When people asked me what study I was doing,

and I told them I was studying at the Art Academy,

they usually responded with, Oh yeah, I didn’t expect that from you. That really annoyed me, and I wondered how an artist in their imagination looked.

I think that the image that prevails is a rather entrenched and prejudiced one. But why does this image still stand? My answer is that the artists and the teachers at the academies keep this image alive themselves.

During my time at the art academy, I saw people

who behaved ordinary and looked normal during the propaedeutic year completely changed. They wanted to adapt to the majority group. And once belonging to that elite group, they showed snobbery and got attitude problems. For example, when I wished them a good morning, they suddenly raised their eyebrows and thought this was weird.

And then the teachers who have to train you to become an independently functioning artist. When I took off my dustcoat out of respect when discussing my work, they asked me if I was ashamed of it. And the jabs underwater when it turned out that one's choice of music is different from the rest.

In between the hustle and bustle of our final year, our exam year, in a six meetings course, they offered to teach us how to be an enterprising artist. But long before this, there was some sort of unspoken rule not to talk about money in the context of art.—As if it could hurt your art. The best example is that one teacher (herself an artist) accused me of not possessing an artist’s mentality during an assessment of the work. What exactly is an artist mentality? This lady had a clear, unambiguous picture of which one was not allowed to deviate.

It is a pity that the group of people who could change this long-established image, and of whom one expects to be open-minded, who I thought opposed the wrongs in society, that precisely this group of people shows xenophobia and prefers to leave things as they are.

And that they do not approach things independently and autonomously, as they do in a status quo-like group, and consequently again becomes a certain group of people. And this way creating a box for themselves and in which then all artists should fit in, with the consequence that the inveterated idea of who or what an artist is, remains.

That is why I wanted to hear from people in the Netherlands what their idea of an artist is. And whether it was all as dramatic as I experienced it.

In all provinces of the Netherlands, I asked a random person to answer this question. I used that one answer for this booklet, so despite what the answer was,

I didn’t ask another person in that particular city.

Kim Engelen, December 1998