"The art schools... you get young kids doing the most vile and meaningless crap. I think they believe every bit of it"
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A barked indictment of pedagogy hides a lament for lost seriousness. Leonard Baskin, the fiercely figurative sculptor and master printmaker who founded the Gehenna Press and taught for years at Smith College, spent his career insisting that art carry moral weight and hard-won craft. Calling student work vile and meaningless is not merely a curmudgeon’s swipe at youth; it is a protest against a system that confuses provocation with profundity and novelty with value.
The sting of the line lies in the second sentence: I think they believe every bit of it. The problem, as he sees it, is not cynical careerism but sincere indoctrination. Young artists absorb the jargon, the theory, the institutional cues about what counts as advanced. They enter critique rooms primed to defend gestures that lack form and gravity, because the surrounding culture rewards the defense more than the making. Faith itself has been redirected, away from material and subject, toward justification.
Baskin’s own work, steeped in anatomy, mortality, and the human figure, stood athwart midcentury tides of minimalism, conceptualism, and shock-as-content. He believed drawing is an ethical practice, a discipline of seeing that binds artist and world. By invoking vileness, he uses moral language to say that certain gestures trivialize the human, that a culture obsessed with spectacle risks turning suffering into decor.
There is a generational drama here, but also a structural one. Art schools do not only teach techniques; they cultivate belief. Studios, critiques, and syllabi can form a shared sense of what art is for. Baskin fears a pedagogy that evacuates meaning yet teaches students to defend the void eloquently. His complaint presses an uncomfortable measure: does the work withstand contact with life without the scaffolding of theory and posture? It is a call to recalibrate the studio toward craft, attention, and moral ambition, and to ask institutions to be guardians not of fashion but of seeing, making, and truth-telling.
The sting of the line lies in the second sentence: I think they believe every bit of it. The problem, as he sees it, is not cynical careerism but sincere indoctrination. Young artists absorb the jargon, the theory, the institutional cues about what counts as advanced. They enter critique rooms primed to defend gestures that lack form and gravity, because the surrounding culture rewards the defense more than the making. Faith itself has been redirected, away from material and subject, toward justification.
Baskin’s own work, steeped in anatomy, mortality, and the human figure, stood athwart midcentury tides of minimalism, conceptualism, and shock-as-content. He believed drawing is an ethical practice, a discipline of seeing that binds artist and world. By invoking vileness, he uses moral language to say that certain gestures trivialize the human, that a culture obsessed with spectacle risks turning suffering into decor.
There is a generational drama here, but also a structural one. Art schools do not only teach techniques; they cultivate belief. Studios, critiques, and syllabi can form a shared sense of what art is for. Baskin fears a pedagogy that evacuates meaning yet teaches students to defend the void eloquently. His complaint presses an uncomfortable measure: does the work withstand contact with life without the scaffolding of theory and posture? It is a call to recalibrate the studio toward craft, attention, and moral ambition, and to ask institutions to be guardians not of fashion but of seeing, making, and truth-telling.
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| Topic | Art |
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