If I may wade into this already over-egged pudding and add my 2 cents: the problem with people hating on hipsters is they always get the stereotype wrong. The other day when we were having mad beef with a feminist blog they accused me of listening to DFA. When did anyone last listen to DFA? No one listens to fucking DFA, it’s been five years at least. Whenever people drop those out of date cusses (remember Nathan Barley? Me neither, because it was six years ago and it lampooned stuff that had happened at least three years before that) all any self respecting hipster thinks is “this person thinks they’re being clever referencing parts of pop culture they think I like/am like and they’re totally off the mark because they don’t know shit about shit because they’re a normie” and remember why it is they prefer being a hipster to being some bridge and tunnel douche in bad sneakers who does facebook organized flash mobs or whatever.
Hipster stereotypes don’t work unless you know your shit really well, because being a hipster is all about knowing the latest shit, or at least, knowing the best old shit or whatever. And if you know about that stuff, then you’re probably one of us, so why you hating on yourself for?
However, some stereotypes you can get right because the more things change, the more they stay the same. Have you ever been to art school, for instance? I don’t think that stuff has changed since the 60s. There’s a reason Dan Clowes’ comic was only four pages long, I was there for 4 years at the beginning of the century and I reckon that over the next 700 words I could describe the only five people that have ever been to art school ever.
(images from the Museum Of Bad Art, fyi)
Mature student creep/rapist
This guy had a whole career in copywriting at an ad agency then hit 48 and decided to go back to school cos he likes to paint, and if he can afford it then why shouldn’t he do that? But some of the reason that guy decided to go to college a second time was all the two thirds his age pussy he knew he’d be near. I’m pretty sure when he arrived he was all ‘look but don’t touch’ in his mind, but after the third or so private view with free beers he can’t take it any longer and his dark brown middle aged dick (and massive sagging balls) gets the better of him and he forgets himself, starts cornering all the girls, asking them about their boyfriends and their sex lives and firmly holding their arms until it scares them a little. You can always hear them stepping out of class to argue on the phone with their wives who they hate.
Bossy keen girl
The people who wanted to be class representatives in school where the people most people came to art school to avoid. It’s hard, then, to understand how one of those power hungry alpha nerds managed to make it into every art class of all time to loudly disagree with the tutor two minutes before the end of the lecture so we all have to stay late to while she argues her bullshit point with some guy who she thinks she’s impressing but who actually hates her as much as the rest of us.
If this girl isn’t petitioning the dean for more plasma screens in the library (just read the books dummy), she’s sobbing in the professor’s study or glaring at you for getting the same grade as her in an assessment even though you handed in something you did the night before and she sweated blood for a month over her thing. Earnestness x desperation x a deadly serious five year life plan = no one I want to hang out with.
Guy having the ‘but I just want it to look nice!’ argument
For the first 18 months of an art degree every time everyone in your class discusses their work together, someone is going to have their work cussed so hard by the tutor for not having any thought put into it. They are going to defend their hackneyed painting/Derek Hess rip off thing with something along the lines of “but I just want to create beautiful art”, and that just won’t wash with the tutors, leading to a boring discussion that holds the class late and yada yada. They’ll continue to paint pretty pictures and think they’re fucking with the tutors’ minds for most of the course, and it’ll get more and more embarrassing for the rest of the class to watch.
These guys are idiots because a) creating something beautiful for the sake of beauty is the most bourgeois/spoilt brat thing ever, way worse than going to accounting school (those guys are going put something back, if you’re making shitty paintings no one respects you’re going to be unemployed til you’re 30), and b) if you’re going to spend all your parent’s money on something as pointless as art school then you should listen to the tutors and what they have to say, instead of producing badly executed paintings that have so little artistic worth they might as well be needlepoint tapestries of kittens that grandmothers make when their grandchildren don’t visit them anymore.
Hot 19 year old girl who can’t draw
I wonder how long hot girls have been drawing spindly pictures of birds? A long time, I’ll bet. And how long have older guys been putting those same shitty drawings in their shows so that they can take the hot girls who drew them to the fucking boneyard? Exactly the same amount of time I’ll wager. These girls are the physical embodiment of human injustice and everyone hates them except the older guys, who hate them but get to fuck them.
The lazy dickhead
This is pretty much everyone else at art school who isn’t on the graphic design course (those guys work like dogs), the guys who don’t know what to do with themselves but hate essay writing and are into films and pot so go to art school to figure stuff out. These guys might end up getting into it or might end up dropping out, and they’re usually ok guys who hate the norms and don’t want to work a desk job. But coming to art school to figure out what sort of a man you want to be - huh? Conscription/National Service used to happen to solve that sort of thing, but I guess if that happened we’d have loads more military dickheads shouting at their kids for smoking pot, now we just have more people smoking pot with their kids. Which is worse? I can’t decide.
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I had a great time at art school, I avoided everyone on my fine art course like they had the Ebola virus and hung out in the illustration studios with people who were fun. But it is still a horrible mélange of middle class self-obsession, arrogance, vanity, self-pity and posturing that makes me as ashamed to be white as comedy songs, tattoos of Nintendo characters and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
SIMULTANEOUSLY POSTED ON STREET CARNAGE.
