"I have wanted to be a fine artist painter, and I reached the point in art schools were I'd like to understand more about images and how images communicate information to people. And I was not getting very far in that from my professors."

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Art schools are partly the villain here. (Never mind that I teach in them.) This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture.

— Jerry Saltz