ANNE ARKEY
Special to the Lampoon
Students who frequent the the cubicles in the back of Reed Library may have noticed a difference this past week: the art is gone.
No, you didn’t read that wrong. In a decision some art historians are calling “blasphemous,” the university took action to apply a new layer of flat gray paint to every cubicle, effectively destroying the accumulated artistic contributions of generations of Fredonians.
“This should be a punishable crime,” says JeanLuc Martinez, president of the Louvre in Paris and vocal admirer of the Fredonia library graffiti. “Why don’t we just paint over Lascaux, as well, no? Why don’t we just bulldoze the cathedrals of Prague? Why don’t we … actually piss in Duchamp’s urinal?” Not everyone finds the new paintjob to be necessarily bad, however.
“The destruction of all art is art, too,” said one student before putting on his beret and cartwheeling away.
When asked just what in God’s name he thought he was doing, the hapless custodian assigned the task of actually applying the paint simply replied, “My job.” When pressed further, he confessed that the administration found the graffiti to be “juvenile and unsightly,” and that they would much rather adorn the library with “real art.”
“Pshaw,” said one art history major. “The university’s insistence on maintaining a highbrow/lowbrow dichotomy in official spaces is really, like, bumming me out.”
At press time, the freshlypainted walls were already adorned with 14 quotes about selfesteem and 122 dicks.