>>I think some careers in the arts are less unrealistic for those coming from a more affluent background. Art history is a very Jackie Kennedy major, in a lot of ways. A successful career in that area depends on not just academic achievement but also is helped along by family connections and the ability to work for a very low salary and live in Manhatten.
>
>Amazingly, though, art history was the equally pointless thing to study back then and back there. That was truly a study for study's sake. On anything else, the pass rate was anywhere between 30 and 70% at the end of the first year (and "pass" was only relative, since 1968 rebellion the system softened and you didn't really have to pass all exams before the next semester, you could pass one or two or four later, depending on college's internal rules). On art history it was 100%... because everything they learned in first two years were several 4-semester courses ;).
>
>The one lady whom I knew that studied that, never got past 4th semester, and ended up as a slightly overeducated clerk in the City hall ;).
Ah, but if her daddy had been a patron of a major museum ...
I have friends who became curators etc. of major art collections or museums. Coincidentally, some of them became curators of collections or museums with the same name they had. But then, Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig's disease, so coincidence is not unknown ...
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.