Proof-of-Burn

The only place I'd ever gone to school was the inner city college my parents made us go to instead of church even though the church was the only institution that had enough power to let you take your kids out of school in the first place. There we only acted in faith, in virginity and in the Bush administration. In 2007, my father drew the line at Creationism. So we went thru the alamo community college system dissecting frogs.

In 2010, I dropped out of art school in the wake of the post-2008 student debt crisis, the movement of the squares and the iphone. This felt like the most economically rational approach to the predatory model of arts education, peaking at six figures in the US. But it was also the art historical conjuncture I'd inherited.

I was recently reading a research paper that surveyed entrepreneurs and that tried to quantify the probability that a person would end up one. Not surprisingly, a number of bootstrappers come from non-traditional academic backgrounds that are difficult to represent in traditional contexts of industry.

When I erased my student ID it was after I'd been in school for so long I'd forgotten I even had transcripts I just had facebook. For whatever reason, I was able to work out my transgression at NYU in Haley Mellin's undergraduate senior thesis course. This was very off the books: Mellin would meet me before class started in order to let me in through the backdoor of the Steinhardt building. The course requirement was that everybody had to do a thesis, and find someone in the art world that they didn't know to come to class and talk about whatever the class wanted to talk about. Looking back, this probably worked because of facebook.

What's interesting to me is how barriers to entry into art and adjacent cultural fields get lower. As they do, the framework gets a lot harder to represent.