France has long been regarded as one of the world’s great capitals of art. But what about the art schools built in such a country? Is the education they offer really as special as we imagine?
I have been living in France since 2016. I completed both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees at a French national art school, and I have since worked as both an artist and an exhibition curator.
In this article, I want to share my own analysis of French art education, based not only on my years as a student, but also on what I later experienced in the professional art world.
This article is divided into three parts:
- The French Art Education I Experienced
- What Happened in the Real Exhibition World
- Conclusion
1. The French Art Education I Experienced
When people think of France, Paris usually comes to mind first: the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées, cafés, cigarettes, and perhaps the stereotypically sharp gaze and slightly intimidating attitude often associated with Parisians.
Now imagine a school filled with those people as professors and students — and not just any students, but young artists struggling to create while often living on very little.
It sounds like it could be a rather cold and unforgiving environment.
But the French national art school I experienced was very different.
The professors were surprisingly approachable. They even used tu with students, the informal form of “you” in French. Rather than treating us simply as students beneath teachers, many professors interacted with us more like established artists speaking to emerging artists.
There seemed to be very little hierarchy between the person teaching and the person being taught.
Coming from Korea, where respect between teacher and student is traditionally taken very seriously, I initially found this almost strange. But as I participated in classes, that confusion gradually turned into understanding.
One of the central ideas in French art education, at least in my experience, was freedom of creation rooted in conceptual art.
I am not going to go deeply into the history of conceptual art here — who developed it, where it came from, or how it fits into the broader history of art. What matters for this article is that conceptual thinking forms an important foundation of education at many French Beaux-Arts schools.
To explain conceptual art very simply, imagine a teacup.
Physically, a teacup is simply an object used to hold tea.
But an artist might begin with an idea such as:
When I drink tea, I calm my mind. As the tea disappears from the cup, I imagine my negative thoughts disappearing with it. The bottom of the empty cup represents peace.
The artwork begins not with the teacup itself, but with the artist’s concept.
This means conceptual art naturally carries traces of the artist’s personal experiences. It also becomes a space filled with metaphors, symbols, and individual interpretation.
And this is where the role of the professors becomes important.
Their job is often to continuously draw stories out of the student’s life, listen to them, question them, expand them, and help the student transform those experiences into visual work.
But perhaps even more important is the emphasis on freedom.
France is famous for the values of liberté, égalité, fraternité — liberty, equality, fraternity — and that spirit can also be felt in its approach to art education.
What does freedom mean in an educational setting?
One example is the relative absence of the phrase:
“You are wrong.”
Of course, everyone lives according to their own values. A professor is still a human being and may personally find a student’s experience uncomfortable, immoral, strange, or difficult to understand.
But in my experience, most professors did not rush to judge the student’s experience itself or the emotions that came from it.
Instead, they asked:
How can this become an artwork?
How can this feeling be visualized?
How can this idea be developed further?
Even the exams reflected this freedom.
Rather than sitting for a traditional written exam, students would usually present and exhibit the body of work they had developed throughout the semester through conversations and critiques with professors.
The evaluation focused on questions such as:
Did the student actively develop and communicate their ideas during the semester?
Did those ideas actually appear in the work?
And did the final pieces still maintain visual and artistic strength?
This educational system can be an incredibly valuable experience for someone who thrives in that environment.
For someone who does not, it can also be a terrible one.
I was fortunate. This kind of education suited me much better than the systems I had previously imagined studying under in Korea, Singapore, or the United States.
And if I am completely candid, before I began working professionally and meeting artists from many different countries, I genuinely believed that French art education existed on another level.
I thought it was not simply different, but superior — something almost impossible to experience anywhere else.
That belief eventually changed.
2. What Happened in the Real Exhibition World
After spending five years completing my bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Beaux-Arts, I had become deeply absorbed in the world of conceptual art.
At one point, I even became arrogant about it.
I started to believe that conceptual art was the only kind of art that truly mattered, and that work without a strong conceptual foundation was little more than decoration or scribbling.
Then I began participating in actual exhibitions.
And I met other artists.
That changed my perspective.
Of course, the artists I met also had ideas, stories, and personal experiences behind their work. Their art was not meaningless or concept-free.
But in many cases, the conceptual element was simply less dominant than what I had been trained to prioritize.
And yet their works were often far more popular with visitors than mine.
My paintings might have contained layers of symbolism, personal narratives, and carefully constructed metaphors, but in my first group exhibition, I did not sell a single piece.
Was that only true for my first exhibition?
Unfortunately, no.
There were even art fairs where I watched other artists sell nearly everything they brought while I sold nothing.
So I started asking myself:
Why?
Over time, I came to believe that part of the answer was that I had become too deeply immersed in the very education I once considered so special.
When someone considers buying an artwork, the first thing they encounter is usually not the artist’s philosophy.
It is the image.
The visual impact comes first.
Something about the work has to catch the eye before the viewer becomes curious about the story hidden inside it. And when that story is finally explained, if it creates even a small emotional response, then perhaps the viewer begins imagining that work in their own home.
That is often when the wallet opens.
In other words, in a commercial exhibition context, visual attraction inevitably plays an enormous role.
When I finally understood this, it almost felt embarrassingly obvious.
Art is, after all, visual.
But the education I received at the Beaux-Arts approached things somewhat differently.
We were not taught:
“Make it beautiful.”
“Make people stop and look.”
Instead, we were encouraged to read philosophy, think deeply, develop ideas, interpret those ideas in our own way, and then transform those interpretations into artwork.
I do not remember receiving classes specifically focused on creating visual appeal for a broad public.
Even when professors gave aesthetic advice, that advice usually existed within the conceptual logic of the artwork.
Their goal was not necessarily to help us create something that would immediately attract the attention of a potential buyer.
This creates an interesting gap.
A graduate may leave art school highly trained in thinking, questioning, researching, and conceptualizing — and then enter the professional art world only to begin what feels like another long doctoral program:
learning how to create work that actually captures the public’s attention.
And that process can be difficult.
Sometimes the balance even shifts too far in the opposite direction.
An artist who once cared primarily about their own ideas may suddenly begin thinking more about what audiences want than what they themselves want to create.
Why?
Because now art is connected to survival.
Bills still have to be paid.
This is the dilemma many artists eventually face.
Some leave art entirely.
Others compromise with reality and discover that the art they want to make and the art they feel they need to make are no longer the same thing.
3. So, Is French Art Education Really That Special?
Before answering that question, perhaps we should first ask what “special” actually means.
For one person, special may mean unique.
For another, it may mean something absolutely necessary.
In the first sense, I do believe French art education is special.
At least among the educational systems I have personally encountered, I have rarely seen another environment that encourages students to think about art with such depth and freedom.
But if we ask whether this education is necessary, especially for someone who wants to become a commercially successful artist, my answer is different.
No.
I do not think it is essential.
Understanding conceptual art can certainly broaden an artist’s perspective. It can deepen the way they think about their own work and help them construct a more complex artistic language.
But an artist can still become an artist without it.
And in some cases, someone who gives greater priority to visual impact may even find it easier to attract buyers and achieve stronger sales.
An artist is still someone with a profession.
And a profession is not only a means of self-realization. It is also a way of surviving in the real world.
If your work allows you to express yourself but cannot support your life at all, that imbalance may eventually make life less fulfilling rather than more meaningful.
So if you are considering studying art in France, I hope you think carefully about what kind of artist you want to become.
French art education may offer you an extraordinary way of thinking.
But extraordinary does not necessarily mean universally necessary.
And before deciding to study here, I hope you have the chance to hear not only the romantic version of French art education, but also what can happen after graduation, when education meets the realities of the art market.
That is what I wanted to share through this article.
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