Interesting. Very interesting. I honestly didn't expect so many replies, I was just letting off some steam. And I didn't expect so many varied responses. I figured that if there were any at all it would all be pretty unanimos. This is fantastic. I scoffed at my teacher's ideas, and at first didn't even really consider his point of view. I suppose, coming from a guy who hasn't really looked into comics as being more than an escape to humour, that his idea of them being "low art" would be considered valid. But, that's justs stupid. It's arguing a topic you know nothing about. I would argue that football is the worst sport ever! because I know nothing about it.

Honestly...at first, I only saw comics as a form of comedy. Then I started reading graphic novels, and fell in love with that style of storytelling. Then I varied up the comics that I read, I didn't fall just into one genre, I tried to read them all. Hell, I just bought my first manga. And I enjoyed it! I think that's what this man needs. I think I will get him that book. I'm going to read it first, make sure he doesn't take it as an offense. Then I'm going to give it to him good!

Andrew Foley
It's a semantic argument, I'll admit, but again, when discussing these things, it's important that an agreement be reached on what is meant by certain terms. For the sake of the discussion, I'm perfectly happy to accept what I perceive to be your premise: that Art is defined by certain cultural institutions and that art can therefore be considered good or bad based on the opinions of those institutions. I prefer my definition, which is that there's no such thing as good or bad art, art just is and has no real value to someone other than the artist, but that a craft works within a structure that can be objectively assessed and can therefore be assigned a value based on non-subjective criteria.

i define art more in terms of mans attempt to craft an image, be it picture or sculpture, with the intention of conveying an emotion from the artist to the vierwer and/or actualizing a intangible concept

via my definition the quality of art could be theoretically be measured if the person measuring that quality had a better objective understanding of the emotions meant to be conveyed than most. That being said I don't put a whole lot of stock in "art experts" I usually have fairly strong faith in my own judgement in the quality of art

Fools! Comics belong to me and my mine - scholars of literature. Arts got nothing to do with it! NOTHING!!! ::gets his broom and swats the "artists" back into their holes::

kingofsnake
i define art more in terms of mans attempt to craft an image, be it picture or sculpture, with the intention of conveying an emotion from the artist to the vierwer and/or actualizing a intangible concept

Which is fine and we could certainly engage in a discussion based on that definition. But it seems to me your definition doesn't encompass the work of dada artists in the early part of the twentieth century, performance artists (by which I mean performers of non-linear, non-traditional narrative art), art happenings, conceptual art, the modernist movement in painting (which, if memory serves, was based on calling attention to the painted surface--neither an image nor intangible), pop art and potentially some abstract art.

"That being said I don't put a whole lot of stock in "art experts" I usually have fairly strong faith in my own judgement in the quality of art"

As quality is irrelevant to my definition of art, I have no problem with that. For me, every piece of art is defined as good or bad by the individual viewing/participating in it, and everyone is equal so every judgement is no more or less valid than any other one. In that model, the only thing that matters is whether or not an individual viewer (the first of whom is generally but not always the artist him/herself) gets something out of the work or not--which is why it's not a model that's embraced by the High Art establishment, who need to convince themselves and hopefully a segment of the public at large that what they're doing is Important.

That said, by the definition you give above, there are at least some semi-objective criteria by which to judge the merit of an artwork--if the image being crafted doesn't convey an emotion or actualize an intangible concept, then it has, by your definition, failed. Because that criterion exists, what you define as art I define as craft, but that shouldn't be a problem in our discussing art, as long as everyone understands and for the sake of a discussion agrees with one definition or the other.

A

Ok first off, if comic art was like mcdonalds..wouldn't we be all stinking rich?
=D


Second, i don't see why people have to put classes on things. Comic art is simply that. Comic art. There are a number of categories and styles...some artists are better than others(by public definition). So in all categories, you'll have stuff that rise above the rest.

Actually, I can definitely see some similarities between comics and McDonalds. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it says nothing about the artstc value of comics, just the monetary. When you think about it, a fancy one-of-a-kind restaurant where the customers where coat and tie and dinner is $100+ a plate doesn't necessarily offer a meal that better fuels your body than your average McDonalds. You're paying for the craftsmanship and the materials, but if you're hungry in the middle of the city and only have $3 on you, a McDonalds will fill you up just fine. Plus, McDonalds is more approachable as an everyman's restaurant, the less extravagant food satisfies a wider variety of tastes.

Comics are sort of the same thing. In most cases, they are made with a sort of assembly line approach with seperate people who write, pencil, ink, and color the comics. Fine art tends to be made by one person (although there are some exceptions) and most famous pieces are experimental in nature, the artist labors over each piece, often painting and repainting it until he/she likes the result. The art in comics is stylized and simplified, yet conforms to set standards of presentation. Comics are cheap, and easily accessible to people of most age and social groups as a form of entertainment. They aren't so deep or complex that the average reader can't pick up on what's being said. Fine art doesn't appeal to everyone. It often loses the audience.

Ok first off, if comic art was like mcdonalds..wouldn't we be all stinking rich?

Webcomics are more like those cheap Chinese carryout places that go out of business in five years.

Black_Kitty
;_;

I know I'm going to sound a tad bit defensive but that's because I'm currently studying to be an art teacher myself. I had a similar conversation with my brother yesterday who suggested that a professor isn't really a teacher because a teacher (high school/elementary) can't really be philosophical and knowledgable but a professor can.

I told him that when he was in grade 9, the real question isn't whether or not his teacher can teach him calculus but whether or not as a grade 9 student, he can learn calculus. And if he was taught calculus anyway, how would he feel? Would his math teacher be a good teacher if he taught them calculus anyway knowing full well that his students probably didn't possess the necessary math skills to understand?

I faced the same problem when I was planning lessons for my grade 9 art class. We're doing a unit on comics and I was using Understanding Comics and How to Draw Comics The Marvel Way as references. I've drawn comics before and I've taught art at a private art school for over 3 years. The issue wasn't whether I knew enough to teach a decent beginner's lesson on comics. It's how much my students can digest before they freak out and become discouraged.

I'm not suggesting that all art teachers are amazing and knowledgable. What I am suggesting is that before you dismiss an art teacher as just not being good enough, think real hard about why.

As for me...I don't have a problem with narrative art being called art. I only have an issue with comics when that's all a student draws. If you're seriously considering a career in comics, then you should try to establish a good foundation. Drawing Naruto and Bleach characters are not the best way to go about it.

I think you missed what I said. I said MOST highschool art teachers... NOT ALL!
You have no idea how many people I run into that say that they hated thier higschool art teachers. And when they told me what their teachers had them do and their teachers experience, I was shocked! My teacher was the same - no experience and bullshit projects. And I took art classes from other highschool teachers at that same time, because my art classes in Highschool were horrible. I thought they were okay until later when I tried to get into Art Center and realized nothing they taught me was helpful at all.
I'm commenting on the teachers that got their jobs a looong time ago, and the schools can't get rid of them because of thier "long years and experience." Some of them weren't really artists to begin with.
I was not dismissing that there are actual art teachers out there that teach elementary, junior high, and highschool that are amazing teachers. But really you have to admit, the whole issue with Tenure, that alot of good teachers are not getting the jobs that older teachers with less knowlege (and less love for their jobs)have. I have friends with masters degrees that can't get a teaching job to save thier lives, so they have to work as cashiers or waiters.
Now this is turning into a rant about academic Tenure.

I didn't mean to get you defensive Black Kitty. I really wasn't trying to say that all gradeschool teachers are bad. I just think, because of the highschool teachers I've run into and all the people who found their art classes useless in highschool, that it's a Tenure thing.


In response to Hawks comment about Comics not being in Museums. The MOCA and the LACMA both had a master comic art exhibition for a few months this year.

I don't know why we're putting values on art. It's all the same thing really.
Fine art's is no longer Fine art anymore. Illustrators are now being trained the way that Fine artists used to be trained.

The only "Low class art" I've ever seen was when I came across a woman who was selling her paintings of Menstrual fluids. And also my dads art before he quit (And he had a masters degree in art!)... he just did Fine Art instalations that looked exactly like his favorite proffessors. That's pretty low.

You know I had art teachers like this. I hated them, and they hated me. Why? Because I didn't accept this line of bull for one minute.

Really and truly, this harkens back to the whole 'style ' argument.

We can all sit here and pontificate our various views on what an artist is or isn't, and what qualifies art by the standards of society and blah blah blah until we all turn blue and the apocalypse passes us by, but what it really comes down to is two things. Style and communcation. There is no such thing as 'lower' or 'higher' art, IMO. I see art as either successful or not and as either commercial or personal.

Art is communication. What the artist is trying to say is subjective, but the purpose of EVERY peice of art is to say *something* about *something*. This can be anything from the state of society, to a personal clique injoke, to a subtle and clever story, a joke, an opinion, or maybe its just how shitty the artist felt first thing out of bed in the morning when he was constipated on the can. It doesn't really matter. Art is communication on some level about something. Even art for art's sake is communicating something about the artist, their mood, their temperment, their medium and their technical skills. I found school and with these 'elitist' artists that I could throw various paint colors on a canvas, do a bunch of finger painting and as long as I could bullshit my 'meaning' in my work, I'd get an A+. As long as someone believes there is meaning, or can find meaning in something, it becomes art in some form. Thereby there is no artwork that means something that isn't significant. If comics mean something to someone, or can communicate an idea, joke, mood, story, ideal, opinion, etc, its still a totally and completely valid and successful peice of artwork. Why? Because it communicates with the viewer. If its actually a 'good' example of that artform or not becomes a different argument, but the artform is valid.

Now, onto the whole beef with style again.

Cartooning/comics is a stylistic form of drawing. Ultimately, you are just putting lines on a 2D surface. It just happens that the way you do it, the teacher doesn't like. I'm quite sure he doesn't have a beef with drawing or painting in general. He has a prejudice against doing it in a comic style. By even refering to it as a 'lower' form of art implies to me that he's an ignorant putz of a teacher. ( much like my grade 12 art teacher, but I'll get to that in a minute.)

Most of these sorts of guys are the 'splatter paint on a canvas' types. While I can understand their point of view, I highly disagree with it. Just because you use a simplistic, stylistic drawing form does NOT suddenly mean you can't communicate. What it means is that you are going to communicate on a simple level with more people than they probably ever will because people in general will 'get it'. You suddenly take out that 'high education' (and complete bullshit) need to 'understand' the artwork being presented in all its so called complexity. (Before everyone jumps on me, I'm not talking about the masters here, I'm talking about the coke can, tampon, rotting meat, and shit machine type 'art' here. And yes, each of those things WERE art peices revered by many, reviled by me. Especially the meat one, Oh god did that stink.) So the 'low' comes from the ability of mass communication as opposed to the 'sophisticated' communication occuring with the so called 'high art'. Its like commoners vs nobility. But is it any less of valid 'style' of art? Hell no.

There is also the consideration of audience. This whole 'high art vs low art' also is quite pervailent among 'fine artists' vs 'commercial artists'. My definition of the two is kind of important here. I consider a 'fine artist' any artist who creates primarily for themselves and their messages consist soley of their own opinions, feelings, and expression with no concern to audience or audience satisfaction for their own enjoyment. They may then later try to vend this work or not, but the buyer gets it 'as is'. Commercial artists on the other had do not work for themselves, they work for a client and an expected audience. They have specific messages provided by clients that they have to communicate to the most people possible. The Commercial artist is at the mercy of their clients, and generally earn a paycheck for the work they produce. Now obviously there is some crossing there. Some fine artists do commission work, and some commercial artists do work for themselves, but its the primary focus that concerns me here.

Cartooning and comics is a decidedly commercial form of art. When you create it, while you may create it for yourself or your enjoyment, there is always a consideration of the fact that someone is going to read it. A good comic communicates well on many levels to many people. It carries subtle and not so subtle messages along with the over arcing story to provide an enjoyable or interesting experience for SOMEONE ELSE other than the artist alone. For many fine artists, this very fact that this art is ment for other people, and is something that is bought and sold, (in their view by children and juveniles), makes it like selling out. So they view it as a lower form of artwork because of the audience they think it is appealing to and why it was created. While we as comic artists pour a ton of ourselves into a comic, ultimately they are designed to be read in the hands of someone else. We are speaking to an audience, and if we do it well, we are a good comic, if we do it poorly, we are a crappy comic. Again, it comes down to communication.

Now, in my personal experience, most of the 'fine art' types such as the teacher in question are pretty snobbish about their views. IMO, an artist who cannot find appreciation in all styles and forms of art is not an artist at all. They are meerly a critic, and a poor one at that. Wile I feel its fine to restrict some artisic freedoms based on projects in order to facilitate learning of specific skills, the idea that you can't do anything remotely cartoon like is a farce. As is the cute thing. What the hell? If you do a portrait of a cute kitten its no good because the subject was cute? WTF? No copying is a given tho. I'd go with that, but I'd define because you have to do some copying to learn certain skills.

I had an art teacher who also hated my cartoons and fantasy drawings/paintings. She considered them satanic, and said so to my face. I got right back into hers about it and told her that she could not restrict my artistic freedom to express myself in the way I choose so long as it isn't illegal. Regardless of the fact my artwork of faeries and unicorns was NOT satanic, its completely stupid and unethical to forbid subject matter because you don't like it. I did have to work around it in Design school, but fortunately it was just for particular classes that were on particular things, like life drawing.

I did have one teacher that LOVED when people did comic book style drawing, because she found it was very easy to force good anatomy on them. We ended up having to study muscles and bones from redlines on drawings. She also found it easier to get us to work harder on life and still drawing to apply it to our comic work. We enthusiastically did perspective exercises, anatomy drills, still and landscape drawings JUST so we could do better comics. We were truly motivated. I think she was the best teacher I had, and a true artist. I saw her work, she was good, but more realistic oil painting type stuff. But she never stepped on our own forms of expression. She just helped us to improve them. It showed an understanding of art and respect of her students that I admire to this day.

In the end, you have a choice. You can either try to change his views, stick up for your own, and probably get a crappy grade, OR you can do the splatter-paint-on-canvas, or dot-on-canvas, or rotting meat on a turnstyle and call it artwork as long as you can bullshit justify it, and get a great grade in the class, Afterward you can hold a bit party and burn everything you did in that class and move on, or the third option is use it as an opportunity to do life studies to improve your knowlege of anatomy, still life, perspective, and so forth and work on your comics on the side in your spare time in a private sketchbook.

To put things in perspective, I was at a couple of art galleries today in New York looking at art. In one gallery, someone had constructed James Bond's car completely out of cardboard. It cost over $100,000. In another, someone had taken puzzles and done the landmarks of the world and glued them to a big circular disk. That was going for $21,000. However each month hundreds of comic book artists draw 20+ pages and get payed about $150 for each. A collection of those pages fully completed then sells for about $3. The original art then sells for around $500.

Those are the price comparisons. Quite a difference. But it's up to the individual to decide what they like more; a cardboard car or a comic?


EDIT- All that said, it's still important to know the basics of drawing before attempting to simplify for comics.

Ooh yes I've heard that before. I used to not like when my mom called me an artist to her friends because they were expecting me to be a painter or something and seemed somehow disappointed when I said I do mostly comics. I can also sketch portraits pretty decently but I refuse requests because I just simply don't enjoy it and think I'm better with comics.

Sure "artists" can sell a blank canvas for a ridiculous amount of money (it's true) and I or any other comic book artists won't make nearly as much (or any) money off of comics, but I do think that at least I and others get a tremendous amount of enjoyment reading comics more than the buyer will ever enjoy that blank canvas. So I win! I also like looking at many different pieces and variations of art but nowhere near as much as I enjoy sitting back and reading a good comic. There's no comparison there in my opinion.

Haaah D: well, the art school I'm trasnferring to has the same basis of art classes that most art programs do, which is realism - drawing still lifes, etc. And of course, I think learning to draw realism is the way to start out, since a lot of cartooning is based on the abstraction of real objects/people/places. But I'm going to major in sequential art, so after my 'core' prerequisite classes, I'll be taking things like inking and paneling for comic books, and manga techniques/style drawing. The school I'm transferring to is SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), btw. Which I think is ranked as the number 5 art school in the US right now. So, I think the trend might moving away from discouraging comic arts, especially with the boom in recent years of comic books and comic-book based movies. I mean, if a prestigious art college is offering classes in manga, there's definitely some things changing XD People will always have their opinions, of course. It's hard to find an artist who isn't critisized at one point or another for what they door how they do it.

Well, Savannah offers certain classes because lots of people will take it. I've spoken to a whole lot of comic pros who think that Sequential Art programs are a joke, and that a Drawing and Painting major will prepare a person to think visually better than a comic making class will, therefore allowing them to not be limited by what they've been taught in "Comic Making" classes.

So I don't really think that a sequential art major will help much when a Drawing and Painting major would actually work better. Of course comics are basically art in panels, whereas things animation require specialized classes because there's a lot more process to it.

Although I have heard good things about the Joe Kubert school.

That sassy gal who Draw The Devil's Panties did a sequential art course at uni... Or a major or something. -I don't know the systems you have over there in the US
Anyway, she does very well with her work. Is the Devil's Panties still going?

I wonder what your teacher has to say about Goya's "Caprichos". They aren't sequential, but they're cartoonish (albeit macabre) and have little subtitles, a la "Family Circus" (hehe bad example!). And I doubt any art teacher would ever doubt Goya's artwork! Also, just because something has value as a piece of pop culture, like comics do, it doesn't negate the aesthetic value of the work. McDonald's is bad because it only offers base pleasures, without any sort of nutritional value. Thus, your teacher is saying that comics are only base entertainment, and contain no other purpose. But COME ON comics can be LITERARY and they can MAKE YOU CRY! (McDonald's doesn't do that! ...well, Ronald McDonald is scary enough to make me cry.. but still!) Art's purpose is, like, to instigate emotion, to elicit some reaction from within the viewer, as well as to contain some aesthetic worth. I guess it varies from person to person, but comics fill all the abovementioned criteria, at least for me!
And btw, saying that comics are "lower art" because they're cartoony and stylized--- well cubism, and other abstract-ish things, is totally stylized-- it makes chibi characters seem photorealistic in comparison! And- I could go on (and on)... but... I won't.


(And regarding the caprichos--if you don't know what I'm talking about, you can check them out here!!!!!!! ^_^!!
http://www.wesleyan.edu/dac/coll/grps/goya/goya_intro.html [wesleyan.edu])