EDITOR Doug Kouma OPINION EDITOR Anne Hjersman EDITORIAL BOARD Doug Peters Matt White Paula Lavigne Mitch Sherman Beth Narans Interlude Lied Center has hit a dry spell If New York has it, we want it too, and we don’t want to take our grandparents. Though the comer of 12th and « R streets is not ex actly a stone’s We (ire Cl throw from Broad- , „ way, the lack of any 1710 b Of high-profile anchor q,-, r\r\r\ event for the 1996- Wu 97 Lied Center for nprmJp the Performing Arts " " season doesn’t offer looking for any salvation from our Midwestern an altemCL isolation. Usually, the tlVe to the Lied Center would i i l, L 1 bring events to the OLCICk tlOie students at the Uni- 0f‘dinner versity of Ne- ' braska-Lincoln that CLlld-CL would not be typi cal of a Lincoln Sat- TtlOVie. urday night, such as STOMP, “Cats,” - Les Miserables, “Tommy,” the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago’s “Billboards,” The Boys Choir of Harlem, T.S. Monk, Yo-Yo Ma, B.B. King and other headliners. The 1996-97 season comes up a bit short in its offerings for a big-name, broad-appeal production that would attract students. Most of the programming seems geared toward an older audience. Though the students are not the high paying donors who fond the center, we are a mob of 26,000 people looking for an alter native to the black hole of “dinner-and-a movie.” Add those numbers up, and—even with the discount tickets — the students can give the donors a run for their money. And this picture is starting to look a little too much like the attitude of the Athletic De partment, which, in the interest of turning a buck, has raised student ticket prices, has moved the student section and has not made enough tickets available to meet student de mand. Hopefully, we won’t be able to make the comparison of the Lied Center to Memorial Stadium. Maybe this season was a bad one for programming and only a brief interlude in an otherwise quality offering. The Lied Center has been a force in bringing diversity and new voices to Lincoln. Whoever is hired as the new director should keep, that tradition, but also keep in mind the interest of the people who use die university the most—the students. Editorial Policy Unsigned editorials are the opinions of the Fall 1996Daily Nebraskan. They do not nec essarily reflect the views of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, its employees, its stu dent body or the University of Nebraska Board of Regents. A column is soley die opinion of its author. The Board of Regents serves as publisher of the Daily Nebraskan; policy is set by die Daily Nebraskan Edito rial Board. The UNL Publications Board, es tablished by the regents, supervises thepro duction of the newspaper. According to policy set by the regents, responsibility for the editorial content of the newspaper lies solely in the hands of its student employees. Letter Policy The Daily Nebraskan welcomes brief let ters to die editor and guest columns, but does not guarantee their publication. The Daily Nebraskan retains the right to edit or reject any material submitted. Submit ted material becomes die property of the Daily Nebraskan and cannot be returned. Anonymous submissions will not be published. Those who submit letters must identify themselves by name, year in school, major and/or group affilia tion, if any. Submit material to: Daily Ne braskan, 34 Nebraska Union, 1400R St. ^ Lincoln, Neb. 68588-0448. E-mail: letters9unlinfb.unl.edu. HovRimMMb N THE W VETfftECK Wf 0g£® ifr Una urn," $SP&£ w mm' ‘Ibm Notebook’ doesn’t fly as art Editor’s Note: This guest column was submitted by Mohammad Seifikar, who is a graduate student in philosophy, and PoDy Seifikar, who studies European history at UNL. We came to Lincoln in June to live and to attend the university. When we heard that Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen had collaborated on a sculpture project for the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, we had some fairly good ideas what the piece might look like. For we are familiar with their works. We have seen “the Clothespin,” located in Center Square in Philadel phia, and the 74,000-pound “Flash light,” which stands on the Univer sity of Nevada campus in Las Vegas. Their philosophy of art and genius is rather simple. They are the masters of small things made bigger. The thrust of their creativity is to “super size” familiar everyday objects into sagging heaps. “Supersizing” is a fitting description of their artistic outlook, especially because Oldenburg began his career by enlarging and making plaster replicas of hamburgers, sandwiches, sundaes and other fast-food items. (Oldenburg has stated, “I preferred touching food to eating it.”) It’s astonishing to us that some are treating Oldenburg and van Bruggen as old masters and their works as modem classics. Oldenburg and van Bruggen seem to think that you can make anything into high art literally by inflating it. It is integrating the once marginal art world into the mainstream of media culture and the upper middle class’s voracious enthusiasm tor art of almost any kind that have produced the glittery art elites to rival rock stars or TV personalities and are responsible for the inflation of these minor talents into major ones and into claims on art history. Oldenburg and van Bruggen have intentionally courted mainstream success, and since then style demands little of the artists and no profound thought from the viewers, it is flourishing both here and in Europe and Japan. But beneath their post-modernist veneer is little besides posturing instead of passion. They are still basically wreaking variations on the works of Marcel Duchamp, the French Dadaist who in 1915 expressed his aesthetic nihilism by selecting mass-produced objects such as a bottle rack, a snow shovel and a urinal, designating them as sculpture and calling diem “ready mades.” They can only be called artists in the celebrity sense that almost everybody is called an artist these days. Rock V roll singers and movie stars are artists. So are movie directors, performance artists, makeup artists, tattoo artists, rap artists and con artists. ‘Tom Notebook” consists of a structure resembling an open, tom notebook, 22 feet tall and 35 feet long with two additional loose pages blown by the wind. Each piece has handwritten notes that reflect the creators’ impressions of Lincoln and its environment encountered on their numerous visits to the area. After three years and close to a million dollars, it is finally in Lincoln. It is expected to be one of UNL’s main attractions this fall and is here as part of Sheldon's mission to bring UNL some of the finest works of art that are being produced by American artists today. But ‘Torn Notebook” is pretentious, profoundly baring and depressingly similar to Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s other works. “Tom Notebook” exploits a well known artificial object and uses its effects to flatter the spectators, namely the students. It is boring, because it simply lacks novelty. Its pattern is too transparent and its elements are redundant and unimagi native. Oldenburg and van Bruggen have failed to process the known patterns in a new and unpredictable fashion. We have heard people describe it as funny, cute, cool or decorative, but not startlingly beautiful. Beauty tends to surprise us by offering a new unpredictable order. “Tom Notebook” cannot astonish or amaze the way beauty of high degree may do. It resorts to trickery instead of inspiration and contrivance instead of creation. At best, ‘Tom Notebook” is a comic monument and a caricature. But Oldenburg and van Bruggen were probably not looking for laughs. Despite what some may think, they are not comedians. Whatever its meaning, “Tom Notebook” is unforgettable; you can’t help thinking about it. Perhaps this was the effect they were after. But merely enlarging small and humble things does not endow them with any meaning beyond their corporeal limits. Nor does the sheer presence of “Tom Notebook” out of doors make it public art—no more than placing a tiger in a barnyard would make it a domestic animal. ‘Tom Notebook” neither satisfies the traditional memorializing criteria of public art nor engages citizens in any but the most superficial social and aesthetic interactions of the public sphere. The monument, in a literal and metaphorical sense, is for the birds. end letters to: Daily Nebraskan* 34 Nebraska ynion,.1400."R"5ti,-Lincoln,"” NE 63588. oria^ta]4Q2)472-1731bre-mail