Both are important. Science degrees train people to help the world live, while people with arts degrees help make life worth living. If you think arts degrees are useless, you might as well stop watching most all TV, stop reading most books, stop going to movies, stop playing videogames, stop using graphics-based smart phones, and stop using most internet function besides old-style text-only newsgroups and email.

Exactly. And I think the final person to comment in the other thread, who essentially said that if there is material to study and at least some jobs in the industry then the degree is legitimate made a very valid point. The commercialisation of education - viewing it purely as a means of maximising income - is a tragic waste of something that would be very fulfilling, and is also pretty destructive to culture and society in general.

Why start a whole new thread? This is all that needed to be said.

>>313
Just because at the time I started it, it looked like the "all arts degrees are a waste of time and anybody who does one is a stupid imbecile who's too much of a moron to understand real subjects" crowd were going to continue to argue the toss, is all.

The question is, do you think you really need to sperg about arts degrees? Everyone already knows that you need a certain amount students in Science degree programs and art degrees. No one doubts any of that. But, and I think you'll agree, we also don't need a bunch of moderately smart kids getting arts degrees. No one from Harvard needs a career in sitcom writing or improv comedy. So you have to demonize the arts, at least to some extent, if you want these kids to have good practical jobs like heart surgeons. I like looking at paintings, but if the guy who painted the thing could come up with some better drugs or treatment plans for cancer, then fuck you I'd rather have him do that.

Art degrees make people who aren't artist think they're artists, and we lose a lot of great minds.

>>315
Bizarre logic. That implies that people who're good at arts would, in the absence of relevant degrees, go on to excel at science instead. It doesn't work that way. Different people are stronger in different areas, and most people who pick arts subjects either wouldn't be good at or wouldn't be interested in doing other subjects to degree level. I did very well at maths and science in school and sixth form, but had I done them to degree I quite simply wouldn't have had any drive to work at it. The same applied to most arts students at my Uni.


It also suggests that the best way to encourage people to want to make a positive change to society is to scream that they're a retard until they do something you perceive to be important. Then there's the fact that many science/mathematics students will end up doing things like corporate accountancy or cosmetics chemistry or researching how to make slightly more aerodynamic cars, and many arts students who'll go on to use their skills to help disabled kids develop social skills, or to maintain important public libraries, or even to actually create a piece of media which makes thousands or millions of people feel better about their lives. Not to mention the fact that the liberal arts (especially history, philosophy and to some extent literature) tend to have a stronger focus on politics and in developing coherent substantiated viewpoints than the sciences, which is also beneficial to society in a potentially fairly profound way. There are lots of ways of improving society with both arts and science, and it's fairly naive to assume that if you discourage somebody from pursuing their passion in one area they'll just shrug and end up making groundbreaking progress elsewhere instead.

Also, in response to your implication that anyone can write scripts/do paintings/act/whatever whereas only really clever people can do medical research - quite simply, you're wrong, and believe me, if you gave art over the dumb, talentless people, culture would end up in absolute tatters. I've got a freelance job reading and reviewing manuscripts for a publisher to decide if they go to print or not, and believe me, novels written by people who aren't very bright or who clearly don't have much of an education tend to suck.

Finally, my experience of arts degrees has tended to show that people usually have fewer illusions about their artistry by the end than they did beforehand. I know lots of people who, having 'got it out of their system' at Uni, then go on to find perfectly normal middle-class jobs that aren't whatever it was they originally wanted to do, and are glad of having had the chance to learn about the subject and have a go at it while they were young. Of those that remain, many tend to be successful, as is the case for most of my coursemates from Uni.

> but if the guy who painted the thing could come up with some better drugs or treatment plans for cancer, then fuck you I'd rather have him do that.

Life isn't just about catering to others in the best way possible. It is finding a balance between self satisfaction and helping others. If somebody is capable of becoming a doctor but their true passion is art, they will probably make mediocre doctors while living an unsatisfied life. There isn't a shortage of people who are willing and wanting to pursue life preserving fields, and unless you believe in destiny or "god-given gifts", some potential scientist who chooses to be an artist isn't suddenly depriving the world of a cancer drug. Other people will do it eventually.

Both science and many art degrees require great effort and intelligence, and intellectually, people who focus on either could probably perform moderately well in the other (assuming they are willing to apply their work ethic to the other field).

I think a lot of people don't understand the effort, intelligence, and analytical ability that is required to be good in an artistic field. I don't have much of a dog in the fight since my degree is for the dumbest of the dumb (business field), but I know enough about each to recognize that both are very difficult and if you don't have passion for them, you're wasting your life.

>>318
Well said. I do want to make it clear here that I have no problem at all with science degrees (or business/vocational degrees for that matter) and it goes without saying that they're very hard work and require a lot of effort and a particular kind of intelligence. In this sense, this isn't an 'arts vs science' debate, because as far as I can see nobody's saying that science doesn't require intelligence or is worthless. It's just that the same could be said of the arts.

>>317
>>318
Does society push you toward your major, or were you going to choose what you chose anyway. Some people are driven towards a specific goal, they know what they want to do, and others are pushed by outside forces. They get a degree because it's a "hot" field or because their parents make them. I honestly don't know which category most people fall under. Or if any of this is even a thing.

We're talking about a culture that tells you to express yourself even if you have nothing substantial to express. And you should get paid for it. Doing something artsy so that you can sit on your ass and have your ego stroked all day.

Let's split the arts into two. The showbiz arts and the cultured arts. Either way a lot of the craft is just showmanship and bullshitting an audience. Even authors have to be somewhat charismatic. And occasionally something good and meaningful and insightful comes out of all this mess, occasionally.

I'm not saying that all of the cultured arts are bad. If you want to devote your life to being an opera singer or writing about history, good. It's just when your intentions aren't as noble and selfless that the idea of an art degree (for some people) sounds stupid.

It's how you use the degree, is what I could have said instead of any of this other stuff.


Wow, my English is fucked.

>>320
To be honest, I've come across more people who've been pressured into science/business degrees by parents and fashions than arts ones. By the time you get to university level, most people are genuinely committed to actively pursuing that career, and those that don't tend to either drop out fairly quickly or find some way of using their degree as a stepping-stone into the career they want, whether that's through some sort of conversion course or even just using the skills they're learned in a different way. A friend of mine decided to train as a social worker after our degree and the drama experience actually comes in very handy for him.

Yes, you get some people who think that as soon as they've done their BA in Performance Studies from the Second University of Podunk that they're going to immediately become a world-famous actor with no further effort, but quite frankly, you get idiots in any subject, science and arts alike. There are people who think that a business degree will enable them to run a company, law students who anticipate being a barrister the moment they graduate, physics students who believe NASA will open its doors to a humble BSc... That's not a problem with the subject. It's just people's misconceptions of what a degree will do for them in terms of their career.

If it were the case that most arts students go to Uni expecting that over the course of their BA they'll receive all the training they'll need to become an internationally-renowned star artist, then I would be able to see where detractors were coming from. As it stands, arts subjects attract a massive amount of vitriol and scorn from maths and science students and I simply don't understand what their problem is.

>>321
>As it stands, arts subjects attract a massive amount of vitriol and scorn from maths and science students and I simply don't understand what their problem is.

Hard to say. I think some of it comes from a lack of understanding, particularly in the US (that's the only place I can form an opinion on) where people who are good at artistic endeavors are labeled as talented, implying that they are just naturally good at it and have to put in little or no effort to succeed. Plus, some science/math/whatever types might view the arts as easy relative to what they have to do. I think a lot of this comes from ignorance, since most good artists (keep in mind that I am referring to GOOD trained artists, not an actor who thinks talking loudly and with a gay lisp makes you a master thespian or a woman who thinks wiping her bloody tampon on printer paper is art) put a lot of time into learning how to do what they do. Out of the arts, I'm most familiar with drawing, and I know that takes a lot of study, analysis, and practice to be any good. Perspective, anatomy, composition, light, color, and design are not just fanciful things that all artists naturally know, they are subjects that have been studied for quite some time and most artists have to undergo great effort to learn them. Art is not as subjective as most people seem to think nor is it just pure creativity. An artist in any field with good, learned technical skills can produce good art. Some people make it big with bullshit like presenting a urinal as art, but that is a fluke and is hardly indicative of the effort that most artists put into their crafts.

Science and the like, on the other hand, are always stressed as things that must be studied and learned. They require a great deal of effort and meticulous study, but everybody knows that, even the artist types. The fruits of these endeavors are often referred to as great achievements, the result of hard work, trial and error, study, and to a certain degree smarts (meaning talent). Artistic achievement on the other hand seems to almost always be referred to as a result of great talent, which greatly discounts the effort put into being able to create the finished product.

In short, I think the disdain comes from certain people thinking the arts to be useless and artists to be lazy folk who just coast on something they happen to be naturally good at.

>>322
As good an explanation as any. As you say, of course, both arts and science require a blend of talent and effort, and contrary to popular belief, arts subjects at university tend to involve a lot more intellectual analysis of the subject than actually doing it in any case. You generally don't learn much about how to act or paint or write when studying drama or art or literature. Rather, the focus tends to be on criticism and understanding the processes behind them.

Basically, you can't teach talent, and people who plan university courses tend to be smart enough to realise that. I'm sure there ARE some rubbish arts courses that are useless and don't demand much effort, in much the same way there are some science courses that do the same - generally dodgily-named ones like "Human Science Studies" at low-end universities - but the better universities have standards to maintain and couldn't get away with creating a course that you could just sleep through and gain nothing from.

>>323
> You generally don't learn much about how to act or paint or write when studying drama or art or literature

While that may be true of drama, I don't know if that is entirely true of the other two things you mentioned. A lot of majoring in a drawing or painting field involves constant drawing and time in the studio or outside, drawing from nude models, drawing still lifes, studying anatomy and perspective, how to use the mediums, etc. I assume writing is similar, learning the basics of good story telling and whatnot. Where creativity comes in is how you use those techniques, and even that I think can be learned. I think that talent doesn't really matter that much in the long run if you have the dedication and interest.

I'll take your word on drama, though, since I know nothing about acting.

>>324
Nah, for the most part I agree with you, and you do learn some practical skills in a university drama course. It's got quite a strong academic focus too, though. Art college seems to be more analogous to going to drama school (rather than doing a Uni degree), by the looks of it.