Which is not to say that the department has no guiding principles or that there isn t a relatively identifiable sensibility among the faculty, whether consciously cultivated or not. One nationally recognized, L.A.-based artist calls it bad boy art. Kelly doesn t disagree, although she prefers the term transgressive, paradoxically bestowing a patina of respectability to an art that s all about disrespect. This department is about pulling together diverse tendencies and making them gel in a postmodern hybrid. It s not about consensus, Pittman stresses.
Consensus brings about the lowest common denominator.
Our strength is that we have a very willful, very professional, very acclaimed and very contentious faculty. That s what makes the school interesting. At UCLA, says McCarthy, we re dealing with the present, with what it means to be an artist today. To those outside the art world, being an artist typically means one of two things. The first is the Romantic notion of the artist as some sort of secular prophet through whom visions of an imagined world are given form.