As Blue Curry so correctly surmised in his starring role in the Goldsmiths-based reality TV series 'Goldsmiths - But is it art?' about students at Goldsmiths: There are hungry, young bucks snapping at our heels and the galleries are already looking over our shoulders to see who's coming along with cooler names and more recent pan flashes. Fortunately he was able to get some work in Five Hundred Dollars on Vyner Street so can consider himself a practicing artist and can think about his next step.
Some others weren't so lucky: the average gap year is now barely more than a few weeks and the wrong career decision can be made far earlier than that. Statistically the useful life of a conceptual artist is now considered shorter that that of a ballet dancer, peaking at 23 years, 5 months and tailing off into jaded, repetitive bitterness at around 26 and a bit.
It falls to the parents to pre-empt the artistic nature of their child and start putting in the graft. Once little Apocalypse has been correctly named there are catchment areas to move to and on-line, pre-church classes to appease the vicar. The current waiting list for a Frieze Art Fair internship currently stands at 16 years so sign up for that the moment young Conceptua does her first Paul McCarthy performance aged two.
What though, for the lucky ones? Twelve of them, holed up in an old sewage works in Seven Sisters, sleeping in shelters they made from tyres and daub (and soon to be featured in W*llp*p*r magazine). They've made their websites, uploaded both their installations and scanned all the pages from their sketchbooks, what is their next step?
It's wikipedia no less. Once the preserve of people who had, like, done something, now it's the new facebook page. Mr. curry's got a wikipage of course, but then he's been on the telly, let's have a look at some normal people.
Actually I couldn't find one of them up there. Not as a fault of our frantically self-promoting young graduates, no, I'm sure they're whipped in a networking frenzy, but at a step back from that. Search as I could I was unable to find a list of 2010 fine art graduates. RCA, goldsmiths, Chelsea - zilch. Slade showed me a video of bits and pieces but a basic written list was nowhere. Just because you're paranoid? looks like you're right Blue, you're purged, history, yesterday's news - there's only room for one class on that website, and that's tomorrow's.
In this month's Artvehicle, we look back at the long lost summer, with review of the best shows - Festoon at Stoke Newington Library, Tom Richards at the Pigeon Wing, and Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners: Works by Ulises Carrión at the The Showroom. We also have summer holiday postcards from Bucharest and Israel and an interview by yours truely with Ludovcia Gioscia.
Adrian Lee