[gilded-lilly]

Yeah, it’s pretty dumb. Science is fundamentally objective, art is fundamentally subjective. That’s a solid distinction.

I think the idea of studying art is wrong in and of itself. It’s interesting and possibly useful from a technical/historical standpoint, but the idea that you can go to school to learn how to be a good artist is silly, in my opinion.

[thornic]

That's an odd take. Studying art, like studying any subject, is a great way to be exposed to new ideas and fresh perspectives, which in turn informs and inspires one's own creativity and understanding.

[gilded-lilly]

Sure, but I think it’s like being a sports commentator vs a competitor, or a film critic vs a director. Tarantino, Van Gough, Jimi Hendrix (and the like) all achieved greatness without any institutional backing or education, as far as I’m aware.

[swores]

I was going to just write a vague comment that many of the world's best painters, musicians and film makers have studied before they became great, and cherry picking a few who haven't doesn't prove otherwise. But actually I remembered Van Gogh already is the opposite example than you think.

Van Gogh: "He traveled to Brussels later in the year, to follow Theo's recommendation that he study with the Dutch artist Willem Roelofs, who persuaded him – in spite of his dislike of formal schools of art – to attend the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. He registered at the Académie in November 1880, where he studied anatomy and the standard rules of modelling and perspective."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh

edit 2: If interested in other examples, check out alumni lists of places such as London's Royal Academy of Arts (where for example, J. M. W. Turner, one of the most famous British painters of the 19th century, enrolled as a student at the age of 14; and where actors such as Alan Rickman, Tom Hiddleston, and Anthony Hopkins - among many others - studied). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Royal_Academicians

And the RA is far from the only place with a history of teaching some fantastic artists. You'll find a few, or many, famously successful people who've studied at pretty much any of the best places to study arts in the US (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-15-top-art-sch...), or at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (students including impressionist painter Edgar Degas, or American architect John Russell Pope who designed the National Archives and Records Administration building as well as the Jefferson Memorial, among others), etc etc.

(You can stop reading this comment here probably, unless you're interested enough to go on - it's quite long after two edited additions...)

Absolutely there are plenty of people, both in creative areas and in business and science etc, who've got to the top of their game without formal education, thanks to talent and self-driven learning. It wouldn't be hard to pick a handful of cities from around the world and name from each just as many examples as I've given of extremely talented, and famous for it, artists who didn't have formal education.

But there's plenty who did have either personal mentors/tutors, or degrees in their field, and while nobody would suggest that their education was 100% (or close) of what made them a great artist, plenty of them do attribute it (either institutionally or just their mentor) partly to thank - just as some consider it wasted time with hindsight.

edit: Anecdotally, in my youth I was a professional singer - nothing fancy or famous but salaried for a few years of recordings and tours. Not only did I keep working with a singing teacher who helped me on any issues I had (early on most issues would be ones pointed out to me, in my last year or two nearly all sessions were focussed on whatever I wanted to work on), but pretty much everyone I sang with who was either early in their career, or who sometimes / often sang solos rather than just in a choir chorus, had lessons from some sort of mentor (or more than one). As far as I'm aware, even those I sang with more than a decade ago who didn't move on and are still singing, in some cases as somewhat well known soloists in their areas, still have a coach/mentor to help keep their voices in good shape and even to keep getting better and better.

I'm also one of many, many people who, as kids, were lucky enough to have the chance to not only have a musical instrument but to have weekly lessons for it. I would guess that if you look at the most successful pop/rock stars, maybe it's less common to have had those sorts of lessons growing up, if you look at classical music greats it would be the opposite way around, Jazz somewhere in the middle... etc. (I could be way off). Which isn't to say there aren't pop/rock artists who had a good musical education (a couple of people who shared teachers with me have had chart hits here in the UK), nor that there aren't classical music performers who taught themselves everything they know (/ learning by watching greats who inspired them).

There's really no right or wrong way to become a great artist.

[gilded-lilly]

I think that can limit creativity though. Look at Albert Einstein. I don’t think he had much of a formal education, certainly he was not involved with any institution when he wrote his groundbreaking paper.

Sometimes, being involved in big, political institutions can have the result of stamping out original/independent thinking in favor of established dogma. To be clear, I’m not arguing against the act of learning in itself - Hendrix and others learned on the job, so to speak, and listened extremely widely. I guess I’m speaking more against formal education/credentialism, which of course has its place, mostly in the hard sciences where it is important to have an objectively good understanding of the dogma.

[swores]

But again, you've picked a single wonderful scientist as if that proves all great thinkers followed his path. Does Einstein not having a formal education somehow mean that all great thinkers just have had the same life path as him? It's just nonsensical, sorry.

Marie Curie was a student at the University of Paris. Isaac Newton at Cambridge University. Charles Darwin studied at the University of Edinburgh. Nikola Tesla couldn't go to university but he completed 4 years of high school in 3 years and "later wrote that he became interested in demonstrations of electricity by his physics professor". Galileo Galilei studied at the University of Pisa.

Or stepping back away from science again, David Bowie. From Wikipedia again to save writing: "Bowie studied art, music, and design, including layout and typesetting. After Burns introduced him to modern jazz, his enthusiasm for players like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane led his mother to give him a Grafton saxophone in 1961. He was soon receiving lessons from baritone saxophonist Ronnie Ross."

Again, since you seem to miss my points in my last comment: I'm not saying education is required for greatness, nor better for all people (Einstein certainly tried formal education and hated it). But to say it prevents creativity is just wrong, except for bad education.

Maybe you're basing things on your experience of school / child education which wasn't good enough for you?

[gilded-lilly]

I don’t think there’s a right or wrong here. I think there are strong arguments on both sides. What I would say is, I think Hendrix would’ve been booted out of a higher education system due to not conforming to the established principles of music theory, or some such thing.

[leoedin]

You almost certainly can't teach whatever it is that makes a great artist great. Just like you can't really teach the mindset and thought processes that make a great engineer great. But you can teach techniques, and you can encourage practice of the craft, and teaching exposes people to ideas that they might not be aware of otherwise.

Good teaching is very rarely "this is a fact you must memorise", but putting the right environment in place for someone to do something themselves. If someone goes to art school, has a class on pottery, learns how to use the wheel and the kiln, and then becomes a renowned potter, did they learn that at school? Probably not the part where they became renowned - but the school did provide them with the tools to get there.

[rcxdude]

I think it's only wrong in the sense that lower levels of education are biased towards a kind of rote memorisation of bashing everyone into performing the same basic task in the same way to get the same results which look good on the test. That is certainly something which is more likely to have a negative effect on an artist's potential than anything else (but the same is true of any other subject IMO). Actual careful study which involves acturally engaging with the subject will generally enhance anyone's capability in the subject, even if in art usually you succeed by breaking 'the rules' in some way or another.