Post #3796201

As a side rant: I'm floored that SO MANY folks with art degrees want to be tattooists. Why? Why? It's like getting a business degree to be a stipper -- you'll be a great salesperson, sure, but it's a shitty job with no benefits, it tanks when the economy tanks, and it destroys your body long-term. I tattoo and make things for people because I have no education. Because I learned to draw from ex-cons, and grew up idolizing the resident tattooist for the gang all of my neighbors and friends were a part of. But now apprenticeships are even further from reach than they've ever been because this industry has been jacked up by middle and upper middle class kids who -- like the middle class kids who took over the good strip club jobs because their parents enrolled them in expensive pole classes -- have made it so that apprenticing an artist is an industry, and not something you do because you're bringing in a better artist or filling a shop spot with someone who is really, genuinely going to last and be a good fit and do good for their clients. And it's not just apprenticeships. The kids with parent networks and the networks they build through art school have every single advantage: from marketing mentorship to large followings coming out of art school from having the privilege of being a part of a large in-person cohort of fellow artists and mentors AND industry connections. They literally have the funds to pay to build a portfolio over several years and have mentorship all the while. And this goes beyond envy -- because while there's obviously still some envy here that I've not transcended, this is a class critique. Y'all think you deserve everything. You weren't willing to just be a tattoo enthusiast. Reality TV and Instagram made it cool, and you wanted that. But like, this industry was literally never for you until you took the entire thing and turned it into a hobby art collection for the middle and upper middle class -- who now can get good white collar tech jobs fully tatted while those of us rocking low-brow shit still can't get a good job bartending. So anyway, that's today's rant on class consciousness. I know it's not as lovely as most of what I share, so I'll return to that later on :)