Founders Note

Can Art be taught? Before I try to answer that question, I should answer another question that has annoyed most of us at some point of life. Why do most of the highly talented artists whom we know, miserably fail in their career as well as in their lives? This was a doubt that haunted me from my college days, when I embarked on my journey as an Artist, as an Actor, as a passionate practitioner of theatre! It grew with me in larger proportions during my FTII days in Pune where I met with shocking numbers of ‘artist disasters’… highly talented individuals who ended up as most unfortunate failures..with very high sensitivity and very low sensibility… complaining about how rude the society was with them. They finally find refuge in anarchism to end up as ‘creative disasters’. They try to break the existential bondages of time and space, claiming to be creative but destructing themselves and others, so also the community. When I started my film career as a cinematographer in 1998, I encountered more such tragedies. Some brutally bruised and battered; some veiled in impregnable ‘intellectual wrappers’, but torn and bleeding inside! Somewhere down the stream, I realized that talent is like water and art is like river or ocean. It is there everywhere, it is there inside everyone. But no community, no society or no individual will realize, recognize, respect or remunerate the Talent or the Artist unless it is moulded and chiseled into a ‘Design’ which is experiential for others, which can be presented in a given time and space to an audience. An Artist need not think of communicating to an audience but a Designer need to think of communicating to an Audience; whoever the audience be. Art has only a generic objective while Design has specific objectives.

Can light be seen? No. No one can see light unless it is applied on some surface. Light can be sensed only if it hits an object, similarly Talent can be sensed only if it hits an objective with a Design. And if someone fails to understand this vital difference between ART and DESIGN and the need to learn the craft of translating Art into Design, he is sure to fail. Once I got this answer – the meaning of Creativity and Productivity - I had always wished there should be somebody out there to tell this fact to those highly talented ones in the society, so that society shouldn’t lose those priceless Artists - the ones who would become the core drivers of its evolution and progression. ‘Though this is madness there is method in it!’. The true challenge of art education is moulding ‘methodically mad professionals or mad people with professional methods.’ This thought is the corner stone of the curriculum we follow in NEO. And today when I see the names of our students flash across the silver screen - in a surprisingly short time span after they pass out – I can confidently say, Art can be taught!. The Neo is confident..confident to create designs as well as designers. Come, share the confidence..the confidence to create!

Jain Joseph FTII, IIM

• Founder, Chairman and Managing Director