O tempera! O mores!

O tempera! O mores!

I believe that you can go to school to learn how to be an accountant, a doctor, a physicist, an engineer or an astronaut. I’m not sure one can learn how to be an artist. Artists are born and the reason to study arts is because it’s fun and technical skills can be learned in addition falling in love with people who aren’t boring while doing the work you probably would have done anyway. That having been said, college is highly recommended. For me, I majored in English and journalism but wanted to be a graduate student forever.

I write this the morning after my wife Marilyn and I attended the Head to Toe gala at which students of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago presented their spring fashion show. We saw about half of the work last week at the school’s 2006 Fashion Show at Marshall Field’s, which sounds ever so much more upscale than the 2007 Fashion Show at Macy’s State Street. We were astonished: The creativity and wit in those designs would have made Fellini envious; these weren’t clothes they were visual arts; I could imagine those same models walking up the red carpet at Cannes and sending Paris’ designers weeping into the shadows.

Then we learned that all of that was just by freshmen; they didn’t learn collaboration between September and now; therefore apparently they always could design.

I am not suggesting that faculty members at SAIC serve no purpose; indeed as a teacher of film appreciation (at two schools) I consider faculties in the arts sainted: They must guide advise moderate encourage teach methods provide a context share secrets declare an informed opinion on the worth of works created within their fields and etc.; faculties create worlds within which such works are possible and valued yet what faculties cannot do, I suspect, is teach students to be original creative thinkers.

“Art School Confidential,” Terry Zwigoff’s new comedy from one of Daniel Clowes’ graphic novels (which was written, like “Ghost World,” by Clowes and directed by Zwigoff), seems to share these sentiments, as might be expected from the director of “Crumb,” a great documentary about another artist who is entirely his own creation.

The movie’s hero is Jerome (Max Minghella), already an extraordinary draftsman when he enters the school; his drawings glow from the page with conviction and love. “I want to be the next Picasso,” he claims, which indicates that his vision is indeed inward and personal, since he doesn’t know enough about Picasso to see that his work does not have a single line in common with that master perhaps he simply means he wants to be famous, make lots of money and grow old while making love to beautiful women; honorable goals.

There’s this point in the movie where the students are told to make self-portraits. Jerome’s work looks like it is of the Pre-Raphaelites. A person has produced a bunch of lines and squiggles that someone else says, “Looks like a Cy Twombly.” as praise. I’m not saying a 19th century representational style is better than Twombly, but I do think that in an introductory class, you should at least draw something that looks like you might be yourself.

Jerome’s teacher is Professor Sandiford (John Malkovich), who walks around talking on his cell phone trying to get a gallery to give him a show. Sandiford draws triangles. “I was one of the first,” he says, to paint triangles. In his mind, possibly second only to Euclid. Characters played by Malkovich issue grave predictions about the destiny awaiting every artist, hide fury over their own neglect and in general provide that forbidding detachment which leads students crazy with desire to please them.

Jerome falls for the artists’ model Audrey (Sophia Myles). She likes the drawing he does of her; who wouldn’t? She’s kind to him; she’s beautiful; and asimply minded nerd in high school, he has thrilled all his life at having his talent rewarded with such affection from such a girl. Jerome’s roommates are Vince (Ethan Suplee) and Bardo (Joel David Moore), who deprive him of solitude without providing him with companionship (in the words of John D. McDonald).

The Vince character is wonderful: an unkempt underground filmmaker making a film of great enthusiasm intercut with no coherence; much time spent rearranging 3 x 5 cards describing hypothetical scenes. Bardo provides street smarts on practical stuff like explaining the politics of the Strathmore school of art and briefing Jerome about their fellow students.

There’s a wise and understanding teacher on the faculty, played by Anjelica Huston, who defends Dead White Males by observing that when they did their best work “they weren’t dead yet.” More wisdom, less weariness is provided when Jerome visits the squalid apartment of the drunken old artist Jimmy (Jim Broadbent), who might once have been young and might once have had hopes but now wallows in cynicism, anger, despair and thirst.

There is something in the Zwigoffian universe that values such characters; having abandoned all illusions, they offer the possibility of truth. I also liked Broadway Bob (Steve Buscemi); his cafe is where the students hang out, hoping he will hang their work on his walls. At this point in their lives Bob is more important to them than the art critic of The New York Times.

Unfortunately, there is a serial killer on this campus too and they have already murdered some people; now is when I must tell you about the plot. The police start their investigation, students become paranoid and some characters are put under suspicion. This is not a bad subplot, but it does one thing wrong nothing at all.

In other words, it forces an unneeded generic narrative structure onto what could have been an episodic film of self-discovery from scene to scene. I didn’t care about the murderer; I wanted Jerome’s interactions with his professors, with Broadway Bob and old Jimmy and with beautiful Audrey who knows that she will only ever fuck the next Picasso because she was born after the last one died.

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