As a BFA degree holder, I have to say you are... completely correct.

Look, it's not that there isn't legitimate scholarship in the FA departments. And it's not that aren't legitimate grounds for investigating and exploring art in that kind of academic setting. But they are certainly different than the craft of *creating* art. And they are *very* susceptible to that bullshit you speak of. Any half-smart individual could cruise through many FA classes by [ A ] knowing the right buzz words to sprinkle in class discussion and papers and [ B ] knowing the teacher well enough to either agree with them or push their buttons.

I totally get why tenure is a *thing* and why it *needs* to be a thing. But it also does real damage to FA programs when Professor Zed is professional untouchable (barring legal troubles) AND is in the position to pass judgement that his/her students need to accept to pass.

Yes, I have the feeling that going through the program at a different school might have elicited very different results. I still remember the very assignment that changed the course of my life. Blessings upon the sculpture professor who told us to "assemble 3 Found Objects, including 1 that is from a living creature, into a form that elicits a feeling of 'dry hardness'."

No objective criteria at all. You had to play the professor, not develop your craft. Instead I transferred and learned an entire raft of graphic arts skills that became obsolete five years after I got my diploma. (press type and ruby lith for the process camera. I need to get a PMT of this paste-up)

Ah well, at least I still have my artistic integrity. That and three dollars will buy me a cup of coffee.

Keith, it is different, but even if you had gone to my my school now, you might still be making the same decisions. Most of the former FA major I have met (who's art is completely gorgeous, BTW) bailed out of the major because the didn't want to put up with the studio system or just wanted an actual paying job after graduation.

At the time, I had come to the conclusion that the large part over success on being a fine artist lay in selling others on your talent. Your work couldn't speak for itself; it was all in presentation and how you used your powers of persuasion to convince others of your worth. I wanted none of that. I felt that it made my art essentially worthless on its own, and merely made me a self marketer and art scene good ol' boy.
I don't feel quite that way about it these days, but I still feel that's a large part of it, and why I will likely never be wildly successful as a pure artist.

And this is the exact same reason I am not an architect.

A friend of mine went to a technical school for architecture. The department was split between the types who did the sort of things that Keith was complaining about (such as the professor who would assign his class to make a structure out of chicken bones), and the ones who were VERY engineering-oriented. She was a member of the latter group; one of her big things at the time was finding a cheaper way to build decent housing by means of little tricks (like making the dimensions work with exact numbers of the various default sizes of lumber--so you never had to spend time trimming on-site).