The Case for the Arts Column | The Cornell Daily Sun

With my year-long tenure as Arts and Entertainment Editor for The Cornell Daily Sun coming to an end, I have been reflecting on what, if anything, I took from this experience. To balance the many headaches, the job had some cool perks: interviews with visiting entertainers and famous alumni, early (legal) access to some music and movies, dialogue with campus artists, etc. But the most consistent pleasure of the job resides here, nestled at the bottom of the second Arts page, open to everyone. I?m referring to The Sun?s daily Arts column, and after reading pretty much every one since last January, I have come to regard this often-overlooked soapbox as perhaps the best thing in the whole paper.

Judging by the number of ?hits? they receive on The Sun?s website, an Arts column is read by far fewer people than the average Opinion column or Arts concert or theatre review. That is to be expected, and I will admit that we lack a clear way to blazon this content online. This is less of a problem in print, where a column may occupy over half the second page and catch your eye with its clever cartoon (drawn by our sleepless illustrators Santi Slade ?14, Zander Abranowicz ?14, Alex Holm ?14 and Rachael Singer ?16). Yet cold statistics persist and remind me that a typical Arts column just does not attract the full readership that it could. Allow me to run through our current stable of columnists ? the jokesters, ranters, tearjerkers, philosophers and not-as-many-hipsters-as-you-may-think who keep the Arts section running strong.

Trading off Mondays are Julia Moser ?15 and Adam Lerner ?13, the two of which could not be farther from each other in tone and intent. Julia specializes in self-deprecating confessionals that pore over her loves like Cary Grant, the Obama sisters and 30 Rock (which, you?d think, we?d be done reading about by now). Her infectious hyperboles may prove too abrasive for the groggy student picking up the paper before his or her Monday 9 a.m. class, but perhaps they are just the cure. Adam?s column, on the other hand, leans academic with a humanities bent, mixing politics, literature and theory in his discussion of anything from street art to the Olympics to The Wire. Reading an entry by each of these respective writers back-to-back is the literary equivalent of an Icy Hot Patch.

On Tuesdays, Emily Greenberg ?13 and Arielle Cruz ?15 trade off a biweekly slot while former Arts and Entertainment Editor Peter Jacobs ?13 inhabits his not-so-little niche on the other weeks. Emily always stays topical in her enjoyable analyses of current trends in arts-related technology, from 140-character flash fiction to the GIF file. She has a knack for merging the art and business worlds in her pieces, by which I mean she will definitely have a job after she graduates. Arielle approaches film and television through a nostalgic lens yet retains her readers with perceptive and often hilarious notes and non-sequiturs about pop culture. While Peter mainly sticks to covering music (and occasionally TV or film), his opinions never cease to surprise in their unabashed sincerity. Peter does not resort to cheap irony at the end of his 800-word love letter to ?Call Me Maybe,? and he continually and successfully bridges the gap between hipsterdom and mainstream.

Kai Sam Ng ?14 achieves the same non-condescending balance on alternate Wednesdays ? you may recall his enthusiastic appraisal of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and its family values. My fellow Arts Editor Daveen Koh ?14 taps an endless well of insight in her Thursday column, where she renders the wrath of Hurricane Sandy or an art museum?s sacred beauty in equally poetic measure. Her personal treatises on topics like constructivism and conceptual art never buckle under heavy diction or syntax; she somehow steers clear of pretension week after week. Alice Wang ?15 has found a different voice for herself on the other Thursday slot. There, she loads her musings on music and art into flippant bursts of lingo and lists; her hilarious piece on the late Andy Warhol?s continuing output is fiendishly clever.

Colin Chan ?13 directs his intelligence to current pop culture phenomena, like the Disney-Lucasfilm buyout or the jingoism of Battleship, every other Friday. He dives into these events with the intent on winging any broader social or political context out of them; I don?t think I need to even say he succeeds. Filling in for the incendiary, stream of consciousness rants of former Arts Editor James Rainis ?14 is Henry Staley ?16, who will likely be going all Jean-Luc Godard on the colonialist undertones of Ben Affleck?s Argo when he kicks off his column this Friday.

All the above writers are united by a drive to make sense of their obsessions, whether they are pop songs, presidential campaigns or readymade art. Some of these topics may seem slight when compared to the hot-button issues debated in the Opinion section, yet there are few other venues for students to think through what they are learning in class and commit this abstraction to paper, for all to see. Often, an Arts columnist will refrain using the pronoun ?I? at all and end up with some of the most personal prose he or she has ever written. And we can just be grateful that said prose is such a pleasure to read.

Source: http://www.cornellsun.com/section/arts/content/2013/02/06/case-arts-column

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