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Art Graduate Survival 101 – What Support Can Art Students Look To?

The cuts to the art industry is one of the most short-sighted acts of vandalism in recent years. With prospects for graduates glooming, what support can art students look to?Google search results can be terrifying. See also: uncertain career paths, wonky prospects, and a vague idea of what life after art school even is. After chalking-up years of arduously studying art, history, and a whole lot of Foucault, art students slip into a workforce that doesn’t always appreciate the curation of heterotopias, but would rather appreciate extra foam on their cappuccino. Occupying Starbucks, art student’s attitudes become as bitter as the coffee they’re hired to make.The landscape that art graduates encounter isn’t one Theresa May would find strong or stable. It’s on shaky grounds, and not many institutions are facing the matter of art graduates. In 2016, only 69.1% of fine art graduates landed a job. Such jobs were mainly retail, catering, and a rather ominous ‘other’ category. This is as worrying as it is important. These statistics make a powerful and compelling case for the precarious situatedness of graduates. Is studying Herodotus something we should pay people to do? Currently, it’s a no. The cultural work graduates can offer is restricted, dismissed, and erased by non-art circles. The (mis)treatment of art graduates is a sign that something is wrong with how particular societies locate the arts.Upcoming artists are crucial to keeping things fresh. Whilst we pay these practises a certain amount of lip-service and Instagram postage, clicks and shares won’t pay the rent. Art institutions are crucial in providing platforms and forums for the curation of new and promising artistic modes. But some of these can be arcane, leaving art studies struggling to exoterically explain their art. University faculties take refuge in niches. Whilst this enables students to navigate specificities, the outside world neglects this.Art award schemes can provide graduates an opportunity beyond the white walls of university to express themselves. The variety and vitality of schemes, such as the BP Portrait Award, Frieze Artist Award, and the Sunny Art Prize, provide ways for upcoming artists to be recognised globally. When Art was listed top of Forbes’ 10 worst college majors across the pond, the need for healthy art exchanges is needed more than ever before.Over 2,557 artists from across 80 countries applied for the BP Portrait Award in 2016. 53 artists were selected by the judging panel and saw their still life come to life in the National Portrait Gallery. So, when just 2% of artists who enter find their work selected and be in the running for £30,000, the program provides a critical platform for portraiture; an arguably dying medium. By divorcing strict figuration, the portraits range from tactile finger painting-esque pieces, to photorealist methods. Commissioned works come to form an exhibition that represents the diversity, creativity, and vision of contemporary portraiture. The competition carries the prestige capable of changing an emerging artist’s life.Jettisoning the portrait, we encounter spatial arrangements that test the idea of the site in the Frieze Artist Award. The competition allows emerging artists to realise a major commission at Frieze London. The site-specific works are ambitious, often interrogating concepts of digital media, video, and sculpture and the methods in which these can find relief. Previous winners range from Yuri Pattison’s navigation of the self-as-data across networked data systems, Rachel Rose’s layering of communication and sensory perception, and Mélaine Metranga’s unhurried negotiation of emotional-economic exchanges in a series of videos and an on-site café-installation. Produced under the guidance of the Frieze Projects team, the Award sets a budget of up to £20,000.The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is one of the world’s largest open-submission showcase. The panoramic scope of the exhibition illustrates art’s pluriformity. Running since 1769, the Summer Exhibition is open to all artists and hangs within its palatial walls everything that is happening in the art scene. Both fresh and established artists can submit, and with £50,000 worth of prizes floating about, it’s a peak into the whimsical realm of contemporary art.Held by the Sunny Art Centre, the Sunny Art Prize creates a transnational space for art from across the world to come together. The institution aims to showcase the plurality of fine art today, from 2-dimensional paintings to 3-dimensional sculptures. By crafting a worldy grammar through art, the competitions sees art from London, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Macau represented and articulated to a larger audience. Cash prizes are on offer (with up-to £3,000 for first prize) alongside a public solo exhibition at the Sunny Art Centre, and a one month residency along with a show at their partner galleries.Visibility is key to art. It is a language not of stillness, but robust dialogue. It refuses to be silent. Art has been inflected with superficial associations, meaning that culture has become obfuscated. Art’s insights have been lost, so the sooner we find relief in art, the sooner we’ll view art graduates as more than future-baristas.

Health Care Reform – Let It Come But Be Ready for Change!

To stir emotions the health care reform debate doesn’t have to peel the onion back very far. There are those who could always afford health insurance and are worried that their costs will significantly rise in the attempt to cover the cost of care for those who have gone without. There are those with numerous and expensive to treat medical problems, who have no health insurance or inadequate health insurance coverage and they need relief, now! And there are those who are healthy, have chosen not to have health insurance, and resent a mandate requiring them to “buy-in” or face monetary penalties.The Health Care Affordability Act of 2010 is wide in its scope and goals. First, it moves us to a place where most Americans will be covered by health insurance. This will remove “the” key impediment to “routine” health care services for millions of Americans. Subsidies will insure health care insurance regardless of an ability to pay and just because you have pre-existing medical conditions you will still be eligible for “reasonably priced” coverage. Stated another way, insurers will not be able to reject you or drastically increase your premiums if you suffer from chronic illnesses that generate a high level of claims, nor will they be allowed to set dollar limits on health insurance coverage.To fund these objectives the Health Care Affordability Act requires all Americans to purchase health insurance. There will be subsidies if you are in a low income category and if you have no ability to pay anything you will be eligible for Medicaid as these state level programs will be more accommodating and act as the ultimate safety net. Through its mandates, the law requires millions of healthy individuals to pay into the system. The idea here is that those of us who are not in need of health care will fund those who draw from it. Since any of us can succumb to a health emergency at any time and thus become in need of potentially costly health care interventions those who support the mandate feel that this is fair – we are simply looking out for each other. Next, there are numerous plans in testing phases that are designed to make the delivery of health care more efficient and more cost effective. These pilot programs are being managed by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and include the cooperation of health systems throughout the country. These are complex to say the least and in early development stages and until proven, which is years from now, it is not known what their effect will be.I support the attempt by the Obama administration and others to get something done on this pressing national issue. But there is a lack of candor about the cost, where the funds will come from, what treatments and medical technologies will be restricted due to very high costs and how the demand of millions of newly insured patients will be managed in terms of timely access to care and treatments. I have spent forty-one years of my life in a medical technology career that focused on global health economics and reimbursement issues and believe me, something will have to give. In every country outside of America, health care budgets are limited and capped. Fees to hospitals and physicians are set, annually reviewed and kept in check and new medical technology prices and access to them are restricted in subtle and not so subtle ways. And if you think that these policies won’t happen in America – think again, as spending limits are being set and will be set and we will have to live within them!Having said that, let’s continue on with the reforms, some government mandated, some driven by the market place as conservative health policies propose. Just know that we will be dealing with health care reform for a very long time and there are going to be a lot of disillusioned folks along the way, newly enfranchised and otherwise. The emerging health care system will be “more just” but it will require real and noticeable sacrifice from the majority of Americans who heretofore never much worried about the fairness of it all.

Google Book Project Adds UC to Its Library Roster

California joins Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library in the Google Book Search project. It is known that The University of California holds 100 libraries on 10 campuses across the state and ranks as the largest research and academic library in the world.Reports says that Google is working with the U.S. Library of Congress on a similar effort, For Google, the new momentum for its Book Search Project is the latest in a string of high-profile deals it has announced over the past week in which it signed a major search and advertising contract with News Corp., the owner of MySpace.com, and a video advertising and delivery deal with Viacom, owner of MTV, were amongst the people who has a done deal with the search engine mammoth.Jennifer Colvin, a spokeswoman for the University of California’s digital library arm, said “We know that we will be digitizing several million volumes but not the entire 34 million.”Google Books product manager Adam Smith confirmed that the project would scan books numbering “in the millions,” but declined to offer specific targets in terms of the number of books or the scope of financing Google planned to provide. The Google Book Search project was a far larger in scope than its undertaking with the Yahoo-Microsoft funded group.