Getting a Grade for a painting is a Joke

Hello,

I just thought that getting a grade for a painting is a bit of a joke.

You could make the same arguement for essays too, but paintings are so subjective.

Well, perhaps if you graded on just one technical aspect like say, perspective or shading or something like that. But subjectivity would still come into play.

if you get an 'C -' in a math class, it's much more certain what this means. But for an Art class, well, maybe the proffessor just didn't like you or your style or painting.

Which indicates that Math is far more understood and codified than Art.

I suspect this will probably always be the case.

Slick

Having taught painting for about 15 years I completely agree. Teachers who gave grades for single paintings were usually power hungry idiots who never knew how to teach anyway. They relied on some wacky outdated method rather than bring themselves into the 21st century of teaching methodologies. Most of them turned off people more than inspire them.

Teachers who graded single paintings also were usually more interested in getting students to learn their way rather than taking time to understand the process and goals of the student involved. You're right, it was subjective bullcrap.

That's a curious coinage - what makes you produce it?

Bullshit is a recognised term for a particular type of nonsense or rubbish, whilst horshit is another - the exact difference between the two isn't well covered by the OED, but, after discussing this at some length with my brother, we came to the conclusion that:

Bullshit is a statement or set of statements that are deeply flawed, rubbish and probably nonsensical.

Horseshit, on the other hand, is a class of misunderstanding, wilful or accidental, of an area.

So, to say that 'AIDS is not a disease' is bullshit (technically it is true as AIDS stands for aquired immunity deficiency syndrome, and a syndrome is not a disease, but bullshit because the term AIDS is now used for what is known as a disease simply because everybody understands it and supplying a new name for the disease would simply confuse everybody). On the other hand, to say that 'Astrology is the wisdom of the ancients' is horseshit, it isn't wisdom, so it isn't wisdom of any particular group, certainly not ancients and, besides, the ancients were wise in many ways, astrology certainly not being one of them - so a whole class of people and an entire misunderstanding of the way that the universe operates are conflated to produce something that is best described as horseshit.

That's kind of funny, Slick. When I was at UC Davis I took a painting class with Mike Henderson, an on the last day he asked everyone in the class to come into his office and request a grade. When I got there (late as usual) I told him I wanted an A+. He asked me why, and I said 'because I've been told that high grades are somehow important. ' Held out his hand and said 'Gimme Five!' and I did and got the A+. But as I was leaving he said 'You know what's really wierd? Almost all the other student asked me for a 'B'. I just can't imagine why.'

The next step in this line of thought is that taking a painting or essay-writing class is a joke, so should not be done. A culture builds up, through observation and consensus, certain practices that make a painting or drawing interesting or effective for its people or purposes. Thus, for example, there is a uniformity of technique among all Renaissance artists, despite differentiation, in the way they would draw a face. The only thing schools can teach is techniques that will enhance the effectiveness of the painting or essay established by this consensus, whose validity one can justifiably argue against. For example

I think there's a broad range on how professors grade. I've had many who didn't think it was particularly relevant (grades) but had to do something because that's what the University required...some sort of record of achievment. When I was a grad student, my major professor would take off to Europe at the end of every quarter, and leave all the essays (that's the only kind of examination she gave) for me to grade. Since it was all theory, and difficult material, we didn't grade on content, because there was no way a student in an introductory course could master the concepts, or at least it was unreasonable to expect a student to do this (some actually did, and did it quite well.) So the grading criteria addressed other issues: was the student reading the assignments? Did the student take the course seriously? Things of this nature. And it only took a couple of essays to get in synch with this, it was obvious from the essays if the student was serious and had read the course material.

And if a student is lucky, the essay will be graded by someone who will make meaningful comments on the work. So the examination, in this case, becomes a powerful instruction module in itself.

I had one student who fancied himself an 'artiste' and above doing students work, and would submit really silly essays. Well, not quite silly - as works of art they were very interesting, but they had no relationship whatsoever to the course material. So I made a deal with him. I withheld his midterm grade, which would have been an 'F', under the condition that he justified his mid-term work in the context of the course material on the final examination. As far as I knew, there could have been a connection that he saw, and that he wasn't ignoring all the reading and lectures because he was just lazy and immature. He agreed, but then, when the final came around, he didn't do it. I gave him a 'F' for the course. He earned it, but you always feel lousy failing a student - like 'YOU' failed to motivate the student or something.