What is the big payoff in art? There are art exhibitions around the
world that can make an artist internationally known. Major museums can
purchase works and present one-person exhibitions. There are a few prizes,
like the McArthur Genius Award, that serve something like the Pulitzer in
literature or the Nobel in science.
Art should motivate a person intrinsically; there should be no need
for an extrinsic payoff. This is the ideal. I suppose, when I was little,
some praise from my family or friends for a good drawing was enough to
encourage me. But that didn’t last when I got into schools and I needed
to think of something to do, something meaningful and moneymaking.
Art was the only thing I was good at, I thought, when I was a boy.
From my teachers and family I got praise for my drawing ability. I could
also do a good job in crafts. I chose to try for a job in commercial art,
and in college I worked for the good grades and portfolio that would get
me into a professional school.
Instead of commercial art, however, my college teachers told me to try
college teaching. This meant making art for its own sake, and selling it
for its own value. That started me in the art game, when showing and
selling artworks was validation and recognition and the cash payoff.
The college degree came, and then another—both payoffs for the work
I did as a student in undergraduate school and grad school. The degrees
were a small payoff compared to getting a job teaching college. I was
fortunate; my work paid off and I was recommended as a new hire at the
University of Washington in Seattle.
My wife and I could not have been happier. Seattle was always our
dream city. Also, I narrowly missed being drafted and put into service
during the Viet Nam conflict. From 1966 to 1967 I did my best at my new
job. My work paid off in the past, but there was still uncertainty.
Nineteen sixty-eight was the year I got my big break. It was
summertime and I’d just finished my second year of teaching at the
University of Washington. At the rank of Instructor, I faced the third
pitch in the game of college art teaching. The windup came in the spring.
I had to do well in my forthcoming third year or I would not be
promoted to Assistant Professor, and that usually meant, Start looking
for a new job. I was getting good reviews from my students, I’d had
two one-man shows at a reputable gallery (The Seligman, now the Seders in
Seattle), and my work had been accepted in a few good shows nationwide.
The clincher in 1968 was on the regional level: The Pacific Northwest
Arts and Crafts Show, in Bellevue, was recognized as a national affair
even though it showed mostly northwest works. It was the second oldest
summer art festival in Washington state and by far the biggest. Prizes
amounted to thousands of dollars.
I won first place in prints and second place in drawing. To add to the
value of this, it was juried by an international figure named Jan Van der
Mark. He had put together the Seattle World’s Fair Art Exhibition a few
years before and would be serving on the UW Art Faculty.
I think those awards helped sway the opinion of my colleagues at the
UW art school. They weren’t the only prizes I got in the summer festival
“game”, but I think they counted for the most. Today, the Bellevue
summer show is bigger than ever, but I never enter it any more. I’m
playing for bigger game.
As a footnote to this, I feel today that there needs to be another
kind of festival for young artists, like I was in 1968. It put me over the
top. Today I doubt that the prizewinners at Bellevue get much more than
the cash and recognition. The link between payoffs like that and, for
example, a college art teaching career, are not as strong as they used to
be.
Now I’m in the third phase of my life career, and I’m wondering
what the big payoff is for me today. I look around at young people and I
wonder the same thing. What could they be thinking? According to my
research for my current project (a computer-based game) the so-called Games
Generation learned from playing video games that if you put in the
hours of practice and master the game you get immediate rewards.
“What you do determines what you get, and what you get is worth the
effort you put in.” That’s what Marc Prensky observed in his book,
Digital Game-Based Learning. The payoff in computer games is immediate and
clear. I'm not so sure about the art game.
Prensky is careful to point out that three generations are converging
in today’s economic outlook and workplace sociology. They are the older
generation (that’s me), the Baby Boomers and the Games
Generations. I’m an anomaly: A 60-ish artist and teacher inventing a
game as I play it. I need to know what is the payoff? Will it work for
Gamers? Will the payoff be worth the effort?
If yes, then I win the big payoff. I’ll be like Richard Garfield,
the math teacher-turned-inventor of Magic: The Gathering or the
Miller brothers who created Myst and Riven. Dungeons and
Dragons and Monopoly come to mind; the inventors of those games
have all contributed something to my thinking as I work on Emeralda:
Games for the Gifts of Life. Mine is an asset management and legacy
transfer game. The payoff is more of the kind Marc Prensky describes as
payoff over the long term (and long-term is not payoff enough today, he
says).
There needs to be something immediate and clear in a digital game when
a person gets his or her award. Like when a person is playing against the
computer in Solitaire or Chess. You know when you’ve won,
and it’s worth the patience it took to get there.
My theory is this: All my life I’ve been patient, willing to work
for a payoff over the long term. In a way, I suppose it was inevitable
that I should be the one to invent (or discover) Emeralda. That, for me,
is the big payoff.
Now, how do I give this away?
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Bill H. Ritchie, Jr. is an Itinerate Professor based in Seattle. He
taught college (UW) and after promotion to full professor of printmaking
and media arts, he resigned at 43. He then launched several teaching,
research and practice companies. In 1992 he discovered Emeralda, a fantasy
region accessible only by computer. He invented the rules-of-play and
created an operating system for online interactivity for himself.
He writes for the benefit of discipline, using a PDA when he's
wandering around and a desktop PC to organize his essays. He has a
thousand or more saved, which you can see listed on the ten
"islands" on the Web. An example is www.seanet.com/~ritchie/eszine.html
For
further information contact Bill H Ritchie via e-mail at ritchie@seanet.com.
His professional Web site is at www.seanet.com/~ritchie
and his first portal for Emeralda is www.artsport.com.
The company name is Emeralda Works, 500 Aloha, Seattle, WA 98109. He can
be reached by telephone at (206) 285-0658. Statistics: 1231
Words. 5653
Characters. 2
Pages. ies30604
Learning the Games Big Payoff. ©2002 Bill H Ritchie, Jr.
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