Ateliê do Centro: How an art school in Brazil turned into a cult in 2016
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At a high enough level, all schools break down the poor people who sign up for them and build them back up again. This is somewhat understandable if said school is for something life-changingly important like medicine or surgery, but the truth is that few schools seem to take more pleasure in this than those that teach art.
Not for nothing is the Central School of Speech and Drama in London nicknamed “Central School of Screech and Trauma” by the people who’ve suffered through it, and the same is true of several art schools across the world as well. This seems to make perfect sense on the surface. After all, not only is the pursuit of art as a career an incredibly tough one that you need a thick skin for, but there’s also this idea that to create great art, you first have to suffer.
These schools offer that in spades, and yet none of them have done so quite as literally as Ateliê do Centro, an art school that was operational in São Paulo, Brazil, for 20 years. It was the brainchild of the artist Rubens Espírito Santo, who also ran the school as the equivalent of its head teacher. I say equivalent because there wasn’t really any official hierarchy in the school. In fact, there wasn’t really an official anything about it.
Espírito Santo claimed that the school began life as nothing more than a notice on the communal board of his apartment block and grew from there. Thus, it was never an officially sanctioned school – at least, this was something that the school claimed with pride, it was a collective of like-minded souls united in the pursuit of artistic excellence, and nothing could get in the way of working with Espírito Santo to make each person who signed up the best artist they could be.
If this is beginning to sound like a cult, you’re right to be suspicious.
Read more https://dangerousminds.net/art/how-an-art-school-in-brazil-turned-into-a-cult-2016/
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