How relevant is an arts degree in today's technology dependent world? Write your opinion. Use reasons and specific examples to support your answer.

Without any doubt, the world has changed during the past century, and forms of art have changed with it. In visual forms K. Malevich and V. Kandinsky are probably the most notorious figures of contemporary art. Movement called expressionism they have postulated in the beginning of 20th century led to establishment of such movements as minimalism, art-deco and, the most arguable, conceptualism art. Emergence of photo and video technologies has brought well-known for today's audience photography and cinema kinds of art. Contemporary art is exteremely contextual. Uneducated people make fun of 'Black square' saying that it be drawn by a child or claim that Duchant's 'Fountain' is not art. However each such peace is a message and artist tries to speak through their art (Malevich has put the former piece in place of orthodox icon of Maria the virgin). Before sharing messages, the most of abstract and conceptual artists have spent thousands of hours studying and reproducing classics works. Kandinsky started with impressionism but overgrown it eventually. Moreover, an iphone, IKEA furniture and MCDonalds decor do have their expressionism roots. So, conceptual does not mean effortless or meaningless. In order to start creating contemporary pieces artist still needs to study proportion, composition, light, scenery and other topics. While degree is not necessary to study these, schools of art have been evolving for centuries, and achieving success in those areas might become exteremely slow without expert guidance. For academic music 20th century has started with Messiers and Schoenberg's dodecaphonic and serialism experiments. 50s-70s went through acoustic, sound engineering and synthesis ideas of I Xenakis, K Stockhausen, J Cage, L Ferrari, T Riley and others composers leading to quarter-tone and natural scales. Cage and Xenakis did not have formal training, indeed origin of such terms as aleatoric and music-concréte belong to them. Needless to say, dozens of jazz musicias, for example J Coltrane, W Kelly and W Montgomery, also did not study music in college. However their ideas have shaped almost all jazz improvisational language. We forgot to mention such forms of art as visual-acoustic, lights art and traditional photo. These forms also require technical competence in addition to artistic training in order to succeed. Concluding, it is difficult to say if formal art degree is a requirement. However, going through some of new forms of art, it can be seen that art education is at least as relevant as it was 1 century before. Emergence of technologies has made art more ubiquitous, technical-oriented and skill-demanding for artist, so saying that arts degree is irrelevant today would be a mistake.