We secretly already know that art school is where the cultural credit line of liberal capitalism comes to a dead end
For all its dramatic potential, the art school has never been the subject of a blockbuster. Terry Zwigoff’s 2006 Art School Confidential, in which the star student painter’s career and love prospects were hampered by a string of campus murders, was a flop. It turns out nobody wants to watch an adolescent solving crimes on canvas.
In Martine Syms’s art-school-insider satire The African Desperate (2022), which follows the MFA artist Palace Bryant’s (Diamond Stingily) graduation day, clichés such as ‘the work’ or dramatic jeopardy are long gone. Palace’s final exhibition consists of an upturned bucket and a piece of Himalayan rock salt and looks more like the work of an overzealous set designer than an artist. She barely bothers to defend her work to the panel of examiners, only halfheartedly invoking her race – and confusing the African ‘diaspora’ with ‘desperation’ – for something to say. But this is a 100-percent-pass-rate industry, so nobody corrects her, and Palace’s professors laud her with inconsequential citations from en-vogue Black thinkers (Fred Moten, Édouard Glissant). If this seems like an anticlimax, it’s because the prior three years on the idyllic Hudson Valley, New York, campus probably weren’t much either.
Before Palace can escape this purgatory of surplus creativity, performative theorising and lazy personal relationships to return to the ‘real life’ of caring for her ailing mother, she has to get through the tedious formality of the graduation party. This unfolds as one might expect: there’s bad music, drink, drugs – someone mentions Anna Tsing’s artworld bestseller The Mushroom at the End of the World (2021) as an excuse for a psilocybin drop – and an inconclusive sexual plot that doesn’t even manage a handjob in the parking lot. Everybody is trying so hard to look like they’re not trying that they nearly succeed. But even as she sports her best ‘I would prefer not to’ grimace, Palace insists that she’s the star of the show even though she’s above it. Nobody disagrees, presumably because they all feel like this too.
If Syms’s art school and its cast of characters appear ‘cringe’, it’s not only because they are astutely observed (Syms studied at Bard, also in the Hudson Valley) but because we secretly already know that art school is where the cultural credit line of liberal capitalism comes to a dead end. There’s a pleasure in watching a bunch of thirty-somethings trying to reckon with this, on the off-chance that they find a workaround.
We know that this is unlikely: Palace might have a New York solo show lined up, but she has yet to produce any of the culture that would make the artworld – the ‘world’, even – bearable for her, or indeed for us. If she doesn’t, all the narcissism, detachment and aimlessness of American Millennialism will have been for nothing.
But frustratingly, the same qualities sometimes make for exceptionally good art. Syms knows this and turns them into aesthetic matter to create a heartfelt portrait of her peers. The film is no advert for art-school student-loan debt, but if Syms can do this at the fringes of the gallery and cinema, it would be unfair not to root for Palace too.
