Welcome to Help Desk, where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling — or any other activity related to — contemporary art. Together, we’ll sort through some of art’s thornier issues. Email helpdesk@dailyserving.com with your questions. All submissions remain strictly anonymous and become the property of Daily Serving.
2012 is almost gone, and over the course of this year I received some questions that didn’t seem quite right for the column — either because they only required a short answer and/or because they require me to make prescriptive pronouncements on the State of the Contemporary Arts (which I don’t like to do, though I am delighted to tell you how to handle your jealous peers). I still believe that art should be a place of freedom, and who am I to say what you, Joe Artist of Gresham, Oregon, should make? I just want you to be happy and satisfied. But every week when I go into my little Google spreadsheet to select the next issue’s query I see these questions, and it pains me that they’ve gone unanswered. This is my opportunity to reply before the year is over so that we can have a fresh start in 2013. Here goes:
Often I see “art” that is honestly nothing more than 3 squiggles on a red background, yet I have a professor that swears it’s ingenious and I should draw just like that person to be a successful artist. So my question is this: how do I explore and grow within my own art style while I’m still within a structured group setting, when my professor is enforcing a completely different style?
Three ideas: 1.) it seems unlikely that your professor really wants you to copy the ingenious squiggler — maybe he or she is just urging you to appreciate something you’re not accustomed to; 2.) if you’re still in school then you’re too young to have developed a style, so stop worrying about all that for now; 3.) figure out why those three squiggles are considered ingenious. When you answer this question for yourself, you’ll be farther along your path to being an artist than if you spent four years on a “style.” Style is nothing but surface unless there is a deep understanding behind it. You’re in school to cultivate your knowledge, so the next time you’re told some work is brilliant and you think it’s not, ask for the reasons behind your professor’s opinion. You don’t have to agree, but you do have to know exactly why you disagree.

Joav BarEl, Models in Red and Green (“Up Set”), 1969.
What I am really concerned with is whether or not art made of perishable or non-lasting mediums can really be considered art — especially when the artist has made no clear attempt to alter the medium in question.