In my years as a student at a top-tier LA art school, now more than a decade ago, we only spent a single class period openly discussing the practicalities, logistics, and pressures of what a “real” career as a contemporary artist actually looked like. I remember my classmates clamoring for honest advice in an academic environment that seemed designed to hide its internal mechanics behind an Oz-like shroud, pointing us instead to abstract, decoy concerns like semiotics and psychoanalysis. As if Freud or de Saussure could save you when you couldn’t pay your student loans back.