Art Student Autistics- What sucks the most?

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I have this class I really hate. It's an art theory class (specifically, a class about critical theory). I hate, hate, hate, hate it because it is so vague and yet so specific. I have very little idea as to what I am doing. I've asked numerous times and I still don't fully get it. I know it's all about literary criticism and understanding the cultural, political, social, etc context of a piece but...ugh.....there's no focus. The objective is very difficult to udnerstand. We need to reflect on the lectures and do research on what we have listened to, but I'm not sure how much research we are supposed to be doing per essay. It all sounds like a bunch of navel gazing, self important crap to me. The criteria for the class is so contradictory. I don't know if it's just that my aspie brain is too literal to understand it or if my course is just trying to teach us crap to troll us. Total waste of my time. But it's part of my course. Damn.

What about other art student autistics? what do you hate the most about art school?

I'm not an Art Major any more, but I do remember my class like that. I never could figure out what the artist was trying to say or whatever, and the things the teacher would come up with I would never have guessed. Its the same with my lit class, why cant someone ever create something just becauae thats what they feel like writting/ drawing at that, with no hidden meanings? Thats always been my opnion. Sometimes I think critics just have to give a specific meaning to a piece even though thats never what the artist meant!

And I know what you mean about the too vague thing. The teacher in the art class I am now never gives enough instruction, and there is just no structure to the class gr. It doesnt help that I actually signed up for a better teacher and they switched her out on the first day of classes :/

I am not an art major either, but I have been interested before and this is why I strayed from the idea. Why does an artist need to have "hidden meanings"?

I studied comparative literature and I remember having to take several "theory" classes. I had the same experience as you. Everyone in the class seemed to know exactly what was going on, what they were talking about, and what was expected of them. I was left looking completely confused as they threw around random words like "the Other" with an air of incredible significance without ever defining them, and whenever I got brave and asked someone to explain what they meant by that, they just explained it with even more random words. In the end I finally decided that I'm intelligent enough to follow even very complicated ideas, and none of the people in that class seemed particularly clever, so they must all have just been talking out of their asses. They'll all make brilliant political speechwriters someday.

So basically, this:


I also got fed up in high school English class with a teacher giving me bad grades on essays examining poetry because I didn't give the "correct" interpretation. As proof that English teachers are full of s**t, I wrote a poem full of symbolism, handed it out to the class to read as homework, and persuaded the teacher to let us spend 15 minutes of the next lesson discussing it. Everyone shared their interpretation, including the teacher, and while most of them were very similar, none of them were even remotely close. I shared the actual intended meaning and the teacher admitted that it's possible for people to misunderstand the intended meaning of a poem, but then insisted that this doesn't mean there isn't a "right" one, that people have been studying these famous poems for long enough that they've surely figured out the "right" way by now, my interpretations were still wrong, and she wouldn't change my grades despite me having a better grasp of grammar, reading comprehension, and a hell of a lot better writing ability than anyone else in the class.

So I wouldn't sweat it too much. Get through the class by bullshitting as much as possible (the more confident you sound and the more nonsensical your statements, the more impressive you will be) and then never look back.

The worst thing is writing about postmodernism. I have no patience for this nonsense. It is the philosophical equivalent of hitting your head with a hammer in an attempt to cure your headache. How can I even begin to unravel the BS of Derrida and Baudrillard?

I've been reading about Alan Sokal lately and I think I'm going to talk his example (just on a smaller scale). Maybe I should just write the most absurd analysis of something that only very vaguely makes sense. Like, complain about how sesame street promotes patriarchy for some reason...

Analysing paintings was the worst part of art for me. I was only on an entry course so it was supposed to be simple. We were set tasks like 'what did the artist mean by this?' when shown a painting of colourful blobs or nonsensical splattering... Well how am I supposed to know!? I love it when people try to analyse how I was feeling when I do certain art pieces. They always get it wrong! I also struggled with the poems in English lit. I moaned 'if they are trying to say something completely different, why don't they just bloody write that instead!?' Abstract thinking + Aspergers = disaster!

I feel exactly the same way. The meaning you find in everything is such a personal and subjective experience. I always found these things slightly ridiculous, especially when it's applied to weird things that are art but most likely aren't really art. If you make up some complex explanation for a hole in a wall, it gets called art. What?!

When I had to write things like this in High School I pretty much just made something up and then found reasons or evidence that it could possibly be true. How would you know if it's right anyway, unless the artist actually wrote a manifesto? You can't...so it's all just speculation.

I don't think it necessarily has to be some detailed statement about feminism or capitalism or whatever. It could just be an artist consciously making the decision to push the boundaries by applying paint in a different way. But don't quote me on that...

It's not abstract thinking here, it's thinking like an NT.

I studied art at high school, but no further than that, other than the odd evening class. I absolutely hated the theory part, which was basically about critiquing artworks of famous artists. I'd no idea what it was about at all. The problem was that the written part of the exam constituted 17% of the marks. I worked out that I got no more than 2% for this part and, as a result, my overall grade went down from an A to a B. It was really infuriating and was probably one of the reasons I didn't go on to art school.

I can recall a theory course I took in my senior year as a fine art major. It was a course specifically examining the work of the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica and the American artist Robert Smithson. It was very heavy on reading-- at the beginning of the course, each of the students was handed a large pack of photocopied source materials culled from various books and periodicals, including writings of the artists themselves. It was all very dense material, and I recall the class having quite a bit of trouble navigating most of it. Oddly enough, I felt quite an opposite experience to what many of you seem to be talking about; at times, I felt like I was the only person in the class who seemed to be getting the concepts. I enjoyed the class very much, even if I really didn't know that much about Lacan or Baudrillard.

No, theory isn't the part of art school that sucked for me. The part that was least pleasurable was when I started out as a computer animation major, and the pressure to work was so intense that students were encouraged to completely abandon regular meals, sleep, and any chance they might have at developing social lives. The college I went to for my first three years had strong industry ties to Pixar and Dreamworks, so pleasing their corporate sponsors meant much more to them than catering to the needs of their students. I felt like I was being trained as a factory worker, except making movies instead of cars. That wasn't why I became an artist in the first place, and it wasn't cut out for me. Luckily, I transferred and ended up in a location that was better suited to my pace and my priorities, majoring in fine art instead.

They say autistics are not original but only copy other peoples work.

I'm much more interested in making my own art than "interpreting" art made by other people. Don't get me wrong, I like looking at others' creations, including art with a message behind it, but I could never endure a course based entirely on interpretation instead of creation.

I despise modern art. It's obnoxiously pretentious, as if the artists wanted to show off how deep and intellectual they were by confusing us with their nonsense. To name only one example, I've seen canvases entirely painted one single color being passed off as "art" in prestigious museums. Seriously, I produced much more moving and meaningful drawings at age five even if my subjects were all stick-figure dinosaurs.

For a high school world history class I once had to read a paper arguing that the invention of the printing press caused European witch hunts. The reasoning was that since reading is a logical left-brain activity, and since men are by nature logical left-brain thinkers and women irrational right-brain thinkers , widespread printing led to increased misogyny and therefore witch hunts. Unfortunately the paper presented no empirical data backing up any of those premises, fancy vocabulary notwithstanding. In fact its unsupported association between maleness and logic struck me as old-fashioned patriarchal sexism even if it disguised that with politically correct language.