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.
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‘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.
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