Problems with Bennington College
I'm in a class called "Media Technology and Social Change", which I took because, hey, that sounds right up my alley, the thing that interests me most about media is how people interact with it and what it means to their lives on a day-to-day basis, that's gonna be fantastic, right?
Tonight's assignment is a long, pseudo-poetic diatribe from a man who was the head of an avant-garde film movement wherein he spends about 15 pages referring his work as embodying some kind of camera-god, and referring to all other film as, and I quote, "shlock". This guy's wikipedia article says that before he published his Godlike Film of Amazingness, he wanted to print a warning in the newspaper declaiming its experimental nature: he was "worried that the film would be either destroyed or ignored by the public eye". In other words, he was REALLY CONVINCED that his way of film was the way to truth and the light--but he was also completely aware that nobody else would agree.
There's something to be said for making art for fun. And there's something to be said for making art for other people to like it. But neither of those things are happening here. The only reasoning behind this that I can figure out is for the Sake of Art Itself, to create some kind of perfection that other people just aren't good enough to see, but TRUST US, IT'S THERE, GUYS, WE'RE JUST THE ONLY PEOPLE GOOD ENOUGH TO THINK ABOUT IT.
The problem is that this isn't an isolated incident! I've been here for going on three years and many of the things I've read which are supposed to be totally enlightening and mind-blowing are just this kind of self-aggrandizing artistic masturbation--and this is presented as the only viable way to approach art at Bennington College.
What's worse is that it's also becoming the only viable way to approach anything else. This new building, the Center for Advancement of Public Action, now. Basically, Bennington's theory is that by teaching two or three subjects a year [including this Media Studies course I'm in] in this shiny new building, and also moving the Field Work Term office there, Bennington students are going to start coming up with viable solutions to all the world's problems. I can get on board with Young Idealistic People who Really Want to Change The World as a concept, I really can, but the issue is that none of them go to this college, because--and bear with me here--because everyone is too wrapped up talking about What-Is-Art and Mastery-Of-Form to even be aware of what goes on in the real world. The Bennington bubble is real. And it's not just because we live in an insular place. It's because the people are insular people. The idea of CAPA is that the solution to great, complex issues like public health that people have spent their lives trying to merely comprehend can be solved by a couple of undergrad art students if we just put them in a shiny new building, because art students apparently possess some **MAGICAL ABILITY TO SEE BEYOND THINGS** that actually matter--and this is why CAPA will never work, because it seeks to set these people who don't care about anything that matters upon solving problems that do matter. Public Action will never be important to people who can't even be bothered to understand why people like books and movies with narrative instead of reading James Joyce for fun--they don't understand the Public part of it, and as far as I've seen they don't CARE to understand, because they are BETTER than the public.
Is there no situation in the world where one can have a reasonable balance between living ENTIRELY within metaphor on one hand and becoming a slave to a paycheck on the other? This really, really can't be as good as it gets. I won't let myself believe it.
tl;dr I fucking hate this school sometimes and I probably should have gone somewhere else.
Tonight's assignment is a long, pseudo-poetic diatribe from a man who was the head of an avant-garde film movement wherein he spends about 15 pages referring his work as embodying some kind of camera-god, and referring to all other film as, and I quote, "shlock". This guy's wikipedia article says that before he published his Godlike Film of Amazingness, he wanted to print a warning in the newspaper declaiming its experimental nature: he was "worried that the film would be either destroyed or ignored by the public eye". In other words, he was REALLY CONVINCED that his way of film was the way to truth and the light--but he was also completely aware that nobody else would agree.
There's something to be said for making art for fun. And there's something to be said for making art for other people to like it. But neither of those things are happening here. The only reasoning behind this that I can figure out is for the Sake of Art Itself, to create some kind of perfection that other people just aren't good enough to see, but TRUST US, IT'S THERE, GUYS, WE'RE JUST THE ONLY PEOPLE GOOD ENOUGH TO THINK ABOUT IT.
The problem is that this isn't an isolated incident! I've been here for going on three years and many of the things I've read which are supposed to be totally enlightening and mind-blowing are just this kind of self-aggrandizing artistic masturbation--and this is presented as the only viable way to approach art at Bennington College.
What's worse is that it's also becoming the only viable way to approach anything else. This new building, the Center for Advancement of Public Action, now. Basically, Bennington's theory is that by teaching two or three subjects a year [including this Media Studies course I'm in] in this shiny new building, and also moving the Field Work Term office there, Bennington students are going to start coming up with viable solutions to all the world's problems. I can get on board with Young Idealistic People who Really Want to Change The World as a concept, I really can, but the issue is that none of them go to this college, because--and bear with me here--because everyone is too wrapped up talking about What-Is-Art and Mastery-Of-Form to even be aware of what goes on in the real world. The Bennington bubble is real. And it's not just because we live in an insular place. It's because the people are insular people. The idea of CAPA is that the solution to great, complex issues like public health that people have spent their lives trying to merely comprehend can be solved by a couple of undergrad art students if we just put them in a shiny new building, because art students apparently possess some **MAGICAL ABILITY TO SEE BEYOND THINGS** that actually matter--and this is why CAPA will never work, because it seeks to set these people who don't care about anything that matters upon solving problems that do matter. Public Action will never be important to people who can't even be bothered to understand why people like books and movies with narrative instead of reading James Joyce for fun--they don't understand the Public part of it, and as far as I've seen they don't CARE to understand, because they are BETTER than the public.
Is there no situation in the world where one can have a reasonable balance between living ENTIRELY within metaphor on one hand and becoming a slave to a paycheck on the other? This really, really can't be as good as it gets. I won't let myself believe it.
tl;dr I fucking hate this school sometimes and I probably should have gone somewhere else.