goodbye new york, hello london

So I'm off across the pond tomorrow for a year of exploring the photo world of London, while also trying to get a grasp of the fascinating world behind the big doors of Sotheby's. The book list I received a few weeks ago already excites me for what is to come of this year. Seeing that the concept of going to grad school at the moment has become almost a survival tactic of the recession; I am avoiding the idea that I am missing out on all the fun of finding a job at the moment. Don't worry, my time will come. 

I am eager to explore this new world and the new ideas of a whole new group of peers. I am hoping that they will both inspire and challenge my thoughts on photography in the next fourteen months. That I will begin to see differently, in a more informed and passionate manner while also, hopefully, doing the same for them.  

But for now, I leave with a thought by one of my favorite writers on the topic of graduate school: 

"My optimum solution would be to to abolish graduate studies in art altogether. Failing this, one might just avoid it. Try Raymond Pettibon's trajectory: grow up in a literary family in a beach house full of books, get a degree in economic, teach math, draw posters for your brothers band, hang out and get discovered. Or Josiah McElheny's trajectory: study sculpture and anthropology as an undergraduate, become interested in single source traditions like glassblowing, go to Venice to study that tradition, learn to blow glass from the masters and start making art. Or, as a last resort, try the solution my classmate Gilbert Shelton fell upon. Gilbert and his co-conspirators went up to the art department at the University of Texas every day and painted Abstract Expressionism. Every night they came home and drew underground comic books. When they had enough pages, they founded Zap Comix and moved to San Francisco. Finally, they moved to Paris, where they still draw comics. 

All these strategies seem riskier and more circuitous than graduate school, but they don't hurt nearly as much. They don't include cinderblock walls. There are no creepy has beens with sour admonitions or nincompoops in the food court. Also, in the egg and spoon race for artistic recognition, you are a thousand times more likely to get there with your egg if you avoid graduate school. More critically, if you want to be an artist and you must go to graduate school, you must bring your own egg, your talisman, your jones, your touchstone in the larger culture, something you love, even if it's just an old Hobie or a street tag or Jane's Addiction. You need something whose loss you will notice when it begins to slip away, something to serve as a hedge against opacity, because it's not just about you, it's about bringing the fire from wherever you found it to an art world that needs it. " 

Dave Hickey, Art in America