter (people with real jobs). It seems that being good for nothing can be more rewarding than being socially useful.
I find it a worrying that people judge themselves by whether they are gainfully employed or not. Everyone has something to contribute. We live in societies, both poor and wealthy, that historically have tolerated significant percentages of their populations being what, in todays terms, we would consider economically inactive. However, economic inactivity does not mean a lack of productivity. There are so many ways that people can contribute value to themselves and those around them without getting a job. I never wanted a job anyway! We should not allow an instrumentalist view of life to become paradigmatic, especially in creative practice. That is the death of the artist. Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art [email protected] www.eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ [email protected] www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: Alan Sondheim <[email protected]> Reply-To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:25:23 -0400 (EDT) To: Theory and Writing <[email protected]> Cc: <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] naughty boy My degree's in english, which has been useless all these years; Azure's is in environmental conservation from NYU (mine's from Brown). She hasn't been able to get work; I teach from time to time, part-time, and the stress is incredible; I think about suicide, running away with Azure, etc. etc. Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
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