Art school is a wonderful place. A least mine was. But there were certain habits of thought that crept into people's artmaking there that, in my opinion, kept the place from being a really productive locale for advancing art. In many ways, the thought processes of many there were as rigid and narrow and uninformed as those living in the western suburbs working at boring and terribly unsexy white collar jobs, that is, those people the art crowd was seemingly rebelling against. And it was certainly a feeling of rebellion.

Really, the sense of rebelling against the straights was part and parcel of this narrowness. The art students I knew, many of them, felt that the outside world existed in conscious opposition to them. The psychology of these artists, and I'm speculating from my observation and personal experiences here, was in many ways defined by that other. By its apparent conformity, convention, power, and intellectual mores.

This had many negative consequences, to my mind. It was a fantastic cliche that freshman girls would cast their bosoms in plaster. Most political art had the nuance of Barbara Kruger, or rather, much less. Legibility and beauty were infrequently discussed- in fact, so much art, like the art world at large, had an explicitly tin ear to its physical appearance. Students were terrified by the notion of selling out. Among the things that struck me the most was students' unwillingness to allow for any absolutes.

People were amazingly loath to acknowledge consciously that an artwork, for instance, was good, or even bad. Any evaluative judgment was couched in weaselly passive language, like "this part works, this doesn't," or were prefaced by a plea that X be regarded as just that person's opinion about the artwork. I had terrible trouble dealing with this, as it meant to me that any judgment was essentially groundless. It meant that the universe could only be read as moral chaos.

The views concerning moral judgment were often rhetorical moreso than effective, but they baffled and angered me. I even had people tell me that no one was right to judge something as "evil" or "good." Which really amazed me. I thought that even relativists allowed people to make judgments, though they asserted such judgments were only specifically meaningful to that person.

I can understand where a good deal of this comes from. Those aspects of society that artists feel most threatened and alienated by are notable for their absolutist thinking. I remember sitting in the ceramics studio with one of my friends and listening to a speech by George W. Bush some time soon after Sept. 11. In the speech, he referred to Osama Bin Laden as "the evil one." Usually, when I'd heard that particular turn of phrase, it had referred to Satan. I was shocked, honestly, with the degree to which Bush seemed, and still seems, to regard the world in terms I would characterize as morally infantile.

In my months since graduating college, working around a sociologically and intellectually diverse set of people, I have seen this black and white world crop up many times. Our culture, in my experience, does not reward people for complex thought. We reward obedience, decisiveness, and cleverness. Analysis, doubt, and challenges to authority are generally regarded with contempt, except where they are fashionable.

My point is that these wrongheaded extremes of thought are far too often the dominant voices. In the words of many a TV commercial,
"There's Got To Be Another Way!"