NEW YORK UNIVERSITYA PORTRAIT OF OUR COMMUNITY

Protected under a Creative Commons not commerical, attributable liscence. Some rights reserved. 2010.

NEW YORK UNIVERSITYA PORTRAIT OF OUR COMMUNITY

Andrea M.A. 11’ History of Art & Visual Studies

I come from Greece, so people always joke about the fact that I’m studying antiquities here…but in a way I think it’s fitting. New York has little of its own history and so it feeds on the history of others. Home to some of the world’s best museums, history is truly studied here where it is lived back home.

It is a remarkable thing to gather the world’s history into a single space as it allows the rest of the city to move forward without reverence or nostalgia. I have found New York to be remarkably unsentimental, but that is one of the things that makes it great

Andrea

robert B.F.A 12’ Studio Art

New York is the best place in the world to be an artists…but it’s also the worst. It’s a pretty audacious thing to make art for a living, but they “get” us here. Problem is…they get us because they’re artists themselves. Everyone in this city fashions themselves an artist: the eighty-five year old granny who makes sock moneys and the hot dog vendor who writes poetry everyone is an artist. But not in a Joseph Beuys “art is life” kind of way, more like an Oprah “follow your passion” kind of way and that’s infuriating. Not to mention all the bad art that comes out of it.

And if street corner art wasn’t enough to get you crazy, the work showing in Chelsea is just as dumfounding. One minute they’re show-ing porno collages, the next, photos of child soldiers in Africa…there’s no way to keep up let alone develop your own style. Try and do that and you won’t even be able to sell your work alongside the sock mon-keys

robert

DanielM.A. 11’ Interactive Telecommunications

It’s a wild time to be in New York…especially if you’re involved in technology. �e community here is really booming and a lot of it has come out of our department. Foursquare one of the biggest, started up in ITP only a few years ago and just got a hundred million dollar bid from Yahoo! which has really put the pressure on us. �ere are more guys in suits here than on Wall St., its pretty crazy.

But its definitely taken a toll on the work. I haven’t been able to do any of the kinds of projects I’d like to because the steaks are too high. It never used to be about the money, we all figured we’d graduate broke, but that was before there was any money to be had. Now our grads are turning down hundred million dollar offers and it’s the only thing any of us can think about. It’s really a double-edged sword. It’s very New York

Daniel

amyB.A. 13’ Media Communications & Culture

It’s hard to reconcile being a student in New York because it’s such a professional city. Even classes feel like internships: more ass kissing and resume building than learning. It’s especially true of our depart-ment where a lot of the professors are adjuncts and teach to recruit students to work for them. It ads a whole new level of competition in which students aren’t fighting for the position of best student or high-est GPA but best potential intern of the professor’s company. I’m working for one of my professors this summer and I can tell you that everything I did in that class I tailored to his company. Every project was a resume and every presentation an interview...I remember him telling us his graphic designer had been poached and so I made sure my presentations from there on were impeccably designed. It sounds a little strange to talk about classes like that, but I guess it’s what we’ve done since we were in kindergarten, working for A’s to propel our eventual careers…the only difference now is that the letters don’t hide the truth

amy