“Alexis Gros-Louis’ thesis, “Anticipating the State of Despair”, offers more than it demands. This sounds paradoxical at first because of the mandatory fee attached to accessing it. The financial obstacle to consuming this knowledge is kind of like a game, where the rules have been overturned, and where the players have suddenly switched positions. As in a staring contest that outlasts the play smiles, however, the seriousness of his proposition does not blink easily.

Gros-Louis documents how much he has already offered, and how the logic of art school forces certain individuals to offer more than others. Our understanding of this offering vibrates between symbolic and material, which is to say financial, registers. In the battle over the role of the university in neoliberal society, the value of university is often spoken of as exceeding the resulting job or grant. It is a life experience, something intangible, a school spirit. This nebulous space happens to be a one-size-fits explanation for the debt accrued in art school, where outputs and inputs unfortunately seldom line up. The economy of art school doesn’t make sense within the wider economy, if education is meant to relate in any equitable way to society (and let’s not forget, it was not always this way). It is hard to avoid such conclusions after reading Gros-Louis’ thesis. The intangible value of university is tainted by debt, creeping like a dye-marker in the psychic Northwest Arm. Gros-Louis’ experience of school demonstrates this, not as a fixation or as a sob story, but as self-reflection. Debt clads the world, letting us absently believe in its solidity, but to keep it at the forefront of one’s mind borders on the horrifying. All the simple, dumb objects we touch or legitimately purchase throughout art school are implicated, preparing for the promised jubilee like guests in Big Night (1996) waiting for the arrival of singer Louis Prima. (Spoiler alert: he never comes.) Importantly, Gros-Louis’ narrative also reaches out from the naked conflicts he recounts of the school bureaucracy, and points toward horizons beyond. Do prospects seem brighter out there? It’s a trick question, and I don’t mean that in a cynical way. Gros Louis’ offer mailed to various and sundry art institutions to buy up shares of his debt as an unlimited edition artwork is ambivalent. Of course, material and reputational returns wouldn’t hurt, but what Gros-Louis is articulating through this correspondence is rather the question of what value his debt has among the presumptive stakeholders in his relevant field. Gros-Louis knows this is an offer they can refuse. His selection of global art VIP addressees reveals the discontinuity between notions of art world success and what we actually learn at school. In an ideal world, I would love to claim the sacredness of this discontinuity. But the debt also creeps beyond.

Underscoring the sober version of institutional critique on offer, Gros-Louis chooses not to disavow completely the value of his degree. Instead, Gros-Louis has volunteered to host the phantoms that hold up institutions.

I see this work as extremely generous.”

— Michael Eddy