Vol. 1, No. 16: School's Out Forever
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Dear Soft Labor,
I’m a bit distraught. My graduate alma mater, a beloved San Francisco art institution, recently announced its own demise with little fanfare: The school has been purchased by another university and will soon close permanently. I live thousands of miles away from San Francisco, but hold the city, the school, and my experience there closely, especially given that I studied in the early aughts—a particularly ripe time for school and city alike.
I’m at an age where one might comfortably list one’s formal education at the end of one’s CV, below the work and life experience that school begets. Yet, I can’t help but feel a bit of existential ennui and even anger here: Was pursuing graduate education even worth it at a school that clearly couldn’t manage itself?
In the words of Alice Cooper,
Schooool’s. Out. For. Ever.
Dear Forever,
Are we the same person? We must be! We are equally fired up over the closure of our alma mater, the California College of the Arts, which was recently purchased by Vanderbilt following years of well-documented financial difficulty. Faculty and staff will lose jobs, current students will lose their academic home, and the Bay Area will lose its last bastion of arts education, thus creating a palpable and long-lasting loss for the area’s truly singular arts community. People are, in short, enraged. Our phone is still blowing up over this!
Does this tragic development render our experience there worthless? Certainly not. As our graduate degree crumbles to dust, however, it does lend us pause when thinking about the proposition of art school.
Ultimately, and as we’ve stated before here at Soft Labor, we believe that art school pedagogy yields critical thinking and distinct approaches to problem solving—crucial skills in an increasingly AI-dominated and slop-filled world. Our best advice to you, Forever, is to do what we ourselves are struggling to do: Separate your feelings about this disastrous development from what you gleaned from the school and the city itself. Your experience there undoubtedly helped make you the person you are.
Keep the faith, Forever.
Yours,
Soft Labor
Search Results
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🔗 ARTnews reports: "Minneapolis Institute of Art Closes for Third Straight Day Amid Alex Pretti Killing, ICE Protests"
🔗 The Audacity's Roxane Gay, to whom we bow, answers a reader's question: "To MFA, or Not to MFA?"
🔗 A San Francisco comrade from the early aughts, now Portland-based novelist Lydia Kiesling, wrote a banger of an essay for The Baffler that perfectly encapsulates an earlier moment in the literary corner of the Internet, when criticism and curation was done “by hand,” not AI. “When you find yourself writing lists in lieu of real criticism, a nihilistic moment will come in which you believe that you hate books, that when you see the cover of a book and believe you have as good as read it because you recognize it has entered the culture via the shitty conveyor belt that your labor has helped construct.”
🔗 According to Rhea Nayyar’s recent piece in Hyperallergic, the Philadelphia Museum of Art might rebrand its new (botched) rebrand, the ongoing drama around which has been reported in the New York Times and other news outlets. A truly remarkable situation.
🔗 It's Nice That's Olivia Hingley reports on the design inspiration behind the collaboration between Mindy Seu and designer Laura Coombs for Seu's new book, A Sexual History of the Internet.
🔗 Cultural theorist and UC Irvine professor Catherine Liu has been keeping it properly old school and running a virtual seminar on Walter Benjamin's foundational essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (or Mechanical Reproducibility)," which is cited incessantly in the culture but often carelessly so. Part 2 of the discussion takes place on January 28th and will feature a focus on technology. Subscribe to her Substack, CLiuAnon, for more.
🔗 We hate-love how trend forecasters write about culture. The Sociology of Business's Ana Andjelic's recent post, "The Golden Age of Creativity," performs the sort of obsessive, hyperbolic microanalysis of brands' engagement with "analog craft" that writing from this corner of the culture industry tends to do. 🫠
