Originally Posted by brunop
jus' aksin' so don't get all mad or nuffin'--but seriously, did any great fine artists (i mean ones that a philistine like me might know--like picasso, pollock, leonardo, rembrandt, van gogh, kinkade (hardeeharhar!!)), etc.--really go to "art school"? i mean painters as opposed to say graphic designers and such.
for that matter, did any truly great writers go to "writer's workshops" and get mfa's in fiction? i mean like hemingway (who never even went to college as far as i know) or faulkner, or fitzgerald, or kerouac, or shakespeare, etc.
jus' aksin'. . .
alot of my favourites went to art school. alot of them still teach or at least monitor classes here and there...your examples of artists (great artists!) are what lay-people (no offense to lay-people!!) normally think of when they think of "art" or "artists". they were "rebels" bashing against the system. besides rembrandt, who basically ran his own academy (see all dutch school of rembrandt painters from his time...) but most artists, these days go through some schooling at a post secondary level. they brush up on art history; modernism, 50's expressionism, pop art, conceptual art, neo-geo, minimalism, performance, etc. . The most succesful artists in my mind choose to be informed as to what occured before them in the field of visual art. As well, contemporary artists like to keep abreast of what's happening or happened in cinema, graphic design, theater, politics, etc.
i am a former 'wild and crazy' painter who now makes very sober, drawings and photographs and boring conceptual video art. the change happened once i went to art school, opened up to what happened in art history, read more theory and studied film history. i dont regret it at all but it sure did make things more complicated...