The LC 14 Isotopes

New York City has a thriving arts culture with hundreds of interesting art galleries, performances, and even audience-involved events. It is important to cultivate this culture in schools. Baruch College supports the arts sufficiently well by allowing its theater to be used by several dance companies, and hosts several other types of shows as well. Most importantly, students themselves are involved in their art as well.

When we visited the Baruch club fair, we saw several clubs that pertained to the arts. At the majors and minors fair there was a wide variety of art minor options such as music, arts, media, and photography and several others. We think it is great that a great business school like Baruch still supports the arts by offering students to minor in some art form.

The Musée Picasso has been under renovation for over two years and the grand reopening has been postponed until June. Anne Baldassari, the museum’s president has been considered the center of the blame for this misfortune, with harsh criticism of her leadership style and her unwillingness to comply with other museums’ requests for loans.

However a closer examination would show that Ms. Baldassari may not be the cause for this blame. She managed to raise $41 million for the makeover of exporting artworks for exhibition abroad, during a financial crisis. She also has allies that include the Picasso family who defend her leadership.

Ms. Baldassari is poring her heart and soul into this renovation. She has also been quoted saying  “I work all the time. I have nothing but worries. I’m criticized. My sole compensation is this building — to produce a building that is the most perfect in its concept.”

The museum has undergone renovation already to replace the windows to make them bulletproof, and the museums public space will nearly triple to around 58,000 square feet by the end of the renovations.  Once the museum reopens there will be one exhibition per year instead of five.

ArticleLink:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/arts/design/picasso-museum-makeover-drags-on.html?ref=design

Last year, Hurricane Sandy has left pain and destruction in our midst.  But New York has risen from the ashes to rebuild and there are plans now for an exhibition in the Museum of the City of New York that is said to rival the storm itself.  There were over 10,000 images that were submitted by more than 900 photographers, some of which have been personally affected by the storm.

Museum curators chose more than 200 color and black and white photographs that documented the storm and the debris and devastation that it left behind. This show opens on Tuesday October 29^th and runs through February 10^th.  People will leave this exhibit with some kind of emotional response and these photos will shock and amaze the viewers. Susan Henshaw Jones, the city museum’s director, said that this exhibit will hopefully spark conversations about how to better prepare our city for future storms.

Article Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/arts/design/recalling-the-wave-of-water-and-panic.html?_r=0

The ballet world is full of brutality, competition and politics- but none quite like this. This past year Sergei Filin, artistic director of The Bolshoi Ballet- one of the top tier of all ballet companies, was horribly attacked with acid that had nearly blinded him. Pavel Dmitrenchko, a dancer in the company, claims to have arranged two men to beat up Filin, but denies any association to the use of the acid. He is now in a special clinic. Filin is back to Bolshoi but still suffering from the attack-23 operations later.

Full of love for dance and the company, he is helping plan the upcoming season, and trying to make up for everything that occurred during his absence. There has been much controversy and chaos during this time causing some dancers to quit the company. He wants to “restore a sense of unity” at the theater. This even has greatly shifted the environment at the company, and has also brought a new sense of competition to the already brutal ballet world. It has also showed us what it means to really love what you do.

Article Link:http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/still-recovering-from-acid-attack-artistic-director-returns-to-bolshoi/?ref=dance

“We are all natural Nazis, fascists, murderers, full of repressions and hate.” Raphael Montanez Ortiz, a Brooklyn-born musician and artist made famous for his 1966 “Piano destruction concert,” claims this as he goes on to say, “ Instead of pouring out our natural aggressions on people, we should use them in an artistic framework.” This idea of “auto-destructive art” that Ortiz hints at has become a sort of novelty in the art community that has gained popularity over the years and is now gaining a show in the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum properly titled, “Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950.” The show will contain scenes ranging from a piano being smashed to an atomic missile going off. It will demonstrate art through destruction and show how life can come from even death. This idea of “auto-destructive-art” and the fact that even in destruction there is art is an interesting one, and although it isn’t easy to go see the show at the Smithsonian, it’s still something to contemplate about.

Article Link:   http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/arts/design/damage-control-at-the-hirshhorn-explores-neglected-trend.html?_r=0

In 1996, the University of Houston enacted a “percent-for-art” policy which set aside a small percentage of the university’s income towards public art’s projects on campus. The policy flourished at the university financing roughly 400 public art works to date and other colleges in Texas followed. Recently, Texas Tech University paid Michael Stutz, a California-based sculptor, $350,000 to construct four seven-foot tall faces that were placed on the schools campus. The giant faces were financed by a “percent-for-art policy” and now breath new life into the campus. We bring this up because these “percent-for-art” policies seems to be gaining more and more popularity, and for good reason for they provide work for artists, provide university’s with some sense of artistic creativity, and provide the public with free art. Since Baruch is also a public University it would be interesting to see what the future might hold and if it two will start enacting some sort of “percent-for-art” policy.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/us/if-you-build-it-on-public-university-campuses-1-percent-must-be-public-art.html?ref=design