Promoted as a “professional university” with traditional departments specializing in commercial photography, product design, graphic design, 3D (glass, ceramics, and jewelry design) and fashion-orientated textiles in the mix with “fine art” departments such as printmaking, painting, sculpture, and photographic/electronic media, The Degree show at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen proved how fractured the concept of art could be.

Context shapes everything, and the context of a degree show is never to judge any particular work or student, but to get a sense of that particular graduating year, and to get a scope of the school’s vision and tutelage. 

Finding the most imagination in the department of Printmaking that resembled more of an interdisciplinary program with a close second in Sculpture for the same reasons, my overall walk through of Gray’s was tinted by the previous night’s Huntly Art Reader discussion that always eventually brings up the dreaded question of “What is Art?”

There was one perspective to move away from naming the public interventions and socially engaged events as “art” — as that limits a vast majority of how people will experience and engage with these moments — but alternately, can we then reach a point where we no longer blindly accept everything we see inside of galleries as “art” as that also limits a vast majority of prescribed cultural experiences?

Gray’s Degree Show made no distinction between applied and fine arts, evident through consistently under developed artist statements. Within the spectrum, the most under developed Department was in fact Painting, where the absence of concept was superseded only by the absence of technical skill.  

Rarely does art offer both excellence in concept and skill, but usually artists are good at one or the other. The Painting Department didn’t seem to offer any hope in either stream (and an evening out after in a restaurant whose walls were lined with a popular Aberdeen-based landscape painter shined a new and unforgiving light onto the situation) so perhaps marketing courses can be borrowed from the business stream of Robert Gordon University, as in lieu of artistic standards, we live in an age where we can still become successful and professional artists if taught the art of marketing and selling our selves. And reciprocally, the business and economics of our everyday can be inspired more by thinking outside of repetition and standardization. Case in point, the exclusive VIP tent for the sponsors was in fact quite boring on the inside, making this discrete and exclusive space a poor setting to experience and understand the influence of art. Selling the esteem of art does nothing good in the long run if not paired with the promotion of understanding why art has esteem in the first place.