Today is the last day of classes at Cooper Union, the free school of art, architecture, and engineering where students protested the introduction of tuition earlier this month. The Board of Trustees is set to vote on tuition implementation this spring. As that vote approaches, the impact of this month’s lock-in remains vague.
Little Response From Cooper Union Administration To Student Lock-In
December 20th, 2012 by Sydney SmithArt Thinks: New Museum To Get Served
December 20th, 2012 by Sydney SmithYesterday at 1pm, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago tweeted at the New Museum about a superb video [below] that one of the New Museum’s staffers posted featuring museum guards gettin’ down in the lobby after hours. The MCA challenged the New Museum to a dance off, and promised that its visitor services department would serve the New Museum guards. “This is the perfect opportunity for someone to teach us how to dougie,” said the 67-year-old museum now exhibiting work by William Kentridge and John Cage. When the MCA proposed David Bowie to judge, New York City’s only dedicated contemporary arts museum which is renowned for its Triennial exhibitions and a wealth of diverse emerging artist showcases replied “Is that even a question! Hell, yes!”
[UPDATED] Cooper Union Students Stage Lock-In To Protest Tuition Implementation
December 4th, 2012 by Sydney Smith
Yesterday around noon, twelve students – eleven Cooper Union students and one student journalist from The New School – barricaded themselves inside Cooper Union’s Foundation Building. They unfurled a red banner from the eighth floor which read “Free Education To All.”
Their actions were a response to the decision by Cooper Union trustees and President Jamshed Bharucha to consider charging tuition in light of a waning endowment and rising costs. Cooper Union students currently do not pay anything for their years of schooling.
No matter the outcome of an upcoming vote by the trustees, all current students are grandfathered into the full-scholarship system, and won’t be retroactively charged tuition or be asked to pay for the rest of their time at Cooper.
The demands of the protesting students, detailed in a communique sent to press and distributed to the public near Peter Cooper Park, called for an end to the consideration of tuition implementation at Cooper Union, as well as increased transparency in the school’s administration, and the resignation of President Bharucha. Read more…
Bobst Boyfriends: Love And Loss In The Library
December 3rd, 2012 by Sydney Smith
Judging by the mobs of frowny undergraduates in Bobst this Sunday night, the inevitable has happened: it’s finals time. If you are one of the legions of dedicated students powering through flashcards in this marble hell with me right now, hello and I am sorry. If there’s a silver lining to finals, it’s that a rare sense of community emerges at NYU. Crisis breeds camaraderie. You’ll see that elusive kid from your freshman year Exploration Floor drooling face-down in his Econ textbook next to a disgruntled grad student deep in an Adderall hole.
Navigating NYFA
November 29th, 2012 by Sydney Smith
In the preamble to its Classifieds section, The New York Foundation for the Arts, or NYFA (Knife, Ah! Haha, that’s just a little non-profit humor for you) describes itself as “the ultimate career development tool” for artists. If you’ve ever looked for a job or an internship in the arts, you’ve probably found yourself spending hours browsing the Jobs in the Arts page under the orange “FOR ARTISTS” tab on NYFA’s website. For rates from $70 for two weeks to $430 for six months, arts organizations, museums, and especially galleries can post listings on NYFA for a wide variety of positions. Under that orange tab on NYFA’s site, artist can also find event listings, studio spaces, grants, residencies, and auditions.
Art Thinks: Twins!
November 27th, 2012 by Sydney Smith
I apologize to my loyal readers (Hi Mom, Dad and that guy I met at CVS!) for the break from our weekly column “Art Thinks” over the past couple of weeks. While I do love a storm (what better time to catch up on reading ArtForum by candlelight?) and even more enjoy a holiday (If I had a dime for every turkey giblet I incorporated into a performance piece back in the mid-eighties– hooboy!), the two do not mix well for meeting deadlines concerning hard-hitting art journalism. But “Art Thinks” is back, dear readers, at least until the next natural disaster (or winter break) rips me from your arms once more.
The New School Provides Shuttles To Poor, Disenfranchised Bushwick (Oh, And Hoboken)
November 8th, 2012 by Sydney Smith
On Tuesday night, The New School’s president David Van Zandt sent an email to students, faculty, and staff commending their “bravery, patience, and perseverance” during the storm. Van Zandt announced that, beginning Wednesday morning, chartered buses would run to and from locations where public transportation was still compromised after Sandy – primarily Hoboken, Williamsburg, and Bushwick (with the L train). Twice in the morning and twice in the evening, buses would run to and from the New School at 14th St and Fifth Avenue, the Hoboken Path Station, and a number of popular stops down Metropolitan Ave along the L train from Lorimer St as far as Bushwick Ave. The service would begin the next morning (Wednesday) and continue “as long as necessary.”
The Great Escape!: How Two Bored, Spoiled Kids Escaped Manhattan Last Week
November 5th, 2012 by Ken Greller and Sydney Smith
On Wednesday, October 31, NYU Local City Editor Ken Greller and Writer Sydney Smith escaped a darkened apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and began a voyage home to their native Baltimore. This is their incredible, true story.
The time is 7 pm, and we’re playing the only board game in our apartment, Klaus Tuber’s Settlers of Catan. Settlers may in fact be the only non-electronic form of entertainment in our apartment, besides alcohol (books? you go read a book.) And when the power first went out, nearly 24 hours ago, we were excited by the quaint prospect of playing this little game by candlelight (also, we thought it might help familiarize us with inevitable takeover of the barter system in our soon-to-be-cashless dystopia). But this was our fourth trip to the island, and the sounds of settling were getting mighty restless.
Our roommate’s boyfriend Joe receives a text: Power is not likely to be restored until Sunday. Ken flips the board. “One more day I can do,” he whispers, “but not six.” That was when our Sandy exodus began.
Wesleyan To End Need-Blind Admissions
October 29th, 2012 by Sydney Smith
Wesleyan University President Michael Roth officially laid out plans in May to end Wesleyan’s policy of need-blind admission. He announced the change in a blog post entitled “Sustainable Affordability,” wherein President Roth presented a challenge: to keep Wesleyan affordable without compromising the quality of a Wesleyan education.
Roth’s concern was that the school’s then-current cost model – hiking student fees annually well above the rate of inflation, and then raising the financial aid budget – was both pricing out middle-class families (who make too much to qualify for scholarship but too little to manage an increasingly expensive tuition cost) and setting up a pattern that would not be sustainable. Increasing the school’s student fees 4.5% annually – as Roth said in his post that Wesleyan did from the past academic year to the present – would mean that Wesleyan’s cost of tuition would jump over $20,000 over the next 10 years from $45,358 in 2012-2013 to $67,406 in 2022-2023. Read more…
Art Thinks: Holy Moly!
October 25th, 2012 by Sydney Smith
Last Saturday night, there was an opening at The Hole! No, I’m not speaking in lewd riddles; I’m talking about a new exhibition at Deitch protégé Kathy Grayson’s gallery. The huge 4,000 square foot space is playing host to “Attachments,” a group show of photography co-curated by Grayson and photo tastemaker/photographer Tim Barber of tinyvices.com.
“Attachments” features the work of several super-current emerging photographers, as is to be expected of Grayson and her Bowery hotspot, which is famous for curating a social circle of young downtown artists as they are famous for curating exhibitions.
Grayson is maybe best known for groundbreaking exhibitions like Dan Colen and the late Dash Snow’s 2007 installation at Deitch Projects “Nest,” where the two artists filled the gallery with shredded phonebooks and spent the next few nights trashing the place, pissing and breaking walls and hosting their friends after hours.
