Blue Period - WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY??!!??

 I watched this anime and I had a little spastic meltdown, which I will now inflict on you.

I will start by describing it

So it starts with this protagonist guy Yatora Yaguchi who has socially faked his way though school and high school, superficially, he is reasonably popular and successful; totally empty inside. High social capacity, not really, genuinely interested in anything. Careful, a climber, in low-level despair. Right on course for a functional degree and a job as a competent salaryman.

Out of nowhere, or maybe after a chance encounter, he takes an interest in art. Supported by some small initial success and a perceptive art teacher, over a short period of time he goes from being not that interested at all, to being in the art club, to rapidly gaining skill and interest, to deciding that he is going to go for an art degree.

The big university has a well regarded fine-arts course. The only way he can afford it is to get one of the handful of free spots and the only way to do that is to ace the entry exam, (which almost everyone fails, some people take it two or three times).

From there it’s a race against the clock as Yaguchi focuses on learning skills and discovering art. He sees himself as not being that talented, can relentless hard work and pure desire make up for a lack of talent? Can he learn everything about art and ace the big test and become a real artist?

THINKS LIKED

It was the awakening of an actual, human soul inside someone who was otherwise living in a performance of their own life like an actor inhabiting a role, and maybe the first time this man/boy who had never done anything that wasn't careful and planned did anything purely non-optimal and risky for its own sake.

I like the art teacher and I like the cast of oddballs and weirdoes who make up the various art classes.

I like the procedural stuff about training and technique, common to anime but I would have been happy with more of it.

I like the slow development of the protagonist into a somewhat less  empty, and therefore somewhat more usefully-empathic and morally present individual.

I like that his close drinking buddies all knew he was shallow as fuck but didn't really mind, and that one of them is inspired to go to cooking school by seeing Yaguchi follow his dream and grow as a person.

I *think* I liked the somewhat odd cross-dressing/trans(?) best friend plot?

Its an interesting look inside the processes of art school and an art education, but oh my god did I find myself unexpectedly fucking DESPISING parts of this by the end.

NEUTRAL THINGS

Regarding the styles and types of art engaged in by the protagonist and their class, the in-fiction art, I didn't actually like much of it myself, it did not move my heart, and I was fine with this as I expect that from any mainstream entertainment.

I was ok with characters going "Oh, so inspiring" and "your art has really improved etc etc" when I wasn't a big fan of the art being looked at in question. I could still care about the story in which the art was embedded, so my complaints below are, I think, separate to that.

THINGS I HATED

Its complex as all of these things combined and interwove at some point, but to try it one-by-one.

The Japanese testing system

Hey! Lets test children to the point of destruction! And lets valorise their personal self-annihilation!

 'Academic Art'

"Oh you won't have to make academic art on this course" says the teacher on the exam-prep course.

(Yes you will and that is all you will learn).

'Academic Art' is apparently a thing where they train examinees in particular.. patterns? I don't know how precisely to define it, but each university has its own particular obsessions, tendencies and fashions in its preferences so they train the Examinees specifically for the University they are applying for, like it was a written test. Perhaps they don't do this 'as-such', but I think they are still doing it in-essence.

WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY WITH THIS PIECE?

This absolutely disgusts me on every conceivable level. If I had to pick one thing in particular that crawled up my arse and screamed its this.

The looping of the language of criticism (flawed and shit anyway) with the production of art turns emotion into a performance of emotion (IN A SAVAGE TESTING ENVIRONMENT). I FUCKING HATE THIS.

'What are you trying to say, from an examiner, in a test with 200 people where only three are going to get in. Genuinely just shoot me.

Educational systems are primarily agreeability and obedience machines, and secondly analysis of skill and drive, so this definition of a visual static art, where this desperate and very young teenager is meant to have 'something to say', in an utterly silent medium, in which 20 kids in a room paint virtually the same thing, it’s a degradation of thought and emotion guaranteed to produce self-deluding drones who when they come to make art in the future, will ask themselves "what am I trying to say" from the examiner in their head. So everything becomes exam art.

(no relation to MFA culture at all there)

(was it all really the same thing I am complaining about?)

Total separation of 'genre' and 'Fine Art'

So clearly, drawing a dragon or something or something from your imagination or even something interwoven with your imagination, is not going to cut it. This is a silent rule, another one these young exam takers are being inducted into, a very familiar one to me.

'we want to see the products of your heart"

'ok, here they are, they are gauche, atavistic, genre and imaginary'

'well in fact we didn’t mean that at all, and understanding *that* we didn't mean that was part of the test. 

What we *meant* was 'we want to see the product of an utterly neutral heart, with a fair amount of skill and drive but almost no real creative imagination, and we want to see that they have 'something to say' (as we would understand it, and about the vanishingly small number of things a teenager might have something to say about that would be coherent to a middle aged drone), and we want that expressed entirely though a still, silent visual medium, and we want it expressed with maybe a dab of 'cleverness'.

What you are creating here is modernism and total emptiness. The painting as 'text' where the quality and "depth" (as if even one of these people would understand anything of actual emotional depth) is decided by how 'cleverly' the teenager can command, ape, combine and recombine the known forms of modernism to produce something of not-too-much emotional content, not too much creativity, but it has 'something to say'.

Do I fucking despise art school and absolutely everything about higher fine art education and the kind of art and culture it produces?

I don't know but I fucking HATED this anime version of it!!!

We have to destroy (Anime) art school!!!