Ten Things They Don’t Teach You In Art School

If you’re going to be a professional artist, you need to know how to do more than just draw and paint. For us art students, the best artists are those who can do the most with the least. Art students need to learn a whole lot more than just drawing. A lot of elements are left out of the syllabus, like the importance of self-motivation, critical thinking, and professionalism.

In this article, we will be introducing ten things you shouldn’t miss out on.

1. Getting a job in art school can be a nightmare, especially when you don’t have a portfolio or any experience in your field. And while you’re working your way through internships and temporary positions, you’re still trying to figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life. Art school teaches you about skills needed to be a successful artist, but it doesn’t teach you the skills needed to be an effective worker in an artistic field or any job.
2. If you were an adult at Art School, just about everything you learned about art was wrong. They didn’t reveal the fact that you were going to make very little money and had no way of supporting yourself. They didn’t talk about the fact that you had to work for decades to make a living from creative pursuits.
3. In Art school, Marketing is a course that often gets overlooked or ignored by art students, but just because it’s not the main thing they’re learning doesn’t mean it is not important. If you want to create a career or a business, the most important thing that you learn in school is how to market your products.
4. It is not entirely clear why there is a persistent myth that art schools teach you how to talk to clients and deal with the sales process. The truth is, while some people claim they have learned the art of negotiation from their art school education, most people go to art school to study something in particular, such as art history, portraiture, or graphic design. Schools like these don’t really focus on teaching their students how to negotiate or make sales.
5. Art schools don’t teach about individualism. They teach about conformity. They teach how to make artworks that look the same. They don’t teach about being an individual. They don’t teach about being creative. They teach about being boring.
6. In a culture where people feel that everyone should be able to pursue a career in art on the same terms, those of us with the skills and experience to make an art career work should be desperate to defend it. The reality is that art schools don’t teach about the value of time-honored traditions. They teach that traditional art is bad art. The result is that those with the time and skills to support the art industry are left out in the cold.
7. Drawing is meant to be fun, and this is why students at art schools are not encouraged to draw in the classical style. They are not being taught to draw but to draw something. Art schools do not teach drawing in the classical style because it is not about art but about using art for the sake of art.
8. At first glance, Art Schools across the world tend to boast their success rates. The fact is, however, that not all of them actually teach the appreciation of traditional beauty. Most art schools already teach their students the basics of drawing, painting, and sculpture, but too many try to teach them how to appreciate traditional beauty.
9. For all its many great qualities, an art school is a place where students are forced to conform to certain stylistic conventions. Many of the teachers and students at my alma mater, the School of Visual Arts, insisted that my work fit into certain parameters. Most students, myself included, fight against that pressure to fit in. However, if you want to learn to find your own unique voice without being bound to trends, you want to avoid art schools as much as you can.
10. Lastly, a lot of art schools do not teach that the most important thing about art is the art itself; it’s the personality, the vision, and the passion that create art. It’s the same for any profession.