EMP Pop Conference 2006
Reading copy – email if you’d like to cite/quote

I’m going to tell you something you already know: Jack Black did not invent the school of rock. Yes you can learn how to play popular music from Berklee with two EE’s but I am sure I don’t have to tell you that mixolidian mastery does not a rock star make. No, the easiest way to get a post-secondary education that prepares you for the rigors and pleasures of popular music performance is to go to art school. As I’m willing to bet none of you will take me up on the offer for a career-change, this paper will take you through a career change and to ask you to modify one element of the one you already have.
It’s hard to be noticed in the art world. First, when you’re young, no one wants to look at your slides. At least that’s what Jesse; the head of NYU’s undergrad studio art program was told his first year class in the fall of 2005. “Don’t show up unsolicited at galleries with slides,” he said. They’ll just be rude to you.” He then listed each gallery owner who was rude to him when he did so as was a young artist in the mid-1990s. Linda, the other teacher of the “new student seminar,” said that it is possible to be discovered if you go to enough galleries and openings. You just have to seem like an artist, and eventually a gallerist will talk to you. “The moral of this story is always be well-dressed,” she said. “The gallery owner may act snooty, but they need you because they’re in the business and you’re the artists.” And as young artists, she added, “Remember. You’re the rock stars.”
How many of you went to school where your first semester you were told that one of your professional goals was to be a rock star? Let me give you a brief summary of what you missed and how what you missed might have made you a rock star:
Students going to art school are likely to have been the best artists in their high schools. Being “the best” meant having manual skills and “an eye” for visual detail. One of the recurring topics of Jesse and Linda’s “new student seminar” was that many students had difficulty accepting that they were among peers who they perceived as being just as skilled as they were. Jesse spent one class period showing the students their peers’ admissions slides, discussing less about the manual skills employed and more how conceptually rigorous work was, and how it showed “ potential for growth.” He asked the students to strive for conceptual rigor and curiosity and for them to put to death the value system by which they judged their works in high school, when everyone wanted to make “beautiful” and “pleasing work” that exhibited great technical skill.
Linda said, “When the students come in, they all want to be Chuck Close.” At first, young students desire to make art that is visually pleasing and bears obvious traces of labor and time. High school aged students want to make realist, representation pre-modern art…and art schools want to make contemporary artists. Within weeks of starting school, students learn this distinction between the two. Linda said that this is the reason most art school students give when they drop out of art school– they don’t want to make contemporary art, they want to make beautiful art.
Students who stay in learn a history of Western art from ancient Greece to the present, focused primarily on Western works and moving quickly from the past to the post-War. A significant amount of time is spent on post-war art considered to be “common practice” for the students, including these fields: pop art, conceptual art, and performance art.
Pop Art was the first successful fine art form to directly challenge the high and low divide between the fine and commercial arts. American pop artists’ incorporated advertising, celebrity and mass media into their works that courted public opinion while critiquing it. It was also the first genre to foreground the sample: callings disparate elements of history into the present, rewriting and critiquing history in the process. The new work accrues value in its use of the established work, and the old work emerges as part of a new form. Sampling also acknowledged the exhaustion of the autonomy of an original text as implied by modernism, instead using collage to create composite images exhibiting the artist’s curatorial savvy.
Jesse told his first year drawing students to make a pencil drawing. As he was handed out pencils, he broke the sharpened end off each one, which forced the students to either sharpen the pencil themselves or use the blunt end in some way, frustrated efforts to making “beautiful” works. Jesse believes that this radical rethinking of tools is a fundamental mental shift for artists who want to make new work. He believes that the “broken pencil” can stand metaphorically for any situation when an artist engages in exploratory or non-traditional use of tools and materials. This exploratory and curious mind state can then be applied to any new creative process, including music:
I think what makes music made by artists so interesting. They’re not looking at their tools as necessarily part of a virtuosic tradition of mastery. Like the Talking Heads. They weren’t very good at playing their instruments, but they made really amazing records because they treated their instruments the way they treated utensils – cameras, paintbrushes –like they were taught in the art school. What can this instrument do? It’s heavy. It sits like this. I’ve seen pictures of people holding it that way. Do I have to do it that way?
He places emphasis on art-as-process over the emphasis of the art-object and refers to John Cage as the philosopher who first liberated instruments from their accepted, traditional uses. Jesse places the “broken pencil” model of heuristic inquiry and processual understanding in opposition to the “virtuosic tradition of mastery” that places emphasis on masterworks.
Conceptual art theory broke down the centrality of the art object. No one could “own” a “concept” and the works produced by these artists were made of cheap materials meant to break down. Because of this, two important subfields arose in conceptual art – the document and public relations. The document provided the rules and strategies of the project and could often be signed and sold like a traditional work, allowing a buyer to “own” a “realization” of the work. A new aspect of gallery ownership also became important: promotion. In the 1960s and 1970s, New York art dealer Seth Siegelaub relentlessly promoted conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth who, because they had no work to sell, found themselves cultivating “public image,” “extraordinary mannerisms” and “social connections to the scene around Warhol, which often coalesced in the back room of Max’s Kansas City nightclub” (Alberro 2003:27). While the art object “disappeared” in conceptual art, the idea of the artist as object had begun to emerge.
As one of the main modes of conceptual art, performance art eschewed the art object and traditional gallery system for temporally based work often performed in non-traditional spaces. RoseLee Goldberg, wrote that “provocation is a constant characteristic of performance art,” and “it rarely aims to seduce its audience and is more likely to unravel and examine critically the techniques of seduction, unnerving viewers in the process, rather than providing them with an ambiguous setting for desire” (Goldberg 2004:13). Performance art became the primary method by which young New York artists in the 1970s worked to challenge art world convention while redefining the space between fine art and other forms of live art – theater, music and dance.
Goldberg devotes a chapter of her book to “Video, rock n’ roll, and the spoken word,” in acknowledgment of wide range of performance fields and media forms in which seventies performance artists worked in downtown New York City venues. The volatile, political, anti-establishment nature of performance art directly influenced the burgeoning punk music scene through shared spaces, shared politics and a sense of the visceral immediacy of action. Performance artist/musicians such as Laurie Anderson mingled with art-school trained popular musicians like David Byrne and provocateur street-poets like Lydia Lunch and Michael Gira and through these shared performance spaces and practices, blurring the line between the high and low systems of art performance.
Jesse refers to the performative aspect of art-school trained popular musicianship as “a way of performing without performance,” or, in some ways, performance art light: The mode of presentation is live and in time and performative but there’s a whole universe of rules you can play by or not play by. A lot of teachers teach performance art as if there were no structure that anything goes. That a performance can be anything, I think, can be a little overwhelming to young artists. [With musical performance] you have to have an instrument, and you have to have something happening in time. It’s an easier framework.
Jesse suggests that popular music, allows young artists to move into the open, structureless field of performance art using a socially accepted framework. Using this popular music framework is a way for young artists to play with performance art without what Simon Frith calls “a potentially humiliating lack of structure.” The structures of popular music live performance – venues, social codes, and on-stage gestures – become another set of tools to be manipulated.

Say you were to study those things, and then you would have gone to “art school.” The term art school is most often employed to describe someone’s educational training. It is a biographical fact, such in this statement about Kayne West. “He graduated early from high school, dropped out of art school and then left Chicago State because he wanted to pursue music full-time.”
The noun “art school” itself can be made into an adjective. It too can be employed in factual statements that describe a type of education one has obtained: “art school training.” The goal of using the adjective “art school” in music writing is to modify nouns that index objects occurring in the performance of popular music: practices, sounds and identity traits. There is some meaning gained from the addition of the modifier “art school” to these nouns of practice, sound and identity, but what meaning is it? Do the writers know? The readers? And what art school is the writer talking about, the one they have never gone to or the one the musician has?
“Art-school” phrases with positive connotations generally focused on the “art” half of the term “art school.” In general, the “art” referenced here is 19th century fine art imbued with Bourdieuian high cultural capital. For instance, the noun “art” is often made adjectival to establish splinter, “smarter” or “high-art” subgenres of a main pop music genres: art rock, art punk, art funk. A lexis-nexus search for “art school” and “music” brought up these positive connotations: art school aesthetic, art school can-do attitude, art school ethic, art school leanings, art school idealist. These phrases often reference a diligent work ethic and notions the artist as a “shaman” or “truthsayer” that come from modern art. This is the same vision of the artist that high school students entering art school have of what fine art school be: difficult to make, difficult to understand, heroic, masterful.
The negative connotations tended to stress the “school” aspect of the phrase. Examples include: art school haircut, art school outfit, art school attitude, art school bluff, art school weirdness, art school revisionism, art school kooks, art school fuckheads, art school wannabes, art-school trainwreck. Negative connotations of the term “school” and “art school” often come from perceptions of the artist in the post World War II era: the young, maverick art stars of Pop, conceptual art, and performance art. These are genres of artist youth, laboratories for ideas that will develop material forms over an artists’ career.
These forms of art also challenge the notion of originality and privilege locus of creativity in action, not object. They do not necessarily reveal evidence of their struggle and often privilege amateur-techniques employed strategically for goals other than beauty. Significally also for my argument, each of these post World War II art movements also cultivated performative identity as an active cultivation of not just arts media but popular media in general. Art-school trained popular musicians are quite knowledgeable about music journalism, publicity, marketing and persona-construction. The question is: how knowledgeable are journalists about art school?
I argue that the negative connotations for “art school,” stem from journalists’ ignorance of contemporary art practice. The result is journalists’ anxiousness in attempt to read the “art” aspect of art-school trained musicianship by using 19th century artist stereotypes such as dandies, dilettantes, forgerers and poseurs to recast these art-school actions into pre-modern terms. In doing so, the writer misinterprets the conceptual, performative, the appropriative gestures that mark postmodern art as bold and progressive creative acts. Here I posit that the adjective “art-school” serves as an anxious admission by the author that she knows something “artsy” is going on within the musical performance by art-school trained musician, but she’s too embarrassed to admit that she don’t know exactly what is going on.
One enduring and beloved art-into-pop archetype is the dandy. Thomas Carlyle writes in the Dandiacal Body that the Dandy is “a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well…what is it that the Dandy asks in return? Solely…that you would recognize his existence; would admit him to be a living object; or even failing this, a visual object.” In his recent book on glam, Philip Auslander called mods the sociological precursors to glam rockers. Mods “were true dandies, interested in creating true works of art – themselves” (58) Dandyism suggests a highly performative masculinity with marked concentration on visual representation, and that that representation is an artifice taking incredible upkeep. Performance artists are like dandies in that their artworks are ephemeral, inherently personal and highly theatrical. Performance artists’ “true works of art” were also “themselves” but their demand to be seen as “visual objects” in time and space is not a matter of mere aesthetics. It was political. Dandies, glam rockers and performance artists were all deeply invested in breaking apart gender binaries. In doing so, art-school trained glam rock dandies like Brian Eno and David Bowie challenged the masculine rock god archetypes of the 1960s, allowing for “glamour.” Glitter, makeup, costuming, theatrical gesture and staging refocused the body from the aural or cerebral appreciation of 1960s rock back to the pleasure of the eye.
In Performing Glam Rock, Philip Auslander enters the PopCon “rockist” bash by critiquing the 1960s “golden era” of rock’s predilection privilege mind/brain perception and not the eye or body experience. He calls this “the antiocular bias” of 1960s psychedelic rock performers and audiences. He suggests a political layer to this era’s disdain for spectacle, as “distrust of the visual, a distrust that stemmed from the belief that the dominant culture controlled the means of producing socially influential images (i.e. the mass media) (15) and while some psychedelic musicians dressed in wild colors, their clothes were not costumes but often just brightly colored street clothes, implying a close proximity between their ‘performing selves’,’ true selves’ their audiences.1960s Psychedelic rock was “introspective” on stage” where performers “focused their attention on each other or their instruments, especially while playing a solo, and did not play to the audience extensively” (17). Musical meaning was obtained by deep listening; audiences went on “head trips” and danced by themselves in moments of extreme a-social individual experience. Glam rock was a direct confrontation of these values, recentering attention from the head to the eye, demanding eyes to look at bodies, and as such, gave a radical space for (mostly) male bodies to perform difference. Subsequent generations of art-school trained popular musicians have employed costuming, make-up and extreme theatrical presentation to continue to challenge and critique dominant rock ideologies. The political power of this gesture is undercut by suggesting art school trained musicians are merely “clothes wearing men.”
The word dilettante appeared in the 18th century, meaning “a lover of fine arts” who “cultivates the fine arts for the love of them rather than professionally.” By 1885 the respect for the amateur artist has diminished and the word dilettante change. It was mostly modified by the word “mere” and a “dilettante” became “one who interests himself in an art or science merely as a pastime and without serious aim or study.” The dilettante is one who is interested, but not-formally trained, or skilled. The dilettante is an amateur. Art-school trained musicians are artists who become musical dilettantes. Essentially, this can be seen as a post-college career change.
Art-school trained popular musicians are often not very good at their instruments. Eno was notorious for never learning to read music and Fischerspooner, at least initially made music only with basic tracking software and public domain samples. The “broken pencil” argument – that tools should be approached with curiosity and not a “virtuosic tradition of mastery” is one emic, art-school answer for why art-school trained popular music often has an amateur approach. A second, and more radical reading asks for a shift of subjectivity occurring in the perceptual apparatus.
Art school training encourages students to believe that being a popular musician can be art. Every single artist/musician I spoke with for my thesis believed that their popular music project was a form of art, and every art educator I spoke with said they would encourage their students into a popular music if they believed it was the best way to realize the student’s artistic vision. In this way, the question of whether art-school trained popular musicians have made a career change is relative to your position in viewing their work. Popular music fans with little interest or knowledge about contemporary fine art can understand these musicians’ art school training as a matter of the biographical past. The music by art-school trained musicians is still music and can be enjoyed on the terms laid out by popular music reception. If, on the other hand, one approaches art-school trained musicians’ works with knowledge of contemporary art, it is possible to see their entire project in different way. It becomes art about popular music, art using popular music, art for a popular music audience. In this way, the radical rethinking of tools is to imagine the “band as art” where the artistic emphasis is less on performance of musical competency and more on creating a successful artistic expression. In the case of art-school trained popular musicians like Fischerspooner or Wynne Greenwood of Tracy + the Plastics, this display is often purposefully laced with amateur musical and performative gestures and, even more radically, performative failures. Making audiences uncomfortable about their musical amateurism and incompetence is the whole point of their musical art. They’ve thought and worked hard to be bad in just the right way.
Sampling is a much-lauded hallmark of the postmodern condition, but what of those who “sample” entire works, entire genres, entire careers of others? Negativland and John Oswald’s plunderphonics are largely exempt from the ambivalence we feel about wholesale identity theft. In popular music, Simon Reynolds called the trend “record collector rock” a genre where “a band’s total sonic identity is reducible to its members’ listening habits,” which is a problem he thinks, that “has infected music with some of the sickness of collector culture” He precedes this with the caveat that “the curator-turned-creator is not an especially new phenomenon. The Stones started out as obsessive collectors, and might never have gone beyond being reverent fan boys covering blues songs if Jagger and Richards’ manager hadn’t persuaded them to write their own tunes.” (299) Where is the space between curator-turned-creator and “record-collection rock performer?” To Reynolds these musicians, except art-school trained pop star Richards, are creating forgeries, but to postmodern artists like John Oswald or photographer Cindy Sherman, forgeries ask important questions about authorship. The same questions about authorship and forgery can be asked back to Reynolds of the Stones. What is the space between “their own tunes” and sampling, forgery and downright theft?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a poseur as “one who practices an affected mental or social attitude; an affected person,” and traces the first reference to late 19th century writer B. Jerrold’s 1872 article that states, “As one cannot go to bed in the middle of the afternoon -- 11:30 p.m. --- it is necessary to go somewhere after the opera,’ is the declaration of a well-known poseur.” Two things are significant about this quotation. First, it is the notion that the poseur is one who pretends. The poseur goes to the opera for its social and entertainment aspects and not those of serious music lover; He’s looking for the next form of entertainment as soon as the first ends. He poses. Acts. The poseur is one whose performance is obviously insincere. Like an artist he is only interested in the artifice.
The second is the double voicing of the quotation. Jerrold is relating the speech of a poseur, and by the obvious absurdity of juxtaposition of the time “11:30 p.m.” with the term “middle of the afternoon,” Jerrold places a critique on this person through his ironic retelling of the situation. The double voicing creates a distance and disdain by the writer for the poseur – necessarily suggesting that to catch a poseur’s insincerity, the writer must be somehow sincere. A true opera lover. Frith and Horne noted in Art Into Pop, to which this paper is deeply indebted, that even within the era of punk, critics sought to disavow the punk movement as a disingenuous co-opting of street-level political action calling punks, "the same old petit-bourgeois art students, who a few months ago were David Bowie and Bryan Ferry look-a-likes – who've read a little art history and adopted Dadaist typography and bad manners." The writer, I assume, has always been a good little working class revolutionary who resents this fashionable insurgency. How can we have this revolution with all these pretty boys around?

Dandies, dilettantes, forgerers and poseurs: Art school students performing themselves badly, inauthentically, unoriginally, insincerely and shamelessly. Why aren’t they embarrassed to be so bad? Because they aren’t playing by the rules of virtuosity, authenticity, originality, and sincerity that were the standards for the old masters and, not coincidentally, heroic rock stars. They’re being pop. Which leads to the central argument of this paper: the work that art-school trained musicians make is art. It’s artifice, a fake, sincere in its in authenticity. Postwar art has been obsessed with artifice, persona, publicity, the pastiche, the spectacle, and the multiple and as such, popular music is an obvious medium.
It is the job of critics of this musical art to approach the work as both music and art, to consider process and approach and not just output: refuse the art context is to privilege musical “work itself” and deny the history of Postwar art, of contemporary popular music studies and, most crucially, the intentions of the creators themselves. If it walks like art and talks like art, why call it music? Because it sounds?
Art school is a noun, a place. It’s a biographical description. Art school is an education, a process, a heuristic model. It is ALSO often an adjective employed incorrectly to described misheard and unseen aspects of art-into-pop musicianship. Art school is fine for biography but a bad description, and if you don’t believe me, hear this bit of art-school trained pop music writing:

In their early art school days, a group of articulate art school kids used their art school can do-attitude and art school learning to put together an art school idealist band. They were art school punksters with their art school haircuts and art school outfits, using their art school ethic to perfect an art school aesthetic and an art school sound that was an equal mix of art school funk and art school weirdness. They had an award winning art-school-typish live show they played for an art school crowd full of art school kooks who had serious art school style. But by the time they got around to recording an album they had become an art school trainwreck whose art school revisionism sounded more like art school wannabes caught in an art school bluff. By the time their album was released only art school drop outs and art school fuckheads who didn’t even know about their art school genesis were fans.

I promise you that there is more to hear in art school than this, and more to see. Break the pencil and find new ways to use it, and if you want to describe what you see and hear by art-school trained popular musicians, take a bit of advice from one like MIA and “Get yourself an education.”

(In the presentation, these examples flashed at 30 second intervals on PowerPoint. All example citations available upon request and 90% came from daily newspapers searched through LexisNexus)

1) Process-based associations for the term “art school”

A. Work ethic: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have emerged from the streets of deeply stylish and neurotic New York to capture the attention of the mainstream while maintaining an art school work ethic.

B. Group orientation: 'Collective action that benefits as many people as possible. It's like an art school ethic.'

C. DIY lifestyle and attitude: Immaculate Machine's esthetics are DIY -- there are songs about silk-screening in the basement and frustration with the pose of youthful ennui…. It’s the kind of smart, art-school, can-do attitude that comes from, well, art school.

D. Stress on conceptual over emotional: Maybe the warm reception for these songs will remind the band that it was built on Southern harmonies and not New York art-school projects…

E. Use of sample technique: With roots in art school, Chicks on Speed, who shed white jackets early on and sported their own white-paper garb, like remixes and reconfigurations. They favor cut-and-paste techniques, both musically and on the video scrim behind them. Their set started with chaos and dissonance, mutated into something resembling synth-pop, and then came back out the other side into the squall. Electronic glitches were part of the bombardment.

F. Live performance scrappiness: The Georges live shows involve props, lights and B-list dramatics that define art-school idealist.

G. Use of irony and/or deception in performance: Her delivery is straightforward, but doing that song at all qualifies as ironic. Is she spinning her retrospective forward even further with an earnest, if corny, sentiment? Or is she just giving us the old art-school bluff?

H. Revisionism thanks to the dominance of empathic Coldplay-esque rock and knowing Eighties art school revisionism.

2) Musical/Sonic associations for the term “art school”

A. Instrumentation: punk rock was being subverted by electronic-instrument-wielding art school students

B. Distinctive sound leading to marginality: The Decemberists' art school style will always mean its fans are more niche than mainstream.

C. Spin on genre and/or musical tradition: its breathy, messy and so much more convincing than those art school punksters the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

D. Spin on sound of other art-school trained musicians: he continues to make the indie kids dance, pilfering from Talking Heads' art-school funk ("Too Much Love")

E. As part of historical continuum of art-trained musicianship Had Franz Ferdinand come out in the mid-'80s when foppish bands with romantic art-school leanings had their own stations on the FM dial, their fight to be heard wouldn't be nearly as difficult.

F. Musical technique/ amateurism Suddenly they're playing shabby bass lines, the drum machine's booming from some corner of a crappy basement, and the whole shrill thing sounds as much like an art-school trainwreck as a sneaky reinvention

3) Persona and identity associations for the term “art school”

A. Unusual or Quirky: this sounds a little like German art school kooks Chicks On Speed

B. Articulate: was bitingly satirical, the thoughts and dreams of antsy but articulate art school kids.

C. Unruly class warrior: Strummer was the son of a British diplomat, but he identified with working-class youth. Sent away to boarding school, he detested "the thick, rich people's thick, rich kids." He was later thrown out of art school.

D. Poseurs: Coldplay is not merely a bunch of art school wannabes.

E. Pretentious, rising above the level of pop: Kapranos has no qualms about calling Franz Ferdinand a pop band, nor does he resist labeling it an art-school group. Six of one, half-dozen of the other. The Franzes have avoided the respective pitfalls of both categories - disposability and pretension - and haven't sanded down their quirks for mass consumption.

F. Brooding: Barzelay,…then moved to Brooklyn to attend art school in 1994, is naturally drawn to the dark aspects of life.

G. Gender bending: The idea, it seems, is to enhance in our minds those early art-school days, when Jim wore eyeliner and all their records sounded like they were designed for Belgian motorways.

H. Tastemakers/fashionistas: This I actually did see, being the sort of sad adolescent who was always more likely to be watching early evening local news programmes than hanging around hip clubs with the art-school crowd.

I. Art school audiences as snobs: I'd play this late for the art school fuckheads!