{shortcode-510b05c2304a4311b6a70ae94710cc5571127439}All the Small Things

As Arts works in ever greater harmony with the rest of The Crimson following its integration into the daily paper, the board and its content approach the asymptotic workplace ideals of professionalism, efficiency, and relevance. Only the arts calendar, a list of upcoming Boston-area arts events printed weekly on page 3, retains those qualities that characterize the true artistic masterpieces of the recorded Crimson Arts canon: last-minute compilation, authorial hot potato, and an utter lack of concern for the opinions of those who would gaze upon it. Rather than strive to erase these last traces of irresponsibility, the Arts board must embrace the arts calendar as the pièce de résistance of its artistic ethos. The haste, the palpable reluctance, the barely-suppressed resentment with which our calendar is written—those things, my friends, are revolution. Those things are art.

Victoria is a Punk Rocker

Since joining The Crimson, I have most notably assumed the administrative role of Problem Child in my long-term partnership with Ha D.H. Le ’17. My two percent contribution to chair emails and zero percent contribution to meeting agendas render me uniquely qualified for the conscious slacktivism required of my vision of the Calendar exec.

Anarchy on the Arts Board

To compensate for the increasingly reader-facing nature of the rest of our content, we need a corresponding decrease in the degree to which our calendar gives a crap about what everyone else thinks. Below, I outline several initiatives that would best preserve the punk-lite rebellious spirit of the Arts board through the calendar:

Decreasing readership: We’re catering too blatantly to the masses if we care about how many people are reading our section. Forget listing upcoming events so that people will have an incentive to actually read the arts calendar. Instead, we should stick it to the man by including only events that have already happened.

Reducing man-hours: The calendar exec clearly has better things to do than her actual job: putting together the arts calendar. Instead of the multi-source research process we currently use to compile a comprehensive list of on- and off-campus events, I propose that we simply screenshot the Office of Fine Arts calendar and paste it into the page. Not only does this save us time, but it also ensures, by virtue of only including on-campus events, that nobody who does happen to read the arts calendar ever has to leave the Harvard bubble again!

Sponsored content: The arts section has historically been ad-free, to the detriment of its revenue (and by revenue I mean absolutely nothing, because arts, both as a publication and as a field, doesn’t make money). To monetize arts, I propose introducing sponsored events into the arts calendar. Never mind the fact that no one wants to advertise with us: We’ll pay for the events ourselves, just so we can say we have sponsored content. #sponcon is the future, even when it’s losing us money.

Respectfully submitted,
Victoria Lin ’17

Dropdown: Charger exec

(499.9999999998 words)

—Victoria Lin ’17 is the outgoing Arts Chair and prospective incoming Arts Calendar exec. She is planning to spend her retirement from The Crimson moored off the coast of Los Angeles with her Best Friend Ha D.H. Le ’17, where she will hopefully never have to wear nail polish again.