Help Feed The Starving Artists of the World

"Art student"

What comes to your mind when you think of that?

Do you see a person or a persona?

At my college, as I'm sure at many of your colleges, there are "art students." The ones I'm speaking of here aren't the ones with actual artistic abilities and creative mindsets to erect something of such originality, such innovation. I'm speaking of those who carry around art portfolios, in hopes to conform to the nonconforming starving artist types, to be seen as an "art student" rather than what they really are: students with identity crises. Not necessarily fake, but not necessarily real, either.

There's a boy I know at my school who has no artistic ability whatsoever. Who has showed me his "work" which consisted of a traced superhero, stick figures and multiple sketches of lopsided eyes. He carries around a giant black art portfolio, hoping thats his "key" to becoming someone he's not.

I know, I know. Art is art. A twig glued to cardboard is art. A solitary ice cube on a silver platter for the moments before it melts, is art. A baby's spit up on a rag is art. Is there anything art isn't?

Art is turning into an image more than anything. What we are getting from select artists nowadays is not art. It's wannabe art.

Be who you are. If an "art student" is who you are, leave the black portfolio in your class, rather than lugging it around to perhaps look different to those who couldn't outwardly tell you're an anti-trendy trendsetter (Casey, 2004, phone conversation with Amee).

I am not a nonconformer. I am not a conformer. I am me and whatever category that leaves me in, cool.

There's so many different norms on my campus that are becoming so apparently notieceable as of late. We have "hackey-sackers" mainly high school students who walk up to our campus to skip school and kids who sniff sugar. We have "preachers." C'mon, you know the type, the ones you love to hate...the ones who think they have it all figured out and can't help but pass the info along to someone like yourself. We have "psuedo intellectuals," with thier "original" zig zag goatees and messenger bags strung over thier shoulders. "Starving artists" which the aforementioned falls into, "Starving for attention artists," as it should be called.

There's about 400 more and I'm limited with space here, so maybe another day when the world gets on my nerves will I finsh my hate entry, filled with such debauchery and bitterness of the crowds that surround me.

But maybe I'm not so different than any of them.