No, really. Ask anybody.
This has been a busy week. I've been talking to the printer about proofs (on the way!), working on comics, and trying desperately keep up with the Todd Goliath vs. Shmorky clusterfuck. The latter usually won out.
In case you haven't heard, Todd Goldman, AKA Todd Goliath, basically traced a cartoon by Dave "Shmorky" Kelly onto multiple canvases, and sold the results for thousands in multiple fine art galleries.
He probably thought no one would notice, since Dave is "just" an online cartoonist. He thought wrong.
Online artists are wont to shit themselves with fury over any instance of "art theft" at all, even by thirteen-year-olds tracing Gorillaz liner art for their Elfwood galleries. They'll even take up banners in scandals that don't concern them, patrolling art archives and private webpages for "style theft," "pose theft," and other sorts of unjustifiable, hyper-vigilant esoterica. They can care too much, and they can make a lot out of nothing. So when it turns out some guy is genuinely getting the shaft, one hundred percent, by law, complete with price tag, you can only imagine the mushroom cloud.
Or maybe not.
The dust has mostly settled, but if you wanna pick the bones, this thread on the Something Awful forums (+3,300 posts at last count) is thorough, epic, and still charging ahead. Todd Goldman's publicist has posted, even. Brew a pot and prepare for a long read, and a few annoying surprises.
Like most of the creatively bankrupt, Todd's made a habit out of his "borrowing;" Online cartoonists Liz Greenfield and Jess Fink were snatched from, too, and print comic guy Roman Dirge popped up to elaborate on Todd's sticky-fingered acquisition of his work as well.
Not cool.
The whole mess reminds me of the short, short time I spent in art school. (I can't technically call myself a drop-out, because it was only a year-long program, and I somehow managed to finish it. But it was meant as a predecessor to an MFA program, which I didn't bother with.) While the experience wasn't a completely miserable one, it did teach me that there was very little exaggeration in the unflattering depictions and descriptions of fine art schools and their students. The Todd Goliath drama just brings the open and stinging contempt most of the faculty and students had for comics and cartoons flooding right back. I don't know if Todd actively socializes in fine art circles, but I wouldn't be surprised. Even with the popularity of Lowbrow art and related fields, too many artists feel work like Shmorky's (And Liz's, and Jess's, and Roman's, and mine, and maybe yours) isn't worth acknowledging, but possibly worth plagiarizing for the sake of "decontextualization." Because, y'know, that's real art.
Spare me.
Anyway, enjoy the comic. More later tonight.
Oh yeah, and PS: This just came out, and I have some stuff in it. I'm not sure what, though. I sent the authors a lot, they might not have used it all. Maybe the Barnes & Noble down the street has it so's I can check.
Oh, man. I did four years at art school, which I liken to time spent in some brainhell prison. In order to justify my comic works I began carving them on wood-blocks. I hated the whole experience, and the people who just trucked along with their books got mauled in crit. So ugly.
You right.
I think the problem is that comics are perceived by comic artists as a visual art form comparable to painting and sculpture, but really that isn't the case. Comics are more a form of literature and the illustrations are just a portion (albeit a major portion) of the language used to create them. The images in comics are more pictorial analogs to the written word than they are "high art". This is why the greatest comics creators of all time are almost never the greatest draftsmen.
So many aspiring comics creators go to art school to start their careers (and I'm sure that the environment at some art schools are more open toward comics than others) only to find themselves looked down upon by the "real"artists. But the truth is that comics are not the same kind of art as painting any more than dance is the same kind of art as architecture.
I think if we viewed comics as a form of literature and taught comics that way (as part of English and creative writing programs) the art form as a whole would be much healthier.
PS: I don't mean to degrade comics by saying that they aren't "high art". I think the concept of placing art on some sort of hierarchy with Da Vinci at the top and cartoonists in the slums at the bottom does a disservice to all art. Art is a continuum, not a ladder.
"I say that to a lotta people." Best line ever.
I just remember my senior art thesis project... a self-selected project, based on our own personal interests. I decided to illustrate a short story my boyfriend and i did into a 22 page back and white comic. My professor waited until our FINAL critique to tell me she was "disappointed" that I didn't pick something more "meaningful."
The worst part about it was that I had 6 other people being critiqued that day, and pretty much all of the art faculty was there, but once they got to me (I was 2nd to last, and the last kid had made an anamatronic geiger-esque sculpture because he wanted to do movie special effects), MOST OF THEM LEFT. I had 3 professors out of over a dozen that stayed. The ones that stayed didnt even critique the work, but just danced around the same message my own professor had given me: comics arent important, this is so below me, I don't even know what to say to you other than I'm so disappointed.
However.... they LOVED the girl that made a 20 minute video of herself, where she'd started off with her head trapped in duct tape and clay and rope and cellophane and all kinda of crap (leaving hair holes to breath) and slowly unwrapping it (She started the year wanting to do jewelry making, which was a CRAFT and why can't she do something more meaningful?) And they LOVED the kid who made 16 splatter paintings, 8 with baby blue and 8 with light pink paint, and built a white wooden changing table thing and splattered that with paint (who confessed later to not giving a crap about the project and just doing it to be out of art school).
And I didn't even go to a REAL art school. I went to a 30-student art program in a general public college. How's that for retarded.
Hm, I think it really depends on the art school. At the one I'm in, I'm actually taking a lit class on comic books. All the professors make a point of calling them 'graphic narratives' or 'graphic novels', but otherwise I can't think of ever running into someone here who dismissed the medium as a whole.
I don't mind comics being looked down on as a popular medium. Comics *is* a bastard art, and being seen as cheap and childish probably keeps us honest.
What pisses me off to no end is the pop-art/decontextualist attitude that fine artists should be free to steal outright from "popular" artists, and that this is some kind of brilliant artistic statement. Maybe it was when Andy Warhol did it with soup cans FORTY YEARS AGO. Now it's just stealing. And it's based on the gratingly self-congratulatory attitude that the only art with any value is fine art, defined as art produced by self-proclaimed Artists to be shown in galleries and sold to people with far more money than sense. Everything else is commercial art, which is produced by nobody, is worth nothing, and only acquires value if a real Artist copies it and "recontextualizes" it (and, incidentally, makes thousands or millions of dollars from it).
I'd love nothing more than to punch Todd Goldman repeatedly in his smarmy face. Well, that and ice cream.
Yeah, shat Shaenon said...
And about art school... a guy that used to work for me went to art school. He was not the least bit talented or even creative. He told me that for his final project (or thesis or whatever the school called it) he asked some of his female friends to paint their bodies with different colors and roll around naked (but for the paint) on a banner (maybe it was canvas or maybe just a bed sheet). He then justified it as having something to do with media images and sexuality or some other horse piss. From what he told me it was pretty well received.
Don't we to, as comic artists take hours to work on our art? Our pages? Our loves? (as it were..)
what makes our work any less "art" than the person who takes a paint brush.. puts it in some paint and throws the paint at a canvas? or does watercolor? or whatever else they want to do? seriously?
You spend HOURS working on a page of Templar right? just like I spend HOURS working on Nendaiki.. just like I spend HOURS working on a single picture from a blank "canvas" in photoshop..
it's still ART
even if stuck up people in art school want to suck the life out of it..
it's why I'm afraid of going to art school..
I don't want my love of my art, my comic, GONE.. smashed to bits because i am not "artistic" enough to be in art school because I dont find it particularly "cool" to have naked ladies roll in paint on a sheet at say
"This is HIGH ART!"
Oh, and as for Tood Goldman.. Man the entire thing had/has me PISSED as well..
As someone said, it depends on the art school. I coasted through my four year fine arts degree. The year I spent at Sheridan College in Ontario, though, was well worth it. They set me straight on so many things when it comes to comics. And they certainly shared the hate-on for art theft.
Comics aren't "high art," but then "high art" didn't even exist before Modernists rewrote the history books to make themselves look good. Michaelangelo and Hokusai and Rembrandt were all commercial artists. And so am I.
I'd like to step in as the Devil's Advocate for art schools, or for at least the one I'm enrolled in presently. I'm aware that being a freshman doesn't exactly give me the grandest range of insight into the way art school work, but I would like to say a few things in regards to it.
As some people have said, it really depends on what art school you go to. I have seen many art colleges like the kind described, and heard about them from acquaintances attending them. However, the simple fact is that these institutions are overpriced, overrated institutions that, frankly, I don't think will be around very much longer. The reason for this is a new class of art school that is becoming more and more prominent - the Commercial art school.
Now, A lot of people tend to cringe when they hear "commercial art," and for good reason. But there's more to it than being the marketing department's whipping boy or being delegated to a back office in some Hollywood studio. Yeah, that'll probably happen to some people. But the simple fact is that commercial art simply means teaching you how to make people want to look at, read, talk about, and with a grain of luck, buy your artwork. My friends and I at art school joke about us all being starving artists, but that's not what we intend to be after we graduate, or leave, or whatever we choose to do with our education.
It is the students of the commercial art schools that will get noticed, and who will be able to wipe the floors with someone who tries to steal our art, because we will have the fans and a much clearer line in the legal sand to back us up. And eventually, it is these schools that will attract students, instead of what many people see as their only option, which is the pretentious, Fine Art schools. Their time is shorter than they think it is.
I am a Sequential Art major, and I am a respected member of a community of painters, illustrators, animators, architects, fashion designers, industrial designers, and at least a dozen other fields. I was once told by an architecture student that he envied me and my other sequential artists, because our peak has not been hit yet, despite what a lot of jaded comics artists and writers may think. We are just starting to crawl out of the cloud layer and have the sun of recognition and legitimacy shine on our faces. Some of it has been people like Scott McCloud crusading for it, some of it has been the sudden transnationalist attitude of comics, and some of it has been the huge increase in production values for comics. The Collector's Gambit in the 90s might have killed us - instead, it's woken us up. Fellow comic writers and artists, we are damn fine art. We know it. And the rest of the world is about to know it too.
Please excuse the naivete of a nineteen-year old.
By the way, is the comic not up or is it just me?
from http://www.gsas.harvard.edu/images/stories/pdfs/colloquy_spring06.pdf :
"...But it was at the University of Kyoto
that [Professor Adam] Kern first came across kibyoshi—18th-century comic books for adults—in the Ebara Collection within that university’s department of literature...
"...Curious, he brought some of the books to his literature professor, who offered no comment because, he said, kibyoshi were really art. So Kern brought the books to his art professor, who also offered no comment because, he said, kibyoshi were really literature.
"Kern realized he was dealing with a “genre [that] has really fallen between disciplinary if not institutional cracks.” Upon returning to Harvard to begin his doctoral studies, Kern worked with Jay Rubin, the former Takashima professor of Japanese humanities, and Ed Cranston, professor of Japanese literature, both of whom were familiar with kibyoshi. There was, however, some question initially from his advisors as to whether the study of comic books would lead to a scholarly future—but those questions have since been put to rest..."
CALVIN: A painting. Moving. Spiritually enriching. Sublime."High" art. The comic strip. Vapid. Juvenile. Commercial hack work."Low" art. A painting of a comic strip panel. Sophisticated irony. Philosophically challenging."High" art. HOBBES: Suppose I draw a cartoon of a painting of a comic strip?
CALVIN: Sophomoric. Intellectually sterile. "Low" art.