And I'm really tired and feel like I didn't do any good work. Or very little anyway.

My final review didn't go really well. I was called "self-censoring" for bringing in and displaying the work I thought was the best, instead of EVERYTHING piled on a table with the ones I like displayed on the walls.

It's largely due to my Art History teacher that it was so shitty. She had never been on a review team, and I was the first review of the day, so I was her first review ever I think. I think someone told her "You have to be brutally honest, because these kids need the criticism!" So she didn't have a lot of nice things to say in the end. And she was snippy when I tried to explain why I had omitted works that I felt weren't successful. WHY WOULD I BRING IN WORK I THOUGHT WAS SHITTY!?

My Creative Processes teacher had me a lot over the year, so he had mostly constructive things to say about how I should look into developing my own aesthetic and keep trying out mediums and think about printmaking. And I will.

NO ONE told us that we should bring in so much work or that we COULD, even. If someone had told me that they wanted to see all the work we got bad critiques on and thought weren't very good, I would have brought it. If someone said they wanted us to bring in things that had influenced us, I would have. All they gave us was a paper that said we needed to have 18 specified works from certain classes and could bring in extra studio pieces from class if we wanted to.

I got pretty mediocre, middle-ground, 4-7 scores on a lot of the things they were scoring from 1-10. They didn't even meet me halfway on how no one told us we could or should bring in all the crap they wanted. And I thought I was one of the pretty good freshmen. =.=;

I can't imagine how the crappy art student's reviews went. .__.;


For a few hours after the review I was thinking that I didn't have to take shit from anyone about these things that I'd worked so hard on over the year. And I worked hard. I struggled a lot with coming up with ideas, because I didn't want to do something I'd already done and I couldn't do anything anyone else was doing and I didn't want to do something that would be too obvious.
Looking back on it, all I was doing all year was trying to 1-up the professors so they wouldn't have much negative criticism when the critique came around. If I had a bad review, I tried even harder on the next one just to show them up. Bad critiques are really painful, because they're not just talking about a picture, they're talking about something you poured yourself into. And all that shit about not taking criticism personally is crap. You can't sit there and take anything they say into consideration without taking it personally or it doesn't mean anything. It's pointless if you don't take it personally, because who else is doing the artwork but you?

I got angry because it wasn't fair. It still isn't fair. That the personal opinion of a teacher is your grade, in the long run. It may be a professional opinion, but it's no less biased because of their personal preferences. It just puts an opinion into terms that sound educated.

I'm angry because art students go through a lot of shit with very little payoff. We work hours and hours on all this work so that other people can look at it and tell us what we already know like we didn't try our best, and we're supposed to encourage and enjoy it. I worked myself to the point of exhaustion, creatively and physically. And it's not even enough to merit numbers above 6 or 7 out of 10 for a freshman. Even when you graduate, you might not even get a good job for all your hard work.

I wish I had the balls to just say "Fuck college, I can make it on my own." But I don't and I couldn't, and I'm probably going to stay at this college until I graduate just to prove to myself and everyone else, especially these professors who act like all students suck at art, that I could do it with or without their support.