Parenting & Family Quote by Leonard Baskin

Baskin’s complaint lands like a rasping etching line: not delicate, not neutral, and meant to leave a scar. Coming from an artist steeped in craft, figuration, and moral gravity, “vile and meaningless crap” isn’t just cranky gatekeeping; it’s a diagnosis of what he thinks art education incentivizes when it mistakes provocation for substance. The sneer at “young kids” is less about age than about apprenticeship: he’s accusing schools of producing artists who skip the hard boredom of mastery and jump straight to attitude.

The sharpest barb is the second sentence. “I think they believe every bit of it” suggests a closed feedback loop where institutions, peer culture, and critical language teach students to treat their own gestures as intrinsically profound. It’s not that the work is intentionally hollow; it’s that sincerity has been redirected from making to self-mythologizing. Baskin is pointing at a kind of trained credulity: if you can narrate your piece as transgressive, political, or conceptually pure, you’re absolved from the obligation to make it resonate on the page, in the body, in the material.

Context matters. Baskin’s lifetime spans the rise of abstract expressionism, postwar academic expansion, and the late-century art-market/campus pipeline where novelty and theory could become career equipment. His line reads as a refusal of the professionalized avant-garde: art as credential, art as posture, art as a seminar. Under the insult is a fear that institutions are teaching young artists to confuse permission with purpose.