To the Editors:

To kick off his April 9 indictment of newly-hired Luce Professor of the Emerging Arts James Keller, Michael Gallope presents us with the following playlet.

Scene: a Wednesday night at the Feve. Smoke, beer, music, a table for two.

The author and his interview subject make chit-chat. Taking advantage of a pause in an involved discussion of art and art music, our intrepid student asks if Keller has enjoyed the pop music he’s been hearing in the background. The professor-to-be lowers his beer. “I wasn’t listening,” he says.

This being Oberlin, where we all enjoy knocking back a nice cold metaphor now and again, I deem myself invited not only to sniff out Gallope’s metaphor, but to wag my tail, raise my intellectual leg and pee all over it.

I get it! Keller not only didn’t listen to the music on that fateful Wednesday night, he doesn’t “listen” to student concerns, to extra-classical and interdisciplinary dialectics, to the world outside his own head.

These are serious allegations. And since I’m lazier than Gallope and probably spent the night of Keller’s lecture knitting, I can’t speak to them.

What I can, and feel I must, address is the disturbing tenor of Gallope’s response. Is Keller guilty of intellectual conservatism, of refusing to engage with the ideas of others? I haven’t the foggiest idea. Is Gallope’s commentary? You betcha.
Gallope puts forward a number of compelling points. I, too, am perturbed that students may not have had input in the hiring of the new Luce professor; further, if Keller does not, as Gallope maintains, have strong interdisciplinary interests, his hiring would seem to constitute, if not a betrayal of the Emerging Arts mandate, then at least an end run around it.

But instead of stopping here, Gallope levels further accusations: Keller functions as — gasp! — a pre-concert lecturer!

He has published in such mainstream journals as Travel and Leisure and Bon Appetit! And most damning of all, his hobbies encompass the Unholy Bourgeois Trinity of gardening, cooking and wine collecting!

To put it in “mainstream” terms, this line of argument stinks. Why should Keller’s status as a pre-concert lecturer have any bearing on his intellectual credentials? Why should publication in Bon Appetit preclude Keller from studying, critiquing and interpreting emerging artistic aesthetics?

I was not aware that, in order to create and/or engage with contemporary art, one had to eschew the pleasures of gardening.

I will go right outside and tear up my tomato patch. Maybe while I’m at it I’ll don black leather and smoke an elegiac cigarette.

I’m tossing around stereotypes because that’s what underlies Gallope’s rhetoric: a schema of the emerging artist and critic that is, at its base, no less rigid than the one he assigns to Keller.

I find this sort of ossification deeply troubling. Gallope plumps for experimentation.

Yet, to my mind, every experiment, scientific or aesthetic, comprises, at its heart, a query; an experimenter interrogates her world, seeks to engage with it on multiple levels and in multiple ways.

Nowhere in this paradigm is there room for narrow constructions of the experimental artist, any more than there is room for narrow constructions of experimental art. What kind of experimenters are we if we refuse to listen to those with aesthetic, philosophical or lifestyle biases different from our own?

Gallope poses a question: “What does [Keller’s work] have to do with art at Oberlin now and the way we think about it?” I would pose a few more. Who is “we?” What is this apparently monolithic way in which “we” think about art?

Why would it be necessary, or even desirable, for Keller’s views to adhere to “our’s?” Must the Oberlin arts community function as one integrated force, a la Captain Planet?

If not — if our powers need not combine, but are free to quarrel and tangle and play — what does the appointment of Keller to the Luce professorship mean to Oberlin?

To a few, no doubt, it will mean the arrival of a kindred spirit. To House of Sauce, it may mean one more customer.

For many others, like Gallope, I would submit that Keller’s appointment, regardless of its merits, represents an unparalleled opportunity to fulfill the mandate of the Emerging Arts Program: to engage, to examine, to critique and to challenge. To listen.
Yep, folks, that’s a metaphor.

–Anne Timberlake
Double-degree first-year