Painting a Jobless Picture: 100,000 Resumes, 500 Jobs
Few sights are so dispiriting as a crowded unemployment office. One was set up yesterday In the lobby of the Washington Hilton. By noon it had received 100,000 resumes from thousands of art historians and artists, many of whom had come to stand in line for a mere 500 jobs.</br></br>"TheyÛªre all good kids," said one observer, and sure enough they were. All had gone to college, all had done their homework and earned advanced degrees. But now they stood in line for hours, their feet hurt and their eyes were dull.</br></br>If you visited the 63d Annual Meeting of the College Art Association of America yesterday you could have seen that industry known as academic art abandoning its young.</br></br>"Our profession has overpopulated itself," the critic Max Kozloff told his listeners. "ItÛªs strangling for that reason." No one disagreed.</br></br>At hundreds of colleges and universities, thousands of professorsÛÓlots of whom have tenureÛÓare training artists and historians for Jobs that donÛªt exist.