I got this question from a Killoggs reader... wondering about LSU's art department. Anyone have any feedback for him?
Sender's Name: Geoff
Subject: LSU Advice
Message: Josh,
You guys are all knowing about LSU. I have a couple of my old high school students who have been accepted to LSU. I was wondering if you could give me a little advice for them. 3 of the 4 are going into the Art department and I know Killoggs is full of Art majors.
If you, or the Killoggs crew have any advice for them, could you please share it?
shelly [email] said at 4:10 PM 01-30-2008: LSU's art department was extremely poorly funded when I attended. LSU is really an agricutural mechanical college and not the best liberal arts/ fine arts school especially at the undergraduate level. The people were all pretty nice but a lot of the ones I knew are no longer there. Artists who want to make a living in art and without family connections to Louisiana generally move to greener pastures. Art as a profession is sort of a luxury service that requires a customer base who can afford to spend on "non-essentials." You just don't find that kind of money value system or spending mentality a lot in Louisiana
LSU also (at least when I attended) wasn't placed in a city that had a solid base of arts and culturally focused community, neither was it a place with a transitory but really active and progressive arts community like you find in some college towns. What can you really say when the library closes down for the football games? I know BR has grown a lot in the last few years so maybe that has changed...
If your students know what sort of art they're interested in (as in fine arts/ academic track or applied commercial arts) they may do best trying to find another school with a good program. For commercial arts, starting in a community college or technical school may be a better option and potentially more economical. None of the working commercial artists I know have a 4 year degree in art but rather have a mix of technical and on the job background.
If their bent is more academic/ gallery art based they should really try to find a school with a better funded arts program. That aspect of the art world has a LOT to do with who you know. Money isn't everything but talent and potential connections often follow the facilities and resources. If your career goal is to make art and support yourself by teaching and/ or gallery shows, it is WAY easier if you know the "who's who." How many galleries in Louisiana show new work by living professional artists? exactly.
If they absolutely can't afford to go anywhere but LSU, they should get their pre-reqs out of the way and look into LSU's national and international student exchange programs. This can give you the opportunity to go to a college with a good art school for essentially the cost of attending LSU (plus travel.) You can exchange with a U.S. school that has a good program in your focus area or get your art history requirements by studying the actual art in Italy instead of slides in a dark auditorium. It also gives you a network of artist connections somewhere else in the world.
If they're interested in art programs because they enjoy artsy things but really hate math and history and don't want to be a doctor or lawyer, but their parents insist that they go to college, they should consider looking for a program that has a technical/ career focus (graphic design, advertising, web design, video game design, architecture.) They should also realistically assess the starting salaries in these fields and not listen to the B.S. fed to college kids about what their liberal arts diploma will entitle them to upon graduation in order to get them to sign on to more and more debt. Otherwise they'll find themselves getting out of school with a general arts or liberal arts degree from a school without a prestigious program in that field, no specific marketable skills, and needing to repay school debt with their subsequently anticlimactic and soul crushing job answering phones and filing.
andrew [email] said at 1:14 AM 01-31-2008: Not totally true. I have a BA, a BFA, an MFA, now a professional certificate from NYU and I make a living as a commercial artist in a highly competitive job market. I filed and answered phones for two years, but didn't give up and eventually got a break.
It isn't really about how much money you make or don't make as an artist. If that distracts you you shouldn't do it anyway. I love my craft no matter how little they pay me. Or how good they say I am or how many times I get rejected. It's part of the game. In the words of H Rap Brown they didn't make me so they can't break me.
andrew [email] said at 5:27 PM 03-02-2008: Me and my piano teacher, my friend Dena, her granddad used to play as a little jazz combo for the agriculture college at homecoming. best food in the world. i used to going to the rodeos and seeing the bulls on campus when i was a kid, looking out the window on the bus on the way home from buchanan. that stuff is long gone. they phased out bulls for otriches, and then the young republicans turned it all into parking lots in the mid 90s. LSU was too cheap and lazy to even build a parking garage.
andrew [email] said at 4:36 PM 02-02-2008: LSU, much more than any other state university, has a close connection to the state government. Huey Long used to personally give out scholarship money on the parade grounds. Like Carville says Florida would go on without the university of Florida, or any other state without one of its schools, but without LSU Louisiana wouldn't have much else to go on.
shelly [email] said at 4:30 PM 01-30-2008: If I didn't make it clear, most of the instructors I knew are gone and perhaps Baton Rouge has changed immensely, but I am back there at least once a year, and the school art program funding priorities and community resources appear to me to be about the same.
myriam [email] said at 9:27 PM 01-30-2008: Can't hurt to ask. I still have a ton of connections to my alma mater who keep me posted on things there--you know, once a student, always interested in the school...
andrew [email] said at 2:56 PM 02-02-2008: LSU has always been about ROTC and petrochemicals. Art is never going to be a priority. The landscape architecture program is billed as the best in the country, and every year during football games the commercials announce that LSU has a new mysterious technological facility (that nobody really cares about or knows what its for).
brandon [email] said at 4:52 PM 01-30-2008: What can you really say when the library closes down for the football games? I know BR has grown a lot in the last few years so maybe that has changed...
Nope. Footballs still closes it/them. "Security" sez the admin. "Misappropriating sons-of-bitches" is my interpretation.
josh [email] said at 4:56 PM 01-30-2008: i honestly think that the library should close during games... how many drunk MFs would try to have sex in study rooms and crap?
brandon [email] said at 5:02 PM 01-30-2008: It would be pretty trivial to post an LSU cop or a rent a cop at the door. After the double-homicide recently, they had them there for days. It would be insanely trivial, given that Middleton and the Law Library only have one workable entrance to the outside for them to exclude everyone but those with a student ID and those who are sober. We had a bunch of home games last semester and the problems they caused for my work were non-trivial. All the same, I didn't get much sympathy for my grumbling.
brandon [email] said at 5:09 PM 01-30-2008: Sometimes I wonder that I'm missing out on some important semi-public, furry action, and one-handed cramming by not renting a carrel.
andrew [email] said at 12:16 AM 01-31-2008: The top five art schools are RISD, Yale, the Art Institute of Chicago, CalArts and Pratt. To be fair LSU is a football school.
My advice to anyone taking any class at LSU - but especially art classes:
Beware. Many of the professors at LSU, especially adjunct professors and grad students, are incompetent. The first class you should be very alert and judge whether that class is worth your time. If not, get out of that class ASAP. Make the course catalog your best friend, find out which professors are good and who is going to waste your time.
The first day of any class at LSU is always like a trial membership at a gym. You've got to stay on your toes and then make a very cold, clinical, instictive decision about whether its worth your investment.
If you can't get out of a detrimental class in time - go to just enough classes so that you are in D range and then quit going. I got two Ds and an F using this technique but it saved my career.
AnotherGeoff said at 11:00 AM 01-31-2008: Thank you all for your insight. A number of my old students are dead set on attending LSU no matter what. I guess it has to do with that whole football dominance or parental ties. My old co-worker who teaches Art is a 2000 graduate of the LSU program and that may have something to do with it.
As to Shelly's earlier statement concerning Baton Rouge and the art scene...these students are coming from Alexandria. It's hardly the arts Mecca of the Louisiana. I think the general belief is that painting and sculpting leads to sin. Dirty, dirty, naughty sin.
evannotsignedin said at 6:46 PM 01-31-2008: who is your old coworker? we probably know him/her.
also, i don't know if this says much for LSU's art program, but most of the stuff i saw come out of it was far superior to the shit i see coming out of pratt, parsons, nyu, and cooper union.
andrew [email] said at 12:07 PM 02-02-2008: It says more about your opinion. robert mapplethorpe, yoko ono, robert redford, terrence howard and the likes came out of pratt - LSU has nobody on that level. Steve Soderbergh borrowed a camera one semester but that's about it. nyu, parsons, and cooper union aren't pure art schools, they aren't as tough either. (NYU is for film, Cooper Union- Architecture, Parsons is a small step above the University of Phoenix).
LSU just can't compete or afford to compete with your Pratts, RISDs, CalArts, Yale, or the Art Inst. of Chicago. Baton Rouge is too blue-collar to finance that type of ambition. Art schools are expensive. Trying to explain this is like telling city kids Rutgers will never beat LSU in football. It's just not true, but they think it will happen any day now. What would Baton Rouge do with a bunch of art majors anyway? They would all be jobless. If you want to get an Art major from LSU you should get a Math minor as well.
jennyjams said at 1:07 PM 02-02-2008: Are these students interested in getting terminal degrees? Just about everyone i knew got into the grad school of their choice, or at least a decent one, after graduating from lsu art. Of course finding something meaningful or lucrative to do with that worthless golden MFA is another issue altogether. I for one always went for the "hone your portfolio/get the papers quickly/go to the (read: save your money for the) best grad school" tack, and you can't beat the price if this is your mission.
I must say, though, that almost all of the faculty i worked with when i was in school have left. There is no real way for me(us) to know what the art programs are like these days, and i surmise that there've been changes. Interestingly, an older friend of mine here in New Orleans will be starting the art program at lsu in the Fall. She's been really impressed by the new classes, equipment, and facilities (especially in the printmaking dept) that didn't exist when we were there. Also, i've learned from her that the acceptance guidelines into the college of design have become more stringent (she had to submit a portfolio and everything), so maybe that has improved the programs too. So... there you go. Not a thorough recommendation, but lsu definitely got me to where i needed/wanted to go.
AND, although baton rouge still gives me a headache, it's gotta be at least as fun as alexandria. Plus, new orleans is always a quick trip away to fill those culture voids. Hope this helps!
zack [email] said at 6:02 PM 02-25-2008: I'm surprised to see so much haterade here for the art dept. Baton Rouge in general sucks in many ways (but it's still 100x better than alexandria), and LSU in general sucks in many ways, but (though I haven't been in school for a few years) the Art School at LSU was pretty decent.
LSU's Ceramics dept. is nationally acclaimed from what I understand, and the printmaking dept. is pretty decent. The painting dept. seems pretty back-asswards but there are a few good adjuncts and profs there too.. I dunno if all the people who helped me figure shit out are still there, but there were definitely some teachers who knew what was going on in the art world and who helped me lots.
The one failing I had, and maybe this is just the printmaking dept's fault (but i don't think so), is that while I got lots of good art education, I don't feel like i got much practical info about putting it to use and being a professional artist in the real world. There's really no classes about making presentation portfolios/websites/learning how to talk to galleries/art directors/grad schools, etc (except maybe in the design dept, but there should be a required class of some sort for everyone in Art, I think). Lots of people I know who got out of the art dept then just kind of drifted around being clueless and weren't prepared for the real world in some ways.
Anyhow, there are worse places to go, and I echo jenny's post about going to a state school with decent programs (like LSU) and then going to yr grad school of choice. There are of course going to be better art schools out there but they're fucking expensive and then at the end of the day, you've still not got yr masters and you can't teach (if that's something that interests you).
andrew [email] said at 4:01 PM 03-02-2008: Nationally acclaimed ceramics is just a bunch of crap they say at lsu. nobody cares about ceramics nationally.
Most of the girls in art school at LSU were only going for their MRS degree anyway.
I had a double major in english and was three credits short of a math minor - that was what has kept me afloat the last few years. The average LSU student shouldn't plan to make a living off of financially. Its highly improbable. If LSU taught art business classes, it would be all moonbeams and lollipops anyway. I went to a few seminars and they were completely infeasible.
That's not 'haterade' that's just business reality.
andrew [email] said at 9:49 PM 03-03-2008: hey i'm not laughing, i'll stand behind any of that. i've been doing this 5 yrs professionally now. art school isn't reality, much less lsu art school. if you don't have the inate hustle and ambition you're not going to make it. i saw people in art school giving career retrospectives, at age 26. i'm past all that.
andrew [email] said at 4:05 PM 03-02-2008: When I told JB I was getting a degree in art, he said "great another useless degree". He was right to. Art is by definition useless. Once its useful it becomes graphic design or marketing or something else.
