Why is this board so dead?

I bet you can't.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wollheim 

art is less relevant than it should be, art departments are closing all the time because the emphasis is on academia rather than artistic pursuits. I think the fear of economic comfort dissuades people from doing it. It also used to be a male dominated path and the art world is still coming to terms with the fact more women than men are involved. Despite talent places like st martins will still prefer to take a male over a female student

I work in the art department at a university and for the last few years there have consistently been more women starting art degree courses than men. This year, it's a 65:35 ratio. If anything, the pendulum needs to start swinging back the other way again.

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thats what I just said. But women are still not being taken seriously enough for places like St Martins and then commercially men still dominate even though more women are doing it.

Such elitist institutions are overrated anyway, but give it a few more years and they'll see a demographic change too.

History guarantees that there will always be more works by men than women sold, but if we look at works produced in the last 20 years or so then things are, finally, evening up. I expect things to swing more towards women in fact, as the recent "bulge" of women art students make their presence as working artists felt.

The saddest thing for me is that 90% of art students end up in a career unrelated to art.

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It almost guarantees a path to becoming a well known artist. Its true that most of us wont be doing art after uni simply because its such an elitist route. It angers me when nonsense like Hirst makes millions when there are artists better than him giving up because they cant make a living from it.
We have to do work experience as part of our degree so getting into competitions, galleries, fairs etc is part of the syllabus but it generally does nothing

Getting into exhibitions can be an expensive business and it puts a lot of people off. For many of them you have to pay to even put your pictures forward for consideration and then they might not even get shown and if they do they probably won't sell. And that's without the cost of the materials. I know lots of artists, and they all have their houses stuffed with pictures that haven't sold. One of them says he is going to make a bonfire of them because they just remind him of Failure. I really think he will do it soon.

But don't lose heart. If you have talent, keep at it but make sure you spend more rime on marketing than art. These days, a professional artist spends 25% of their time on art and 75% on marketing.

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