Robert Storr

In an interview in The Art Newspaper, Robert Storr, critic, curator and dean of the Yale School of Art, was asked "what kind of advice are you giving art students now?"

Storr: I'm telling them that this is actually a fine time to be in art school because, when I was in art school, when a lot of people I admire were in art school in the 1960s and 1970s, there was no money. If you go into it knowing that you will probably not be rewarded lavishly, but you can in fact continue to work, you're o a much better footing than if you go into it trying to make a huge impact when you're 23 or 24, and then maintain that for the next 60 years. You know Jonh Baldessari is someone whom everyone admires, but people by and large forget that he destroyed all of his "successful work" and started all over again. I'm interested in people who make good art, whenever they make it, and I think a lot of the best artists today are late bloomers. I'm a big fan of both Raoul De Keyser and Tom Nozkowski, who I put in the Venice Biennale (2007). Tom is 65 and Raoul is 78 and neither one of them really hit it until they were way past the age when most people think it would be the end of your career.

TAN: Maybe there's less of a focus on the cult of youth.

Storr: There isn't less of a focus yet, but it's going to dawn on people that it's not working. It's always nice to be a coming attraction, but it's murder to be a has-been. If it hasn't happened for you yet, you can at least console yourself with the idea that it might. It's a fashionable world and even good artists go out of fashion. If you've never really thought about what you're going to do when you go out of fashion because you've never been out of fashion, it's much harder to take than if you've gradually come into your own, gotten through difficult times and know that you can survive.