My Life Is "Top Chef"

When people ask me about graduate school, I often compare it, for better or worse, to "Top Chef." Really, the similarities are uncanny: A group of 30 students, slightly larger than the roughly 16 on the show, with a studio course as each semester's centerpiece. We all work in the same space, each with his own desks, like the "Top Chef Kitchen." Assignments are distributed to us all at once, after the professor calls us into a huddle. As we work on them, the professors visit our desks to ask what we're doing and to make suggestions, aka Tom Colicchio's "sniff and sneer." We have various levels of reviews and critiques, leading up to "final review," when an outside panel of professionals visit to listen to five-minutes (or longer) presentations, just like the "celebrity chefs" who make cameos. Then, they compliment and/or criticize based on what they think.

Having real life resemble reality is an interesting experience, though sometimes a disheartening one because evaluations become as arbitrary and subjective as possible. If one professional's reaction is disdainful but another's is praiseworthy, you only experience one or the other based on pure luck. (Sometimes you have both.) If one professional finds nothing to like in anyone's projects, but you avoid him and receive a glowing review, that doesn't say much about your skills beyond having a good luck of the draw. Sometimes it's hard to learn much from these reviews, except: Life depends on luck as much as it does skill, and life is tough.

After glumly thinking about this on a recent weekend, I read Peter Schjeldahl's brief review of Urs Fischer's mid-career retrospective at the New Museum in the city. Among the rabidly harsh comments, here's the conclusion: "If you spend more than twenty minutes with the three-floor extravaganza, you’re loitering. The New Museum could just as well not have done the show while saying it did. The effect would be roughly the same: expressing a practically reptilian institutional craving for a new art star." That's it. Years of work by Fischer, a complimentary profile of him in the same magazine a few weeks earlier, accolades from many other sources and, bam, one of the country's biggest art critics tears you to shreds in three sentences. That's how the worlds of art, design and the physical environment work, I suppose. Better be able to shrug it off and go at it all over again.