Editor,
I write this letter in response to the infuriating news that the Art Student Association gallery in the Student Union Building is soon to be replaced with a workout room.
I'm not sure why ASUNM is hell-bent on destroying all of the cultural enclaves of the flagship university in New Mexico, but it is doing a bang-up job.
It monopolizes the Southwest Film Center, pushing aside quality, independent films that provoke thought and bring awareness to global human issues often neglected by the media, which are too busy covering the escapades of Michael Jackson. And it does this in order to make way for slack-jawed Hollywood garbage accessible at any movieplex or video store.
Now ASUNM wants to level one of the only formal venues in which undergraduates can hold an exhibit just so people can further obsess on how tight their glutes are and how to gain a six pack.
How sleazy is it that art majors had to find out from the Daily Lobo? When people do something they know is wrong, they tend to try to keep it under wraps.
This exemplifies the dwindling respect our society as a whole gives to the arts, be they literary, performance or visual. There was a time when an American public school student had classes in art, music and drama every year. Now kids only get these aspects of education if their parents value them and can afford private lessons.
We are obviously on the path to a culture without culture, one that is devoid of abstract or complex levels of thought except for the elite few who send their kids to private school or hire outsiders to teach them.
Music is math, and creativity is a purely human characteristic worthy of nurturing. In 20 years when a new generation emerges that is incapable of human compassion, nonlinear thought and creative solutions to the problems we will be facing, who will we blame? The artists? Or the politicians who disenfranchised them?
I implore everyone who has a vested interest of more than a few short years in this institution to do everything possible to stop this.
President Louis Caldera, do you want your time in office to be associated with the end of student art at UNM?
What kind of statement are we making when we allow workouts to take precedence over modes of human expression that have uplifted and created identities for entire peoples and are intrinsic in broadening our scope of thought and imagination?
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Isn't thinking outside the box how we achieve greatness? Isn't thinking outside the box exactly what the arts teach us to do?
Bridgette Wagner
UNM student
