> You can also go to art school to make those social connections to the larger art world - the art world is nothing but a huge web of social ties. I found that

> You can also go to art school to make those social connections to the larger art world - the art world is nothing but a huge web of social ties. I found that part of it pretty dark and disgusting, really. I just wasn't willing to stab so many people in the back to get ahead. This is true of every profession. Politics is a part of human life. Academia is absolutely rife with this, business obviously; and you can argue that engineering and certain other professions are 'more' merit driven, but in the end this is only true at the bottom of the pile. Once you hit the threshold where you have sufficiently competitive domain knowledge, then the value of your position is determined by a balance of factors which begin to have more and more equal weight: Can you get along with anyone? Do you have a strong network which can help drive business? Can you sometimes make hard decisions? Can you formulate a larger view of the landscape? Of course these things count to a varying degree at all stages of a career, but there is either no such thing as a 'pure' meritocracy - because this is a fundamentally one-dimensional, naive view of the world; or it is a meritocracy by definition, and 'merit' is measure of outcomes.