art skool

This is an image from Daniel Clowes' 'Art School Confidential', its deadly accurate - describing art school types - wistful hippies, angry lesbian radicals, beatnik modernists etc etc - the fashions may have dated but the typologies remain.
So Art School - that process of education and transformation - did, I came to realise, imbue in me a set of values, ideas and tastes that have stayed with me ever since. The stuuf that I like to surround myself with [plaster casts/bits of coral/white things] refers to several traditions from classical sculpture and the process of drawing from casts to modernists ideals about form - even Peter Blake's Museum of the white. My taste for these things is not innate but acquired and carries with it associative value and pretence. Art School taught me how to use 'specialist language' - so that I could talk knowingly with other people in the know - I learned the codes, like never to use the word 'nice'. Although using the word nice now - is post ironic, acceptable - I now know so much that I can use the word nice to describe a piece of work in the full and certain knowledge that the person that I am talking with knows that I do not really mean that the work is merely 'nice'. So tastes and the way that I expressed them have moved away from the Edwardian semi in the midlands - they are now much more urbane and sophisticated, I am the product of several art schools - I have been through my reactionary phase [actively encouraged!] and come out of it the other side. This is simplistic - but my question is to what extent do institutions like the art school shape taste and values.