So you're a self taught artist huh?

Self taught? Are you kidding? is there any other way? Are you telling me that a person has his head wrapped in furnace tape until until he goes to school?

The big schism between self taught and store bought is bullshit. All us humans and animals educate ourselves from the moment we're born, We're programed to educate ourselves. Self education is the natural way to mature, to grow up. There is no alternative. To assume someone is not educated because he didn't go to school is to make a big mistake. Life is education, and it has better teachers than any store bought school.

As far as higher education goes, bad teaching is rampant in this country, from pre-school to Harvard. Everything depends on the teacher, and nobody has any idea how to teach teachers, or how to measure teachers, or where the good teachers teach. 85% of the students coming out of US schools are not any smarter than when they went in. Often LESS smarter!

Take me for instance. I'm stupid as shit! and I went to college! I have a degree from a big time university, and it's not worth the paper its printed on. I spent lots of money and four years of my life and I can count the stuff I learned on one hand. Why? Bad teachers is the main reason. Not only do bad teachers get to teach, but they also get to administer their own tests. They actually get to test their own students. Then to top it off, they get to pass judgement on the test results and decide if their students learned anything. You think they're gonna blame themselves for bad test results? Think again! Worse yet, if they think you didn't learn anything, you think they care? Hell no! They'll pass your ass right out of the school and give you a bogus degree and let you go flopping out into the world none the wiser! I said NONE the WISER!

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time I had a big beautiful piece of art hanging in a museum in Chicago. A representative from the Outsider Art Museum in Baltimore happened to wander by and was impressed.
I think he was anyway. The museum called me up and asked if I had a degree from an art school. They said the Baltimore Outsider art museum was interested in the piece, but I had to be an outsider artist to get anything in the museum. I said well. uh... shit, yeah I got a stupid degree, not a whole lot of good its doing me, said I. So then the guy said, well tough luck. Your stupid degree just kept you out of the Outsider Art Museum in Baltimore.

I pondered this for a moment and wondered if this means I'm an INSIDER artist. Unlikely I thought, A handful of gallery showings, no sales, no representation, no past, present or future in art, how can I be an insider? I am a new category of artist, a Failed Artist. One who has somehow picked up the finer points of the craft, but through no fault of anyone but me, and even though I've been making kick-ass art all my life, I have failed to become an artist of ANY KIND! Inside or Outside! And this judgment from the Baltimore museum of outsider art, is rendered after inquiring about one of my pieces. Followed by an abrupt rejection on the strength that I didn't fit into the Outsider Box. Can you believe that? A category called Outsider that you can't get into? That's like a trash can that rejects trash or a pot you can't piss in!

Okay, so the Outsider Art Museum rejects outsider artists who wasted their money on a stupid degree. But the smart outsider artists, the ones with no education at all, the ones that can barely talk, now they get right in. No problem! So follow me here, I'm dumb enough to have blown four years and lots of money on a bogus education, and dumb enough to have wasted my whole life doing art nobody ever sees, and dumb enough to have failed as an artist, BUT, too smart to be classified as an outsider artist! And yet, a genuine bum, who sits down by the river and whittles a cool little frog out of a piece of driftwood gets his stuff right in the museum.