Went to the VCA Graduate Exhibition today. Wasn't terribly impressed by the work on display, but was rather taken with the idea of studying there myself. The MFA program is two years long. That would be nice.

Assuming they'd be willing to take someone like me. The VCA site says some alarming things like "... contribute to the understanding of current art practice and associated theories and of contemporary society and its culture", and the course descriptions are fairly excluding to someone who isn't Qualified (the track I'd be on, as far as I can see, is a Grad Dip in visual arts, and then an MFA, which is three years and around $30,000). On the other hand, the work at the Graduate Exhibition was all presumably the work of Qualified Artists, and none of it was particularly good. The facilities, tuition and institutional focus are attractive. The pomposity and elitism aren't (although the latter is at least understandable as a desperate last-ditch defensive measure nowadays when everyone with a camera is a photographer and everyone with a blog is a writer). Did I mention that thirty grand is a lot of money? And if I spend three years in training, I'd better come out the other end pretty goddamn good at what I do.

Incidentally, you can't do a PhD without writing what amounts to a thesis about the work you produce, which automatically disqualifies me. The wordiest justification of the work I tend to want to do that I can come up with is "it needed to be done", which is hard to pad out into a page and a half, never mind a thesis. And it's not like I'm a stranger to academic writing (or even pompous, overblown, overcomplicated writing. Ahem).