How Art School Is A Scam (And Also Totally Necessary)
by Dave Baker
When I graduated high school I was a bit lost. Shocking, I know. I didn’t know what direction to take my life other than to go to college, because that’s the thing you do. I knew I wanted to make comics and be a cartoonist. But going to college seemed like a complete waste of time.
What I didn’t think about is that it bought me time to try things. And also taught me how to think. I’m not going to lie to you, dear reader. I had a somewhat contentious relationship with many of my professors during my illustrious collegiate career. Shocking to no one, my desire to do anything other than draw comics was fairly low. Like ostensibly non-existent. And by that I mean, literally non-existent. Every assignment, no matter how defined or stringent the rubric was, I’d finagle a way into making it into the proverbial nine panel grid.
Making comics, for me, wasn’t a pastime. It was a religious calling. And the fixtures and structure of the art school experience was definitively hampering. What I didn’t think of at the time, though, was the fact that our school was training me to think outside of the box. Due to my firm dedication to this antiquated artform that most of my professors refused to acknowledge as Real Art, I was constantly looking for new ways to justify and legitimize an artform that they viewed as lesser than.
One could say that my degree was not actually in Visual Communications with an emphasis in Illustration, but in fact, a masters degree in the Art of Bullshitting. I found every loophole, miss wording and syntactic error and used it to my advantage in order to be able to spend more and more time laboriously rendering trees on a six panel grid.
I also learned that if I took my shots correctly and strategically applied a very specific type of rhetoric to my professorial opponents, I could very easily talk my way out of certain assignments, while doing next to no work, in order to buy myself more time on assignments that actually interested me. One comes to mind where I purposefully drew an entire piece with my left hand very poorly as performance art about how my left leaning political inclinations were coloring my opinions on a given topic.
Now, you might be saying to yourself that I was only hurting myself by not taking all of these assignments seriously. However, what you’re overlooking here is: that so much of life is this push and pull between objective truths and interpretation of commonly accepted facts. And this has served me endlessly well in my life as a Working Artist ™. I’ve constantly been able to negotiate, cajole, or talk my way out of things due to the Masters in Bullshitting that I received from my alma mater.
At the end of the day, art school in America is wildly expensive and almost objectively cost prohibitive due to the very limited earning ability that anyone in any sort of traditional visual art has. If I were to tell myself again to enroll in college, I don’t know that I would make the same decisions. However, my time in university allowed me to develop my craft, develop a network of fellow artists, and, more so than anything else, retrain my brain to think in a way where I could envision possibilities outside of the given and accepted circumstances before me.
In my new graphic novel, Punk’n Heads, a large part of the narrative surrounds Hannah Lipsky, an art school dropout who is attempting to navigate the Los Angeles horror punk music scene, and is somewhat lost in her real life. These experiences are based on real world circumstances that me and my co-creator and collaborator Nicole Goux have experienced. But more so they’re mined from the fact that we both went to art school and had both simultaneously amazing and dreadful experiences in those hallowed halls.
Going to art school is like subjecting yourself to an improv class that never ends. It’s theoretically fun and everyone has agreed on a simple game that has dictated a shared hallucinated future that they can all envision. And on the other hand you’re putting yourself into massive amounts of debt over a dream that is nearly impossible to actualize.
I am extremely fortunate in that my grades yielded me a sizable scholarship to the University I attended. If it were not for that I literally don’t know if my life‘s trajectory would be the same, due to the harsh realities of attempting to pay down exorbitant amounts of student debt.
However, I cannot overstate the lessons that I learned while attending art school have informed the career decisions, creative trajectories, and general “well, fuck it, if no one else believes it I’ll believe in myself” type of attitude that has yielded me the successes that I’ve accrued to date.
Much of the theme of Punk’n Heads revolves around the difficulty of threading the needle between living in Los Angeles, one of the most expensive cities on Earth, and also attempting to make art. Punk’n Heads is one of those endeavors that for a long time was met with resistance and rejection at every return. It’s been set up at three different publishers, had multiple dead ends and was dropped multiple times over its long and arduous journey from sketchbook page to printed and bound graphic novel.
Now that it’s finished? I’m exceedingly proud of it and can see how the many twists and turns in the secret life of this project have yielded results greater than the sum of their parts. Much like my experience at art school. When I initially attended art school, I expected to learn the craft of illustration, meet like-minded individuals, and potentially craft a portfolio that would yield me a working career after graduation. What I did not anticipate is that almost none of those things would happen thanks to the classes I took, but instead the hundreds of hours I spent on my own working on private projects.
This skillset of being able to Speak Critique, you might say, is the most invaluable thing I gained while in art school. Why do I say that, you ask? Well, if someone asks if something was intentional in a critique? You just say yes, and own it. You always intended it to be that way.
At the end of the day, it’s somewhat difficult, not to have an existential Stockholm syndrome for the trajectory that your life has taken. And I am no greater than anyone else, a prisoner of the thousands of decisions that have led me to this point. Much like Hannah Lipsky in my book, I too have found myself in places unknown and gazing out across strange new frontiers that I could never have anticipated. I’m now attempting to find the joy and the sorrow in those revelations.
Making things is not a straight line, unlike how art school is structured. You don’t progress from level to level. There are setbacks, there are divergences, and there are dead ends. It can be hard to recognize these things when they’re happening. It’s a difficult, shimmering mirage constantly out of reach in the minds of almost every working artist. You always think your greatest work is directly in front of you. You always imagine that the next piece will be the one that breaks through to a larger audience. It’s difficult to look back and witness the previous accomplishments for their flaws or their triumph. There is no group critique. There is no large body of voices analyzing or giving feedback on what does or doesn’t communicate.
That’s one of the things I am most thankful about with my continued and lengthy collaboration with the cartoonist Nicole Goux is we both have a common shared language that we are constantly striving to improve. We’re both interested in similar subject matter. We’re both each other‘s harshest critic and biggest fan. And though we do make work separately, when we work on things together, it’s exhilarating to see those interest sets wax and wane. Some of our books are more me some of my books are more her.
This book is decidedly more her and that’s something that I take great pride in saying. She was involved in its construction on every level. From the structural foundation forging its characters and building its many revisions over its numerous years gestation to its inevitable rebuilding and restructuring multiple times, she was at every stage offering feedback, opinions, and pivotal direction.
In many ways, our shared experience creating books together was like a grad school of two. We’ve pushed each other to new heights and we’ve constantly been attempting to console each other at the numerous lows that inevitably are inflicted upon the wandering Ronin that is the freelance artist.
Punk’n Heads is a story about a band. It’s a story about a girl attempting to find her place in a world that is new and unfamiliar, after leaving one that was old and safe. And in some ways, it’s a love story both in falling in love with another person, but also in falling in love with the act of creation. And it’s one that could not have been written without Nicole‘s involvement. This book is a long distance love letter written in public. It’s a lie whispered in the back room of a punk show where only one other person can hear you and knows it’s a lie, but still smiles and nods anyway, Every book ever written isn’t really a book. It’s a secret message written in the hopes that one day it will be decoded.
The scariest and potentially most freeing aspect of all of this is that I already know that this book has been decoded. Nicole and I each share an existential decoder ring. And when tuned to the right frequency it grants you a simple gift… immortality. Or, at least, some kind of fleeting delusion of it.
That having all been said” art school is a scam, but you should probably do it anyway, because if you don’t…. who knows where you’re going to end up, and who you’ll end up being when you get there.
Dave Baker is a writer and illustrator living in Los Angeles. His latest work is the graphic novel Punk’n Heads, in collaboration with Nicole Goux. His previous works include Forest Hills Bootleg Society (Simon & Schuster), Everyone Is Tulip (Dark Horse), and Mary Tyler MooreHawk (Top Shelf), among many others. He’s also written for Cartoon Network’s Ben 10 and the live action feature film Alien Warfare. When he’s not working, he’s at home practicing his Bela Lugosi impersonation.