E
on
for ork ngs he got benehe
aled ght it. ner nd ht, w-
esne y’s to re. on inckr de to nds ok. ads in dehy
ou We hrour hat ee-
CAMPUS LIFE ing myself playing with the new limited edition American Girl doll, Chrissa. Listen, the campus center wall debauchery looks ugly for no good reason. Just because it’s hung up and presented as an ofcial piece of art doesn’t mean we have to accept it unquestioningly. We don’t approach anything else this way, but for some reason, we see art and immediately stop thinking we should have opinions. It’s squiggles on a canvas! We call someone with bad ideas that can’t spell stupid and illiterate. Why don’t we say the same about art that fails equally? Flickr and the Internet’s inuence on the dispersion of knowledge may inuence values, but we can’t just start thinking every idea holds equal merit. I mean, what if we did the same thing with U.S. foreign policy? We could just start a war with some country in the Middle-East for some unarticulated reason, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and conveniently prot from their abundant oil reserves while failing to provide poor U.S. citizens with adequate healthcare. How messed up would that be? We must recognize that how we approach artistic ideas inuences our ability to differentiate between the good and the bad in every arena. We rely on a system of values to derive our culture and identity, the tools we use to construct meaning. The more considered and perfected our values are, the greater the meaning we can create. Without these
“
How can I focus on accomplishing anything when such a blatant failure assaults my senses faster than the reek of the quiet room bathroom right after a 90 pound girl drops a massive load?
societally established referents of meaning, we can’t even communicate collectively. I couldn’t rely on the outrageous connotations of “tits” to offensively draw you into my essay and hopefully make you laugh and think. Instead, words like “tits” and “breasts” and “mammaries” and “daddy’s little fun bags” become nothing more than a collection of worthless, squiggly lines on a piece of paper – tit nihilism. If we accept the campus center paintings as art, we contribute to the depressing leveling-off of meaning that isolates individuals by making it impossible to communicate. We end up with no mutually comprehensible mode of expression. Art should explore and beautify subtle distinctions, not homogenize them. The freedom of expression granted to art makes it an especially vital testing ground for new ideas. If a piece of artwork has no ideas or suggests ideas are dead, we cannot accept it, much less praise it. That would be
like loving your parents even if they didn’t pay for college. I think we should all want to live in a world that values the masterful expression of great thought and judge accordingly. Each human act, from oil painting to ling taxes should have established criteria for judgment because they all require thinking. The most talented and established practitioners in a eld should strive to improve those criteria. If a person hasn’t developed the necessary skills for mastery, they can’t credibly question that eld. At the end of the day, if my father doesn’t get a tax writeoff for that “business dinner” he took his mistress on, his accountant isn’t an artist; he just doesn’t know what he’s doing. Colleges function as factories that manufacture the enriching ideas which redeem a confusing and often mediocre world. Our art should celebrate and take seriously that responsibility. Or at least have tits. O
MICHAEL GOETZMAN November 23, 2009
THE OBSERVER
23