Among the fringe benefits of living off campus and not taking classes is that one can avoid pondering the display in the Barrows Rotunda at the front of the Hopkins Center, more often than absolutely necessary. When the WITS tracking system informed me that a fresh ration of contact lenses had arrived at my Hinman Box, however, I steeled myself for an encounter with whatever dismembered cord of firewood, exploded remains of a circus tent or suspended menagerie of gopher burn victims might lie ahead.
Upon my arrival at the Hop, I discovered a bed of potato-clams in the midst of some arcane festival, which would undoubtedly end in the sacrifice and ritual consumption of some unlucky celebrant amidst the technicolor glee of the occasion. Sophie Hood '09 said her purpose with the clams was "to engage audiences by emphasizing the playful, mischievous nature of the pieces while still requiring audiences to question their understanding of the medium" ("Hood '09 confuses passersby with playful clam exhibit," April 21). But I believe that this sort of artistic expression the primary aim of which still seems to be to elicit pure consternation in the viewer is a major source of disinterest in the arts at Dartmouth.
People who are not regularly involved in the arts may need products tailored to more mainstream interests to get them involved. The College certainly has an interest in engaging the student body with artistic expression and encouraging more students to participate in the arts. This is made clear on the institutional level by the presence of programs like Arts Ambassadors, Random Acts of Art and AREA, all of which attempt to bring the arts into the campus mainstream. But all these programs condescendingly presuppose a ground state of disinterest in art, rather than in whatever "art" happens to be on the menu. Their approach implies that Dartmouth students never learned to eat their artistic vegetables. Perhaps if we could just keep an open mind, those chunks of rust lounging in the Darling Courtyard, also in the Hop, would begin to signify something other than the gullibility of those responsible for their installation. Maybe my uncreative, culturally maladroit section of the student body is the problem, but then again maybe the arts at Dartmouth are subject to periodic fits of aesthetic delusion. Sometimes the emperor's new clothes are made of dyed, matted human hair, and somebody has to call him on it.
Though I am clearly no admirer of the avant-garde, I am supportive of the arts and believe that many Dartmouth students would benefit from basic instruction in visual literacy. Students should be equipped and encouraged to hold artists accountable for their competency, and we might expect the arts to consistently pursue forms of excellence such as beauty, realism or narrative, which are more readily appreciated than their alternatives. Unfortunately, subversion is the new orthodoxy, and the arts have lost their critical voice through overuse.
The arts community at Dartmouth has lost touch with those outside its immediate influence not only in form, but also in content. Even if Dartmouth students were regularly presented with artwork that communicated intelligibly, the pathological commitment to cultural iconoclasm demonstrated by many contemporary artists would go unappreciated by the very same individuals whose value commitments they ruthlessly seek to undermine. A pungent cocktail of social elitism and cultural imperialism, emanating from the general direction of the Hop, is designed to flatter the vanity and assuage the conscience of its overwhelmingly wealthy and leftist patronage and does not reflect the values of the centrist, populist mainstream with which many students identify.
If the arts community at Dartmouth is serious about involving more students in its activities, then they ought to consider that deficient sales tactics might not be to blame for losing a substantial share of the campus market. Gimmicky installations, edgy programming and rampant sidewalk chalking might be the answer, but I doubt it. Maybe the real change needs to happen in production. But if those products get lost in the shuffle of opacity, mediocrity or condescension which characterize so many of the Hop's offerings, then many students will miss out on experiences they might authentically enjoy. That should be reason enough for the arts community to tone down the creative bombast and refocus their efforts toward presenting art with substance and communicating ideas for the maintenance and enrichment of the cultural mainstream.
