This past fall I taught a course called “New York and the Arts” at Hunter. My students were freshmen in the CUNY Honors College, which meant that, on the basis of their academic promise, they had all been granted a free ride for four years—not only subsidized tuition, but also no-cost housing, a reimbursement for books, a free laptop, and even a monthly Metrocard. Of the twenty kids in my class, five spoke Russian, three others were from the Indian subcontinent, three were African-American, two were Italian-American, one was Asian-American, one was a Conservative Jew, and one, I think, was Persian. In other words, though they were mostly drawn from the greater New York City area, it was quite a varied bunch.
“New York and the Arts” is a required course for Honors College freshmen, but I wanted it to seem like a purely pleasurable elective. I had been given a free hand in designing the syllabus, so I decided to structure it around the idea of “good and bad art.” Not only would this help the students develop their own aesthetic convictions, I conjectured; it would also cover those inevitable occasions when my semi-blind selections from the universe of available art offerings turned out to be duds.
The only problem with this idea, in practice, was that we barely saw any bad art. Needless to say, I saw plenty of it on my own, over the course of the fall season—the appalling Sarah Michelson dance piece called Dogs, for instance, and the unspeakably awful Broadway musical Spring Awakening, to give but two examples from an array of performance disasters. But my students seemed to function as an amulet against terrible art: everything I took them to was golden.
We saw American Ballet Theatre perform The Green Table with David Hallberg in the starring role of Death; we saw Bartlett Sher’s production ofThe Barber of Seville, with the marvelous Peter Mattei playing Figaro; and we saw Gidon Kremer, along with two extremely talented young associates, perform chamber music in the magical setting of the Baryshnikov Art Center’s fourth-floor studio. In modern dance, we attended the opening night of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s and Akram Khan’s BAM performances for Steve Reich @ 70—not my favorite pieces of the year, but clearly an exciting event. In search of visual art, we went to the Frick Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and a selection of Chelsea photography galleries chosen by the students themselves. To sample the world of New York publishing, I took them on a fieldtrip to my own publisher, Pantheon Books, high atop the glassy Random House skyscraper, and then downtown to the homey, historic offices of New Directions. For an inside view of a life in the arts, I invited a retired Mark Morris dancer, Guillermo Resto, to come speak to the class about his work and experiences. And when, at the end of the semester, I gave them a choice about how to spend the last of the money in our ticket budget, they chose an evening at Bargemusic, the floating concert hall in Brooklyn.
The results, it seemed to me, were phenomenal. I started with a classroom of kids who had barely been to anything before (none of them had evenheard of the Frick, only one had seen an opera, and very few had ever attended any kind of dance or classical music performances), and I ended up with a group of people who were enthusiastic, vocal critics of the arts. Most of the time, when I teach, I have the feeling that I am merely supervising the natural evolutionary process: the good students do the good work they would have done anyway, the others do otherwise, and my function is nil to invisible. But this time I actually sensed that I was introducing students to a world they didn’t know about—and, more to the point, that they were taking it in wholesale. The class discussions were exciting almost to the point of chaos: far from having to elicit opinions from these kids, I had to keep them from overpowering each other. And the freshness of their perceptions was something that never ceased to amaze me.
“Why do the musicians walk off and then on again during the clapping?” they asked me after the first chamber-music concert we attended, and I was forced to reflect on the conventions of applause. “Why are the words in Italian when the setting is Spanish?” they sensibly wondered about The Barber of Seville, initiating a conversation that led from Beaumarchais and Da Ponte to the differing traditions of French, German, and Italian opera. “How can this place be non-profit when it’s obviously so rich?” they said about the Frick mansion, leading us into a whole discussion about the relationship between money and art. Everywhere we went, they caused me to see things with new eyes, because for them everything was part of the performance—the misplaced kick that caused an ABT dancer to ruffle her colleague’s skirt, the chandeliers that retreated up toward the ceiling at the Metropolitan Opera House, the fluid, jazzy physical gestures of the vibraphonist who accompanied Gidon Kremer. If I was introducing them to the arts, then they were doing the same for me.
Each of their final papers was on a different subject, because the students all used this opportunity to zero in on what had mattered most to them. One wrote about the way the modern architecture of places like Lincoln Center and the Baryshnikov Art Center played with and against the classical music performances that were set within them. Another reflected on the difference between watching a performance of The Barber of Seville and listening to a recording of it over and over. A third focused on the moment of silence that preceded important transitions in specific dance and musical works, and a fourth noticed how a sense of anxiety—the sense that “something could go wrong”—added to the heightened experience of watching a live performance in a small space. One adventurous student even explored the parallels between the minimalism of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Reich-inspired dance and the minimalism of Sean Scully’s Wall of Light paintings at the Met. These, perhaps, were the standouts. But even the students who didn’t write brilliant papers absorbed and gave back an enormous amount in the course of the semester. There was no one, I felt, who remained completely unchanged by the work we had done together (if you can call such pleasures “work”).
The minute the class was over, I rushed to the Hunter Honors College office and asked to teach the class again next fall. I have no illusions that subsequent semesters will exactly duplicate the delights of this one. For one thing, I will have done it before, whereas this time, as one of my students pointed out, “we were all freshmen together.” But even if the form of the course is familiar, the contents will be new each time. We might even see some bad art next year, and be able to work that into our conversation. And whatever we end up seeing, I now know that I can trust my students to make the experience as fresh for me as it is for them —a side-benefit so huge that it makes me want to urge every critic to teach “New York and the Arts,” or its local equivalent.
—January 12, 2007