Is the MFA the new MBA?
Is the M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) the new M.B.A.? Drifting across the blogosphere, I came across that arresting claim, next to this quote, on (of all places) tompeters.com:
"People who are learning the design technologies are the ones who will be creating the visual images (thus stories) of our culture."
This amidst entries in a messy blog of shoddy thinking and bad prose... I'd love to start discussing whether the MFA is the new MBA - and whether that's a good thing or not (the earlier post on this blog on artists as real estate developers, and art critics as their realtors, comes to mind) - but certainly the business of creativity is not restricted to visual culture. Story telling, of any kind (including the kind that is part and saddlebag of any decent sales training and marketing), is not exclusively visual: you need to be able to paint pictures with words - and so to use them well means not just (but at least) using them correctly, efficiently, coherently, interestingly. That's not creative yet (and beware of the phrase "creative writing" that is so carelessly bandied about) - but it's at least more than the lazy thinking-in-images that is the vacuous domain of bad advertising, bad marketing, and bad television...
On a related note, this helps explain why television is allegedly dying, as in a quote from the Washington Post people have been mailing around:
"In fact, just one of the 13 shows that divvied up the 27 Emmys attained, in the course of the TV season, as many viewers as did Sunday's Emmy broadcast. That one show was ABC's own broadcast of February's Academy Awards ceremony, which clocked nearly 44 million viewers; it was named best directed variety, music or comedy program."
Once you realize that the biggest TV audience went to the show about the shows, and tally this with the fact that the Emmy award show had the second lowest ratings in recent Emmy history, you might want to jump to the conclusion that this kind of award cannibalism spells the end of TV history. However, just as a search engine tends to have a far bigger audience than any of the sites it points to, these shows are visual guides to what succeeds in the medium these days. In short, just as many people will vote for the candidate who seems to be winning anyway, they will watch what other people are watching, and not bother to think what others aren't bothered to think. What is smelling funny here is not the TV medium, but the critical capacity.
"People who are learning the design technologies are the ones who will be creating the visual images (thus stories) of our culture."
This amidst entries in a messy blog of shoddy thinking and bad prose... I'd love to start discussing whether the MFA is the new MBA - and whether that's a good thing or not (the earlier post on this blog on artists as real estate developers, and art critics as their realtors, comes to mind) - but certainly the business of creativity is not restricted to visual culture. Story telling, of any kind (including the kind that is part and saddlebag of any decent sales training and marketing), is not exclusively visual: you need to be able to paint pictures with words - and so to use them well means not just (but at least) using them correctly, efficiently, coherently, interestingly. That's not creative yet (and beware of the phrase "creative writing" that is so carelessly bandied about) - but it's at least more than the lazy thinking-in-images that is the vacuous domain of bad advertising, bad marketing, and bad television...
On a related note, this helps explain why television is allegedly dying, as in a quote from the Washington Post people have been mailing around:
"In fact, just one of the 13 shows that divvied up the 27 Emmys attained, in the course of the TV season, as many viewers as did Sunday's Emmy broadcast. That one show was ABC's own broadcast of February's Academy Awards ceremony, which clocked nearly 44 million viewers; it was named best directed variety, music or comedy program."
Once you realize that the biggest TV audience went to the show about the shows, and tally this with the fact that the Emmy award show had the second lowest ratings in recent Emmy history, you might want to jump to the conclusion that this kind of award cannibalism spells the end of TV history. However, just as a search engine tends to have a far bigger audience than any of the sites it points to, these shows are visual guides to what succeeds in the medium these days. In short, just as many people will vote for the candidate who seems to be winning anyway, they will watch what other people are watching, and not bother to think what others aren't bothered to think. What is smelling funny here is not the TV medium, but the critical capacity.
1 Comments:
Creativty has been successfully appropriated as merely another engine driving business. Singapore has been worried that its educational system has failed to cultivate "creativity" and so has been dictating government policies to encourage its well-mannered citizens to be more 'creative.'
It's neither a bad or good thing that the MFA is the new MBA, it's just another part of the processes described by Frank and Wu Chin-Tao in their work on history of multiationals' relationship with alternative and contemporary culture.
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