What does it mean to study arts? Most of us spent the last semester learning about people who are now dead. Whether we’re archaeologists, historians, philosophers or literature nerds, a lot of the arts faculty is about making sense of what people have already said or done. That’s why no matter how many times an arts student is asked how our particular choice of subjects will be useful or employable, it always catches us off guard.
Clearly there is some point to the arts that we can’t put into words; otherwise we’d all take science, or worse, commerce. Like many things in the faculty, being inexpressible doesn’t make it any less important.
If the other end of the science-art spectrum makes logical connections, then our side must necessarily be the illogical ones. From the premise that not everything is logical in life, it follows that a creative mindset is essential for understanding the world. But that’s another simplification.
A phrase thrown around a lot is ‘critical thinking’. Some degrees (which I will not name) have a habit of making practical assumptions, whereas the non-engineering ones have more trouble taking things at face value. It’s easy to see why either could be useful in certain situations. The amount of misinformation online these days makes implicit trust harder to justify, believe me.
The draw of the arts is skills, such as critical thinking, communication and combining incomparable sources of information. There are few jobs that require an intimate understanding of gender studies in the same way lawyers might demand memory of case law. Many careers instead hire a gender-studies-like mindset. As long as we learn the right skills, we are left free to do so by studying whichever areas are personally interesting.
Queries about our majors catch us off guard because it’s the wrong question. The real question is not “What useful knowledge will that course (about people who are now dead) give you?” but “What skills will that class foster?”
The arts teach us how to think ahead, and be critical of our upcoming career in customer service.
Image of the Tower of Babel is an edited version of The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré, from the public domain. Quote from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
Gali. Your post is hilarious and I so enjoyed reading it (even if I am half a science student…). A lovely observational piece about the mysterious world of ‘The Arts’. I have found I can often draw parallels between the arts and science worlds, in more ways than I first anticipated. This has been quite a lovely thing to experience. Thank you for this post and the joy I got from reading it – I look forward with great anticipation to my career in customer service.
Fear not, I’m also half of a science student. The best half, I like to think, because even scientists can be creative and critical. At the end of the day, arts and sciences are just ways to frame our curiosity. The university seems to recognise the overlap between the two, placing Geography, Stats, Logic and Computation, Maths etc into both faculties. From the research papers I’ve read, the most interesting are generally on the border between arts and science (but oddly never commerce). If you combine science’s “thinking of” with arts’ “thinking about”, you can get to “thinking well”.
This is a really interesting post! I think that question is one nearly all arts students grapple with. You’re absolutely right about arts being skill-based learning in addition to the content. Isn’t it often said that a good deal of the jobs our generation will work don’t even exist yet? It seems, then, that skill-based degrees are potentially more useful, as they allow adaptation to an always-changing future.
While there are undoubtedly many careers that the arts lead onto, I also find it interesting that the focus in education is so often reduced to simply getting a job. Surely there must be something inherently meaningful in education for its own sake? I do find it interesting how the ‘use’ of knowledge is boiled down into whether it contributes to the economy.
The Arts teach us to question, to analyze, something hugely important when so much of our current academia has been written by privileged white old men. The arts are necessary to be engaged with society and to push it forward. Rebellions, political institutions, great works of literature. All of these are rooted in the arts, and all are things that cause us to question both ourselves and the lens we’ve been told to look at the world through. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, the arts make us poor subjects but good citizens.
“Poor” subjects could be a double entendre there: we don’t fit neatly into the commercial machine. I do wonder: do arts students not care about the fiscal side of things because their degree doesn’t focus on material things, or does the curriculum just reflect the arts students themselves? Whatever the answer, it’s valuable to be able to see the value in things that aren’t narrowminded money. I pray that I don’t turn into a privileged old white man, or if I do that I have an open mind.
Your post made me think about the recent ads I’ve been seeing at bus stops and online for studying a BA. They all advertise doing arts alongside the reassurance that ‘you will turn out fine’ if you end up doing a BA. I found this to be an interesting approach, as it assumes that most people don’t see arts as a safe or reliable career path. Despite the good intention, by assuming this it also makes anyone who doesn’t think this way feel as though there is widespread support of this negative portrayal of arts. Yet, as you bring up, the skills arts students learn are wide-ranging and invaluable. It’s common knowledge that there is necessity for education across the ‘science-art spectrum’, so it seems of no benefit to advertise one as being potentially less useful. I can’t imagine they would ever advertise engineering by first reassuring us that it is a useful degree.
I guess even artists aren’t detached enough from reality not to have heard the statistics about the arts vs. engineering. There is a belief that the arts are not the best for employment, although it’s not as if the arts believe in absolutes like “best”. Statistics are not a free pass to make generalisations about a faculty.
This is excellently written Gali! It’s a fascinating post.
I struggle a lot with the fact I study arts, which sounds terrible for someone in Art Scholars. I enjoy being practical, and knowing the precise outcomes of the work I’m doing – which is sometimes difficult when a lot of what I study is theory, and I can’t always discern the immediate value of it. I stumbled across something some time ago, however, which fundamentally changed how I viewed arts. It was a small quote – meant to be funny, I think – which said the sciences learn how we can do things. The arts, on the other hand, asks whether we should.
I found this very fascinating and important. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should, necessarily. Of course the arts is entirely valuable in and of itself; but it can also function as a filter to science. Science is very narrow-minded in the sense that it operates only in the “can we”. The arts can evaluate the implications of it on various areas of society – the “should we”.
I feel that as arts students have to fight for their studies to be deemed worthy. But really, arts as a whole seems to be doing the most important job. It’s a very simple thing to deal in truths; not so much the complexities of humanity. In the arts, very little is certain. Few things are ever “right”. The truth is humanity is dirty, guttural, and horrifyingly uncertain. We have the courage to navigate the terrain other disciplines don’t want to traverse.
That quote is an interesting way to look at it. My science brain wants to understand everything, and I need the rest of me to tell me where my curiosity will be pointless or harmful. It’s the Jurassic Park dichotomy, really. Ironic that the mathematician was the one telling the rest that “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” (Although mathematics is one of the more freeform sciences i my view, so it’s not too far-fetched.)
You say arts are needed to deem things worthy, and also find our own work under scrutiny. Arts may not be the best environment for an anything-is-possible approach. The far extreme of being ‘critical’ is being judgemental.
Thanks Gali! Your post is something I think about often as I am fully immersed in the arts. The first thing I hear when I tell people that I’m taking sociology and anthropology is “so you want to be poor for the rest of your life”. I don’t see it like this however, because even though we learn about a lot of dead people and what they did to contribute to the arts, we can learn things about the future and preventing certain things. The people that actually understand these topics say to me a lot of employers are looking for anthropologist to help enhance their businesses and to give new ideas. Even though they are both very different response I have always felt good about being an arts student as its what I’m interested in, even if others don’t think that it is level with science degrees. A thing I have found different to most other degrees is I find myself analysing everything whether or not it’s something that needs analysing – I’m always looking for the bigger picture.
My mother used to select people for jobs in a marketing department. She says she looks mostly at the existence of a degree rather than what the degree actually is, and pays attention to work experience. (If you have more than one degree, a masters or something from a prestigious university, that counts for something.) As far as her group is concerned, a degree is just a certification that you can be organised and hard-working, a ticked box rather than a specialisation. You might get to show off your arts-centric skills in an interview, but that’s a property of your mind, rather than of the piece of paper you graduate with.