Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton

students set to present work today, offers me a lift to Whole Foods Market, where the students customarily pick up their lunch. Four students and I squeeze into her beat-up Honda. In the middle of the back seat, I listen to the ping-pong of their dialogue. First they have a debate about one of the most vocal men in the class. “He’s so arrogant and patronizing,” says one of the women. “When he says, ‘I don’t understand,’ he really means, ‘You are an idiot, you’re not making any sense.’ And why does every observation he makes have to begin with a position statement and end with a list of recommended reading?”
    “I think he’s great,” counters one of the men. “He’s very entertaining. We’d go to sleep without him.”
    “He’s overinstitutionalized, domineeringly PC, and macho, all at the same time,” intercedes a third student, who then turns to me and declares with glee, “He got ripped to shreds when he had his crit.”
    Then they talk about Asher. “He certainly gives you enough rope to hang yourself,” says one.
    “Michael is so minimal and abstract that sometimes I think he might dematerialize before our very eyes,” quips another.
    “You gotta love him,” says a third. “He’s seriously good-willed, but he’s also lost in a world of his own calculations. He should wear a lab coat.”
    We drive past bland houses with two- and three-car garages, green lawns, and deciduous trees that defy the desert landscape. Apparently these Valencia neighborhoods inspired CalArts alumnus Tim Burton’s vision of suburban hell in the film Edward Scissorhands .
    What do the students want to do when they finish their MFA?
    “I came to grad school because I want to teach at college level. I was an installer in a gallery, but I’m interested in ideas. I think my work will be better as a result of teaching,” says the fellow to my left.
    “My work is going to fly off the shelves. It is not de rigueur to create commodities, but it is part of my work to create this fantasy economy which overtly tries to sell things,” says the male student in the front seat.
    “What to do when finished? That’s the big question. Go back to Australia and drink. I don’t want to teach. I’d rather waitress,” muses Hobbs as she takes a left into the parking lot of the grocery store.
    “MFA stands for yet another Mother-Fucking Artist,” says the girl to my right as we climb out of the car. “I will just try to graduate as preposterously as possible. One year twins received their diplomas while riding matching white horses. Another year a student walked up onstage with a mariachi band. But my favorite story is when a male student locked the dean in a full kiss on the lips.”
    Whole Foods Market is an emporium of fresh smells and vanguard taste tests. As I load up with guacamole and black beans at the create-your-own-burrito bar, I think about how difficult it is to be an art student looking into the abyss of graduation. Two or three of the lucky ones will find dealer or curator support at their degree shows, but the vast majority will find no immediate ratification. For months many of them will be out of a job. Mary Kelly used to think it was depressing that so few students could sustain themselves as full-time artists, but then she realized “it is not sad at all. I believe in education for its own sake, because it is deeply humanizing. It is about being a fulfilled human being.”
    Faculty members may understand that the value of art education goes beyond the creation of “successful” artists, but students are uncertain. Although CalArts students distance themselves from UCLA students, who they say “have dollar signs in their eyes,” they don’t want to languish in obscurity. Hirsch Perlman is a sculptor-photographer who has known market highs as well as many difficult years of enduring the relative poverty of part-time teaching. Now a full-time professor at UCLA, he still talks like an outsider. As