Orientations are always meant to be a fun day intended to introduce you to something (club, camp, college, etc.) but in a fun and entertaining way. The Macaulay orientation week was no different. The first day at Governor’s Island was a great way to meet various Macaulay students across campuses and Tech day was amazing cause well…we got our laptops ^_^. Arts day however, was the day I was most curious and interested in when we first heard about the orientation. Frankly, I was very disappointed with what we had for our “Arts Day.”
In the prompt you ask us to give you our impressions of the theater day performance but there wasn’t any performance. Although I am very passionate about writing and see it as an art form I don’t consider an interview with a writer – who doesn’t really speak about the book – a performance. Other than the twenty or so minutes he spent reading an excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Jonathon Safran Foer spent very little time talking about the book. The interview was more about him, his personal life and endeavors. I will give Mr. Foer a break however, because I did find some of his points on technology and art interesting and some I even agreed with.
Yet, overall I would say the night and the interview barely grasped the theme of art that Macaulay has tried to instill within us all. The amazing thing about art is it has such an enormous scope that so many different things fall under its umbrella. Music, writing, drawing, sculpting, photography, these are all various mediums of art and the list goes on.
In my opinion there are also two sides to the coin of art, there is the practical sense of art that you yourself perform and engage in for self-expression and then there is the art that you observe and admire, forms that speak to you. For instance, I am absolutely terrible at drawing, even when I’m tracing the picture comes out terrible. But when I see my talented friends draw something for their class I’m usually just staring at it the whole period thinking ‘Woahhhhh.’ So I would consider drawing and the like as the art that I observe. However, I love photography and capturing moments/memories through my camera or phone.
Thus, even though I consider Foer an artist and writing as a beautiful art form I think the night failed to fill us up with art. The point of the Cultural Passport, this class and a major part of Macaulay is for us to fill ourselves with the culture and art that can be found in NYC. Moreover, we’re meant to experiment new things, go to exhibits and shows that we’ve never been to before. These ideas are what I believe Arts Day represent and I don’t think the interview with Foer really grasped those concepts.
