Angela Ashman rocks out with this article in The Village Voice about the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at NYU. The piece focuses on the realities–both grim and grandiose–the students face as their dreams and desires are filtered through an academic model, which traditionally implies a categorical, measurable success for students and their futures.

The real problem is that there should never be degree programs for artists. A degree means very little in terms of an artist’s actual talents or popular appeal. There has never been a an opera singer who got cast for his or her GPA. There has never been a work of art sold because the artists aced Western Civ. And there will never be a pop star who became a pop star because they graduated cum laude from Tisch.

Granted, the exposure certain educational programs afford students can make measurable differences in the opportunities available to artists (and I’m including writers here). The Yale influence in NY’s theater scene is only one example to speak of. But focusing on these kind of realities promotes the idea that the real art of art is the industry; the network and the transaction.

There is also an emphasis on career product, commercial outcome, rather than encouraging artists to look forward to the unpredictable experience of finding one’s way through life as an artist. There is a tone of disrespect for the artist’s path mixed with an assumption that without fame and commercial success there is no point to any of it. The students in the Clive Davis program are not shy about their wish to become famous; one of them casually admits to changing his style because of wariness that the persona he had chosen would not lead to mass appeal. And when it comes to the kind of music they are making–popular big-label studio albums whose only measure of value is the quality of the technology used to manufacture the music with few if any spiritual, social or philosophical concerns–they might be right; maybe there is no point without commercial success. There is a chance that these people cannot be called artists, because their work is so embedded in the established media culture that there is nothing artful about the work they produce, and since they are part of the status quo, there is an inherent inability to critique status quo, which is essential to the construction of art. The program is modeled on the big industry standard, the music is theoretically part of the industry in that sense, it is already homogenized. It is a firming of the break from the old fashioned notion that new music will organically change the overall shape of the industry, a loss so well lamented so long ago by Joni Mitchell in “Free Man in Paris.” It is a subliminal surrender to establishment cemented by an academic degree.

What American Idol has proved, above anything else, is that a simple hit can be manufactured from nothing given the right amount of media access and unlimited quantities of capital. Sure, you can generate a pop hit. But lasting appeal is less guaranteed, as we’ve already seen when it comes to Idol. Only Kelly Clarkson–the first winner–has anything of a pop star career going. Programs like this–including other reality competitions involving the arts and fashion–do a two-fold mind-fuck on young artists: they force a pageant-model on what is an inherently organic life experience, and they idealize the experience of succeeding within that model. So it’s not just that they play into the commonplace fantasies of aspiring artists that there is a structured path to sure-fired success, but then they encourage these artists to want to succeed in that way, by winning out in a cut throat, round-by-round, elimination-style pageant where their talents are laid before a panel of not-always-nice judges. Transcending that awful, often dehumanizing experience to come out the winner is now a goal in the minds of aspiring singers, designers, filmmakers and dancers across the nation.

But at least participants in reality shows aren’t asked to fork over $40,000 for the opportunity to participate in these competitions. (Christ, I hope I haven’t given the networks any funny ideas. With the mania surrounding idol and other reality shows, I’m sure people would pay top dollar just for the chance to see their dream fail on national TV.) Universities, however, are charging prospective artists what prospective stock brokers, lawyers, doctors and regular old business men and women are expected to cough up. And this is all enabled by the convergence of two enormous cultural trends.

The first of which is the virtually unlimited government student loan subsidies (to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year) that colleges rely upon to expand their student base . The students have to pay off the loans, leaving the universities virtually spotless and unaccountable participants as funnels of debt.

The second trend is an expanding upper class whose trust funds and other income sustain a growing number of arts students who will have no personal debt coming out of school. It is fair to say that the risks of spending so much money on an arts education are not the same for the first group of individuals as it is for the latter.

I wish Angela Ashman’s piece would have focused on that specific reality. There was no effort to disclose exactly how the students in the Clive Davis program were paying the $160,000 sum. I hope, for the students’ sake, that they are all backed by trust funds or parents’ bank accounts, or…scholarships. If not, the failure to succeed in this career model may be a greater real loss than not winning a Grammy.