Episode 384: Boston artist and lifelong art school teacher on photography and teaching in art schools for 46 years

0:00this is the conversation it's a podcast that goes behind the scenes and between the lines the contemporary art worlds including art school and teachers and students and that dynamic hello i'm michael shaw welcome to the show this is episode 384 with jim dow he is a photographer and almost lifelong teacher mainly at the museum school in boston also at harvard and other

0:34schools around the country but mainly what was formerly known as the museum school in boston now known as school of the museum of fine arts at tufts university so we talk all about boston including the fact that he is a dedicated mass hole he said that not me the website for the the show is the conversationpod.com where you should definitely go check out images of some of jim's work a lot of photographs of food stands and restaurants and whatnot across the country

1:09a lot of his photographs are also particularly black and white images of old nostalgic signs for motels and whatnot mainly motels but other things as well but the imagery is so vintage and so nostalgic for depending on your age it might be like completely foreign to you but so worth a look and it's an opportunity to talk about the teacher or professor student experience and how students have

1:45changed the wisdom that he has gained from students over the years there's just a lot to dig into you will hear in this first public half about a lot of the photography he's done by the way you can see a video of a tango singer at a food stand on our instagram at artist podcast if you haven't already it's in a reel um he talks about his experience working on the nea selection process which he translated to

2:17his classes in terms of deconstructing how decisions are made among so many other things related to both his photography and his teaching and towards the tail end of this conversation you'll hear about the odds from his book anyway of an artist making a financial living from their work he compares it to baseball players making it as a professional baseball player and we will continue that conversation into more of his teaching and experiences with his students the students that he has become lifelong

2:50friends with there's about seven of them as well as just some more great wisdom from students that he's had including a woman who grew up on a dairy farm who taught him a lot about her perspective of class amidst privilege at this school so that is all coming up before we get there i want to tell you that recently i was lucky enough to get to see some of my resource images for my work transformed through a new rendering tool that i want to share if you are an architect or a designer or even a photographer

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4:34off any subscription that's myarchitectai.com and use the code cap 15 let me know what you think all right here we go with jim dow a little bit more on the back end and thank you for listening

4:52so jim dow hello welcome you are in the boston area or you are in boston itself how would you know just outside in the in the suburbs right in in a suburb that was voted uh a number of years ago is the most boring town in massachusetts the state of massachusetts voted voted accordingly yeah well the boston globe which is essentially which is essentially the state of massachusetts oh i see and it's great because uh nobody pays any attention to anybody else uh we're lucky we have a couple of

5:24wonderful neighbors uh including i don't know if you know the writer tom parada yeah he wrote uh the leftovers and a number of books so uh you know we've got neighbors that we're friends with but it's just it's a great place to live and it's you know boston's a great place to travel from because you can get to the airport quickly you can get out of town quickly you know it's it's it's really good for that yeah well i mean that was going to be one of my questions because you've been in the boston area for how much what percentage of your life would you say well i was brought home from the hospital to

5:58this house okay uh and i i've left it on photo trips and i've left it briefly to be an undergraduate student at risdy but i scuttled back i'm an only child i live in a neighborhood with people who make you know thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars and we as jackie and i say keep the property taxes low we hang out our laundry wow okay well i i think that the part of the reason for asking you about boston is i was thinking about it just a little while ago how many guests i've had

6:31in the past from the boston area and i think i could come up with a couple i don't think there are any more than that prior prior guests um and so that just frames the question around the arc community of the boston area i mean do you think that boston is comparable to a place like san francisco as far as size and cost of living or are there maybe better analogs and no i think that's a good analogy yeah okay and and what is just give me a sketch of the uh the art community such as it

7:07is and you've known it over the years sure well the art community sort of divides itself into uh people who are here to study and working in the academic world of which there's a lot there's a lot of colleges and universities here i'm sure as you know most of them have uh one form or another of fine art program there's three three maybe four major art schools here three major art schools plus risdi which is very close um and so there's a whole community that's lined up in that yeah and then there are people

7:43who collect and of course a lot of the people who collect go to new york um you know which is that which is the moan and the groan of gallerists here um but i think there's an active an active art community it's also because of the connection with academia there's a kind of a um how shall i say it in some ways sort of an over seriousness to it there's not kind of the uh whoopee sense that you

8:13would get in in new york or los angeles or probably san francisco too but uh it's it's a great place to be because there's at least one of everything you know they're not 42 restaurants that serve the same kind of food but there's you know two or three really good art stores there's a good photography store you know you can you can survive here quite well a lot of people leave because it's it's as expensive it's as expensive as san francisco yeah uh and it's cold yeah right now there's right now

8:46there's i don't know two and a half feet of snow on the ground which is unusual these days but you know we have winter right yeah this doesn't bother me i grew up with it and i'm fine with it and you know but sure some people it makes crazy sure but i do think i i do think you you form friendships here that last that last a long time um because people tend to either be tenured or you know have some kind of secure secure job so i have i have a small group of very close friends that i have here

9:18some of whom are in the arts uh some of whom aren't um i didn't know anybody who wasn't in the arts until we had kids and then daycare came along and that opened up a world to me you know i know i know people who you know do financial advising right and they're friends right isn't that the biggest institution our biggest the biggest business in in boston proper is uh finance yeah yeah finance finance and education okay yeah and and and and one of the curses that boston has which is which is

9:49unusual and people outside here don't know about it is that there's a huge amount of tax free uh land here because it's owned by uh the catholic church and uh academic institutions and so the tax you know metro boston's about about 700 000 but excuse me boston proper is about 700 000 but metro boston is about 5 million is it so you compare it to la where you know obviously the population is much bigger but

10:19there are a whole lot more portions of la that are paying taxes to la yeah and are paying taxes here to boston so boston's always boning so in other words is boston or or massachusetts taxes uh cop the california or even higher uh property taxes that is property taxes are comparable yeah yeah right yeah got it we're we were we were uh house rich when the kids were in school because they were going to public school the two kids were going to public school now we're back to house four again

10:53you could sell the house and you know live happily ever after i don't know where but just love living here so yeah that's great that's great other than your great neighbors what what what are the benefits that make you stay uh well uh i'm a devoted mass hole as we're called okay uh i love it here because i love the edge to it i love the fact that uh people question you about everything uh nobody is uh people here are very friendly and very helpful but but they there's an edge to them and you

11:28got to break that edge so for instance right now i'm working photographing in a in a neighborhood called nonantum which is an old italian irish neighborhood that's being gentrified but it's still got the edge to it and so for example i was photographing the other day i had my camera set up it's a big view camera so it's i'm not moving around i was photographing this park where they decorate it for the holidays and i was photographing one of the decorations in the park and this truck pulls up and drives across parks diagonally into into the sidewalk uh blocking the traffic in

12:06the other way the guy this guy gets out in a suit and a hat you know it's like a it's like a pinstripe double-breasted suit on a snowy day and says what you doing and i explained he said oh yeah i designed that park good job yeah my my father big joey he had to play it just that's what happens here wow that's crazy if you're not and if you're if you're not bothered by that which i love it i embrace it uh it just there's no smooth surfaces here okay well you brought up you brought up an interesting um

12:42image which is the photographer with the large view camera right so do you have one of the the curtains or whatever the the drapes yeah whatever okay so so where i'm going with this is when you are photographing your work or photographing things that will become your work you are almost as much the subject as the uh you know as the person making subjects right because you are so visible right what is that you're absolutely right what has that been like over the course of your career

13:14as far as i don't know um figuring out an idea deal dynamic with random passersby who interrupt your work and what have you yeah well i i mean let's just say the arc of my career it used to be that people thought if i was down south we're talking the 60s and 70s early 70s if i was down south that i was a civil rights worker uh if i was up north that i was a surveyor and the property was going to be knocked down uh and now i'm just an old guy with this wooden camera and everybody stops to talk and

13:52some of the conversations are even too blue for this podcast uh but they're just wonderful so i just again i embrace that i may have to say okay excuse me just give me 30 seconds here because and because my exposures are sometimes anywhere from a second to 20 minutes so give me a little time here and we'll talk uh and so while there are very very few if any people in my photographs um the fact is that

14:22there are people all around you i'll send you a wonderful little 40 minute a 40 second clip of me photographing in uruguay where this guy i was photographing this guy's hot dog stand and we asked him to step out and he stepped out well it turns out he was a tango singer and so the entire photograph was accompanied by him singing tango in the most beautiful is it deep you know whiskey cured voice

14:54so yeah that stuff happens all the time it sounds like the bottom line is you basically kind of you embrace it but when you need to get work done you have to tell people like give me a minute yeah and i always feel bad about that because generally speaking people stop with interesting things you know they'll say oh big camera or used to be how much is that camera well now it's like a wooden artifact you couldn't yeah it's is it priceless at this point or they're replicas of what you have oh no no you can find them okay

15:24people buy them people buy them think they're going to use them and then they sell them and so there's still plenty of them floating around yeah but uh you know if you if i were to walk in with the comparable digital equipment i'd be lugging 35 to 40 thousand dollars you know it wouldn't be big but it would be a 35 to 40 000 thing it might be tethered to a computer i'd stand out like a sore thumb and somebody would hit me over the head and take it has all of your black and white or or

15:54your entire catalog of photography been analog or have has any of it been digital well the funny thing is that uh in teaching i converted to digital uh probably about 2007 and i've become very very proficient at using a small digital camera to basically document uh uh exhibitions and stuff in new york and so i would make i would make these post-production photoshop representations of shows that

16:27look better than the show you know people would go to the show and say oh that didn't look so good i said well you got to look at the little squares in the corner and you know the little squares in the corner when you saw them in class were you know six feet by six feet no no no that's just

16:44so so you know i think that whole aspect of working is really really interesting but for me um using the camera working in the way that i do interacting with the people that i do i always ask permission and sometimes i come back you know i'll say they'll say oh come back tuesday well i'm there tuesday what if you're shooting a lot a lot of the work that i have seen of yours are very vintage very uh

17:15signs advertising signs with a lot of character and originality if it's a if it's a restaurant or a motel do you ask for permission for those yeah yeah oh yeah because because i again i'm going to be sitting there right so for example i was uh i was in uh birmingham alabama this summer and there's this wonderful wonderful um barbecue joint that has this fabulous sign and and it's very very popular it's

17:46called bob sykes it's right on actually it's on the old highway i'm photographing on and so i knew i was going to sort of be in the way because i was it's dusk right yeah so so i go in and i ask and 90 percent of the time people will just say yes occasionally i say well could you come back tuesday because we're not busy or you know and of course i'll do that because i'm in people's space do they ask you for the final results ever oh yeah i i bring them back i send them pictures and i also say

18:18you know i'm happy to send you files if you want to use them for whatever and because you know that i think that's a fair part of the exchange or on a technical level regarding analog digital um and you're you've made it clear that you've done it to document your work document your shows looking thinking about your the signs in particular um but we could take it to other examples but i want to

18:49focus on the signs because that's just something that i it's most easily in my mind yeah is it possible even to get what you have gotten with digital it doesn't seem like it is well i can give you no foot no photographer can answer that question subjectively right objective right right we're all welded we're all wed to the things that we do right um you can approximate it in sharpness probably even

19:26do better than it analog and sharpness you can approximate it in color saturation all those things but you can't it it simply won't look the same which is not to say that one is good and one is bad it would be the different it would be the difference between somebody who say says paints in in muted colors and works between whites and grays and greens let's say to somebody who works with reds and

19:56blues and has trees in the middle there's just a difference yeah and you can see that you can pretty much see that difference right away i have friends who use you know a hundred thousand dollar camera setups their stuff looks great but it's not the look i want are they all digital the hundred thousand dollar ones yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah are they digital digital large format yeah because you're paying you're paying somewhere between fifteen and fifteen and sixty thousand dollars for the camera itself

20:32for basically for the computer yeah and then you're paying between three cheap that's cheap three to twenty five thousand dollars each lens you use so and the bastards change the operating systems all the time so you've got to constantly re-up and my film just just just to give you an example yeah i just bought a box of film because i'm going to new orleans next week uh what kind of film did you buy so about eight by ten color uh color negative film kodak or whoever whoever's wearing the kodak right shirt ready

21:08it's it's it's a great film it's uh after tax it's three hundred and seven dollars for 10 sheets so that means each picture is 37 well i take two so now we're up to what 70 72 dollars 72 then it's 15 to process each sheet so that's 30 so it's a hundred dollars a picture right right so i i i think about it but i i just feel that i'm tempting the gods if i just do one

21:46totally so whenever i can i do two we could definitely go down that rabbit hole but i'm going to actually back up to fine but i'm but we're staying close because i want to go back to the analog again because what you brought to mind just describing the you know objective your attempt at an objective take on it is the fact that at least a couple of big films recently had been shot on film and i think it's because they have that visual je ne sais quoi right and then maybe

22:20it doesn't have to be even je ne sais quoi it can actually be articulated but that sort of fullness richness graininess etc right that you can you as you well described you can say is you know it's six half dozen it really depends on your taste but as we're sitting here talking about it now and i'm describing it that way and i'm thinking about these sign photographs that you've done it's just like i can't see how you would make a better picture digitally can i can i throw a curveball a curveball

22:56okay uh so uh there's a particular scanner that i just got access to that's extraordinary it's no longer made but costs about fifty dollars a scan to do it the german manufacturer by the chance it's it's called it's called a creo i don't know where it's okay it's no longer made okay but these these friends of mine that i work with got a hold of one and so now whenever i sell a picture i will take my negative

23:31and have it re-scan i've got scans of all my pictures and some of them are very very good but i'll have it re-scan and this very interesting thing happened uh just last month a friend of mine in new orleans wanted four pictures they're all signs they're all from that black and white late 60s early 70s work uh i said okay here's the deal i will charge you that the amount of money that it takes to print them which is about 250 dollars a picture so that's a thousand dollars this

24:03guy's a lawyer thousand dollars um i said and i'm gonna re-scan them he said fine fine fine so you know that ended up costing another 200 bucks okay i get the prints now you know when you print when you print uh big editions often you print on a roll and when you go to preview them uh they're still on the roll so they're spread out on a table almost almost like a piece of huge piece of movie film with a picture a picture a picture a picture so here are these four pictures of four

24:36different signs on four different surfaces like one was a wooden surface a weathered wooden surface one was enamel on metal one you know etc etc four distinctly different surfaces i start looking at the prints and i oh there's something wrong here i see this pattern i see this but it's different in each picture and my friend looked at me that's the actual surfaces you're seeing the difference in the surfaces you can't get that it's it's a it's a piece of film but you

25:10cannot get that out of a piece of film with an analog process you have to scan it because the scanner sees more than the photographic paper does right and that's we are in that sense we're living in the good old days i can take a picture of you know like it's a picture i just took a bakery at dusk okay it's bright inside the bakery relatively it's dark outside relatively and the sun has gone down but there's still color in the sky all those things are in the negative and i can get them and put them

25:45on one piece of paper if i had taken that same picture analog i would never get the bakery the inside of the bakery and the sunset and the shadow on the wall you know i sit down i just was working on some pictures before we we started talking you know i the pictures i'm working on are from the 1970s i i'd never scanned them i scanned them and i'm looking oh my god there's stuff in that i never saw

26:16so okay that's good to know you just gotta the issue is you just gotta stand still

26:25you know metaphorically to to do all this kind of stuff you made me wonder if you have any advice for artists of any kind who have to go through the labor of editing their own documentation like let's just say whether or not they're using a pro documenter for the of their work in between those documentations they're going to do their own documentation they're going to go into whatever software lightroom or whatever you've rich and they're going to sit there and edit and i do that

27:01and it's yeah i kind of hate it so i'm so i'm wondering if if you have a a hack or a workaround so that it's not such a ban yes uh first of all i take my phone everywhere i go and i take a picture with the phone and i would say 85 to 90 percent of the time the phone gives you a really good sense of color whether i'm in a gallery or out in the street or a sculpture in the park or the bakery

27:35that i just photographed so that's my sketch and whenever i start to go to the next step whatever the next step might be i work from that sketch so for example when i would go and photograph because when i was photographing these shows they're all contemporary art shows in new york and london and places they were not my work they were other people's work so i would take a phone picture that would be relatively neutral and then i'd have sometimes 40 files 50 files from

28:07the show i would then match them to that and work backwards and start exaggerating and then it became fun and then it became like a game like oh really it would be like working on a painting you know adding adding adding of course you're not technically adding but you know you are adding what are you adding what are some of the main tools that we're talking about digital tools uh making masks and saturate changing saturation and changing color balance right changing angles not so much angles

28:37of light but uh intensity of light and you're looking back at your sketch and you're going how you know this is the this is my reference but i'm going to make it a much better version of this sketch yeah and and when i was doing when i was like the pictures i'm just working on just now are this family this this uh family from uh south louisiana that sort of my adopted family and in in 1978 i took a picture of the four basic clusters of the family and now i'm going down uh to new orleans and and i'm

29:11taking the picture the prince i'm finally going to bring them prints okay the family is standing generally in front of their house or in front of trees or whatever and as i look at the i i never made a you know there were no phones and i never made a a slide or anything so i don't have any idea and suddenly i'm able to take the cluster of people in front of the house or in the space that they're living in and pull them out you know make them a slightly different color balance than the background

29:46so that even though even though the viewer is going to think oh they're standing in front of their house on a sunny day or they're standing in front of their house at night or whatever they're actually two separate realities well in the pictures that i really work on you know for my own work there may be six or seven separate realities within the picture in terms of the the saturation the lighting etc etc that was that's a freedom and i'm not talking about adding external stuff i'm talking about just working with the stuff that's in the file was in the negative

30:21so to speak uh and using it in the same way that a painter would dip and dive and move and to me you know coming towards the end of my life and never having had that freedom uh you know it's whoa every day is fun wow yeah let's segue from there to your teaching actually since you you cut you you almost brought it up you've had a 50 plus year career teaching how many

30:5140 40 40 45 46 okay okay so my question is to start anyway how much if any of those 46-ish years were teaching the things you just described versus crits etc what's the breakdown yeah i labored very hard to make it as much as i possibly could and of course when you're starting out you

31:21take the the classes you're assigned and you know many of them were crit classes or beginning classes or whatever um but i found as i got as i got older and particularly when i moved out of teaching in the studio and was teaching um academic classes where uh they were not the standard academic class because i was in this wonderful crazy school the museum school but i was able to use the kind of um how shall i say it inventiveness that all these things apply in order to make my teaching better

31:58so for example when i when i as i said when i would go and document those shows and actually think about okay here's this particular artist how am i going to make them really really look good on the screen as a because they're no longer in the gallery they're on a screen and i would bring those skills which i was in the midst of learning so that was interesting too use those skills to make that work look even better and that was just fantastic and then having to

32:28talk about it right because you can't just show the stuff and go uh you've got to talk about it and especially if you're trying to inspire people to talk back so all that was

32:43increasingly as time went on became more and more for lack of a better word creative and less and less worrying about the syllabus and worrying about you know oh the what do they call it quantifiable deliverables deliverables that's what they talk about do you do do you do academic stuff do you teach i don't teach okay well yeah you know there is as much corporate speak right in in the academic world as there is and and deliverables you know the old herman goering when i hear the word culture i

33:15reach for my gun when i hear the word deliverables and the other word that i shall not speak in your honor thank you when i heard that when i hear that word i reach for my gun right did you you got tenure at a certain point correct or no we had rolling contracts oh okay so in other words that the reason for the question obviously is if you don't deliver the deliverables you're you're vulnerable potentially to revision yeah well you're you're vulnerable where you're not vulnerable is if your classes are big

33:49and you're in a school that is underfunded um so you know i i i actually have i've also taught some of those same classes at harvard and at princeton and um you know was greeted was greeted very warmly but i was a temporary you know visitor and so i wasn't ruffling anybody's feathers it's inevitable for people to wonder what the difference if there is one between the experiences you had teaching in the ivy league

34:25versus at the museum school or elsewhere that you taught is there a notable difference would you say or not okay this is this is a good anecdote okay one of the things i are you familiar with the mechanics of the old national endowment for the arts uh award awarding prospect grant award probably probably not into the mechanics of you know i'm like a lot of people familiar with the whole uh government you know shut down of the or attempt to shut down the aaa but yeah so yeah so so and i i was

35:00involved in it a number of times so i i knew it well and one of the things that they did in pure genius was the selection committee that would be voting on on grant say grant and photography for the year 1984 or whatever they would get together a panel that was always an odd number and always had uh an idiot savant and always had a you know professional quote educator and a professional you know they had this

35:30they had this thing curated and balanced and they wouldn't tell you anything about the work and you would just see i think it was at one point it was 20 images and then you'd vote yes or no you'd go through round after round after round when you got to the final i think it was the semi-finals or quarter finals essentially they would give you statements and all this kind of stuff so there was this kind of um you had to go you had to go with your gut so i set up

36:05i would end the semester that would be the final exam we would look at 50 artists and choose and then when we got down to say 10 we would have a discussion of why are those 10 and what happened to the other 30 and all these fascinating things came out so one year i did it at harvard and it was a particularly small class so we could do it really quickly in one afternoon and so um i i set up the talk by saying

36:36you know you're going to look you're going to look at this stuff and you're going to have to judge it just without information well they all froze because you have to have information no you're not going to have information and uh we went through a couple rounds and then we before we get to the final round i said you know i think i ought to tell you something that uh this is the way a lot of decisions are made decisions about triage medically decisions about investment decisions about who to

37:11hire for whatever you know maybe even to go to the moon i said and you guys are probably the most evaluated group of people in the history of the world you know your class not the class at harvard but your class of people are looked at from the very you know from the time you're two and applying to private school and so this has happened to you scores of times and you don't even know it

37:43but you need to be aware of it because you need to understand how best regardless of what the category is or what the parameters are how best to present yourself essentially sight unseen in that in that thing and you know as as i think i said to you when we were talking earlier you know i would always tell the students if you stick in this whatever this is uh you're going to be a freelance producer of intellectual property and that's your role in the

38:15world and you need to you need to be aware of it and you need to embrace it or challenge it or walk away from it but that's the way you're going to be judged regardless of what sort of content you're creating and the important thing is you need to protect that not protect it in a legal way or anything like that but protect that thing that you have inside you that you love and believe in from suffering from the kind of practicalities uh that can lead to cynicism wow that's a lot to uh

38:50to take in to give and to take in for a student well we did have a semester fair enough um but but i couldn't help wondering whether the takeaway it may be a little too easy but when the students the smaller class as you said it was but when these students are were like no we need why can't we have the stuff right why can't we have the statement or whatever if that's a question of high analytical

39:24skills but low intuitive skills and or if it's more just of a type a type of thing you know i think it's i think it's more than anything it's the system they're in um i have wonderful students at harvard and i i so enjoyed them one of the great stories for me is is there was this young woman who um she was an econ major but her uh boyfriend was a very good photographer and went to a good art

39:57school in columbus ohio which is where she was from so she she she was very aware of photography and she decided to write her thesis on why what what makes photographs valuable what are the criteria if you use standard economic you know scarcity desire blah blah blah all these things so of course she comes to me and she said would you be you know would you be she was taking my photo history class and she's and i said sure i'd love to so i took her to new york and i took her to a couple of

40:30galleries and she interviewed the gallerists for that perspective and we're driving back and you know it's like a four-hour drive so we're driving along and she says jim i gotta tell you something and i thought oh god i don't want to hear it it's going to be some she said he said i'm i'm a senior at harvard i'm going to graduate you know magna or summa cum laude i i'm you know blah blah blah blah blah i've got all these things i've taken these all these courses with all these professors and you're

41:04the first professor that ever asked me what i thought i said well what happens and she said they ask you what you think about what they think and i said uh that's discouraging and and she didn't say it in a pejorative way she just said that's the circumstances you get these people who who are world-class researchers and they're just so deeply buried in their whatever it is that they they just

41:35presume a you're going to be interested in it and b um that they're the most interesting person in their room so i i think it's i think there's a certain amount of that in in a lot of i've observed in a lot of institutions and and so and so students so you set up this thing where it's this where the ethos of the museum school was this you know when i first taught at harvard which is a whole separate thing that was teaching a studio photo class this wonderful student um like the third day of class he's standing

42:12there and i'm demonstrating something in the dark room and he said jim because i always told call me jim don't call me professor jim let me tell let me ask you something i said what is it paul he said well the only difference between you and me is you i i'm doing photography and you're doing photography you spent more time than doing photography so you can kind of tell me about stuff right i said yeah that sums it up you know it's no more glamorous than that and presumably you're both

42:46interested in the stuff this student of yours the one at harvard who did that thesis did you learn something from that thesis oh yeah i would imagine what what what were some takeaways you remember well here's here's the thing because it dovetails with uh a dear dear friend of mine who passed away a couple years ago who uh was a consultant but came uh with a a background in um oh god was it sociology

43:18and he wrote this thing uh it was a pyramid of the way that desire the functions that create uh the need for somebody to buy something or have something or do something there's this beautiful pyramid i can send it to you if if you're interested beautiful pyramid yeah i looked at it and looked at the graphic of it and we were good friends we had

43:48dinner together all the time and stuff and our partners were we're all close friends and i said this looks exactly like the art world exactly as somebody said to me when i was trying to get some money for a book well we'd consider doing a book with you if you were dead

44:10you know so there's that yeah there's rarity yeah yeah there's scarcity right there's all there's all these things that that we like to think are in the you know from the corporate world or from the capitalistic world but they're really from the human world of desire and need and all that kind of stuff and so what was interesting when i was talking to this this other student this was before i'd met this friend this was probably in the very early 2000s and um she anticipated all of that you know

44:46she had she didn't have a beautiful chart right she you know she would tell me well

44:55it's known that there's only one of these it's well known that there's only one of these or it's well known that there's only four of these or it's well known that this guy went blind the year after he made this picture or you know all these things that are of course create scarcity create desire create so yeah i learned a lot i learned a lot and i learned a lot from so many of my students yeah well well that's i think where we have to talk about next which is the fact that the

45:28one of the big takeaways i had from talking to you before was your line that in you know 50 not quite 50 years of teaching the last 10 have been the most inspiring and interesting as opposed to when you were starting and you were only about 10 years older than the students and then i and then it was like i think that's what it was and then the most recent years you were 50 years old this gap this right this gap is not going to go away right yeah you can teach an evening school and you can teach

46:02an extension school but it's still not going to go away it might be small but generally the age range of the students that you have worked with over the decades has been between i would imagine like 18 and 22 somewhere in that range no it's actually been much broader because the museum school where i did most of the teaching had very very active uh students from uh older students who came back to came back to go to art school after having done something else in their life we had uh a program called mass rehab we

46:33had people who had gotten out of uh incarceration to go to art school which was brilliant we had uh people there was this wonderful woman uh patty akiardi who had you could go to mass rehab and you could apply and you could say i want to do something but i prevented doing it from my circumstances i want to have a new career or whatever and they would pay the money for you so she wanted to go to art school she had been a cabin uh attendant flight attendant on allegheny airlines which at that time was the

47:06most dangerous airline what did it serve allegheny airlines uh pittsburgh you know which is a terrible airport to land was a terrible airport that that that area the alleghenies and she said uh the worst thing about the job is you show up to work you're all freshened up and everything you're bright as a you know bright as a pod and the captain comes in and he's drunk and you can't report him well hopefully

47:37the co-pilot no he's drunk too so the navigator flies the plane and you couldn't report anybody sure so she just eventually just kind of destroyed her so she was able to convince and i don't know what she's doing now but she went to school and finished sure we had a guy who did uh the first time he didn't rat on his brother they hauled him in front of a grand jury and he wouldn't sing so he did

48:08uh two or three years in hard time and he said he came out he knew everything he said i never killed anybody i never never hurt anybody but he said i did everything else and then he went in for i think 10 years or something and then he got out and he came to the museum school and he's most wonderful guy he was trained as a roofer but he couldn't he wanted to start start a roofing company but he couldn't he couldn't borrow money he couldn't get a loan from a bank he had to do everything cash over the table under the table excuse me right and and and just he would come to class

48:43and and give these perspectives on the world that the kids was priceless and the kids would listen to them you know they would go oh yeah really wow um so you know and and they've been endless examples well as you're describing these students that you've had and what you told me before about you know yeah the teaching over time well before we get deeper into that what you just said made me

49:19wonder whether in general i mean maybe it's very case by case the students were learning how to think you know that's one one way that people describe going to art school or taking art you know you're not gonna it's not a trade you're not gonna do this and then you're gonna go and you're gonna make paintings you're gonna make silk screens you're gonna make photographs you're gonna make sculptures or you're gonna sell them on the market you know it's much more abstract right that you're learning how to think you're learning how to be critical etc etc right is that what what is the

49:53general because it almost made you almost made it sound like with that woman who was the flight attendant that she was gonna you know take photography and then she was gonna become become a photographer and that seems probably misleading yeah probably not yeah and i i would say it used to be i don't know if it's true anymore but the odds of becoming uh monetarily successful artist right are worse than becoming a major league baseball player i don't know that by that by that

50:27well no but by that by that you know um like the dodgers for instance i don't know they have 26 people or 28 people on their regular roster but there's probably another 30 or 40 who have what's called a major league contract and so you take those maybe 100 people you multiply it by 32 so that's 3200 teams some 3200 people you'd be hard put to find more than that who who are financially comfortable

50:57without having some kind of hope you enjoyed that there is more as i said on the the whole second half on patreon go to patreon.com slash the conversation pod and you can hear more also i will be sharing with the patreon listeners an experience that i had with a curator recently i would say it did not go particularly well there are some takeaways but i wanted to share it with you patreon supporters so if you're curious about that again patreon.com slash the conversation pod hope you guys enjoyed this

51:32thank you very much for listening i will talk to you again soon hopefully in four weeks until then ciao for now