The man himself

I believe that Albert Camus is the key to earning our liberation in today's society. Camus was acutely aware that we’re always in a state of degeneration at the same time that the world, the natural world, moves forward and grows in abundant ways. This gives our existence a whiplash quality: we’re always moving one way and the world is always moving in another. We’re creeping towards death, as the world keeps on bringing forth new life. It’s as if existence itself is suffering from its own meaninglessness. Camus understood this and in his strange, first novel, The Stranger (1942), gives us three deaths to contemplate and each of those deaths are represents a key to understanding how Camus wants us to live.

UNBOXING THE ART OF COLLECTING

is this what we want?

By Carolyn Kim

Do you want this?

Everyone collects something; you know, each to their own and all that stuff. From art, bags, shoes, books, sports to K-pop photocards and NFTs, collections take many forms that reflect people’s diverse interests, passions, and hobbies. Collections create new subcultures in which people find joy and community. Collections serve as a way to connect with others and as your collections grow, they become part of you. It’s a deeply personal art and a rewarding pursuit that brings joy, satisfaction, and a sense of connection.

IS HE THE GOD OF MANGA?

yes, Urasawa Naoki is

By Marshall Hu

Two pictures of God

Many fans and critics consider Osamu Tezuka one of the great figures in the history of manga. Without a doubt, Astro Boy and Black Jack have had a profound impact on manga aesthetics and culture. In order to commemorate Tezuka's outstanding contributions and to encourage subsequent comic talents to take up the mantle of Tezuka’s brilliant innovations and work, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun created the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 1997 to recognize new and inspiring achievements in the field. The joking title for the winner is the “God of Manga.”

THE GREAT APPLE STAIRCASES

and a few others of note

By Xinye Ju

Look at the missing C of craftsmanship

Stairs are often overlooked and underappreciated features of our daily lives. We ascend and descend them routinely, taking their presence for granted. Even when they exude a touch of grandeur, they're often reduced to mere functionality. However, as a designer, I've come to see stairs as more than just utilitarian structures – they are captivating, awe-inspiring creations that play a pivotal role in our lives. They hold secrets to understanding beauty, form, our relationship with the world, and the essence of moving from one place to another. Yet, there's a new breed of stairs that has taken the design world by storm, gracing Apple stores across the globe. These staircases possess a mesmerizing beauty so profound that it transcends visual brilliance to reach out and touch your very soul. Am I going too far here? Maybe, but why not, let’s keep on praising these unsung saints. Apple has reached the pinnacle of staircase design, and, bold as it may sound, I might dare to claim that they are the most extraordinary staircases ever conceived.

THE STATIC BECOMES DYNAMIC

the public art revolution at d'strict

By Evelyn Lee

The team

Imagine you open your window and you see the majestic sight of the entire solar system in front of you. Or, you walk down the street and the building in front of you is turning into water. Or, you’re in Times Square and a flatiron building becomes a waterfall. Moments of pure fantasy like these used to be strictly the province of a childhood imagination. And so, the question is what happens when you bring these types of fantasies to life. Well, D’strict,a South Korean art? advertising? branding? tech? company is giving it a try.

THE HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL MOVIES

Or, your life as the best movie ever

By Vrinda Bindal

Look at those two

It’s New Year’s Eve and you’ve just sung karaoke with someone you’ve just met but it’s love at first sight. You know it, they know it, the guy who set you two up to sing knows it. No, that’s too cheesy, too dreamy. Is it though? High School Musical, released in 2006, was the first of a trilogy of the cheesiest, dreamiest movies you could ever imagine. Based on the lives of six characters in their final two years of high school, the movie starts with Troy and Gabriella at a ski resort on New Year’s Eve, who get invited up to sing. Two weeks later, they find out that they attend the same school. Incredible!

The Revolutionary Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

or the future of art

By Andrew Chang

Beautiful, isn't it?

It has been a recognizable fact that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has become one of the most important milestones in video game history since its release in 2017. This game is the first of its kind to bring high art into a popular video game franchise. To understand this outstanding project from Eiji Aonuma and his team at Nintendo, we need to look back at other video game releases during that time. Major companies were releasing large-scale open-world games that people were getting tired of, and the indie game studio had artistic games that only appealed to a small audience. BOTW slipped into the gap between indie art and popular games, and in doing so, it broke out from each category into what might be the future of art.

THE TRICK OF LUXURY CONSUMPTION

Or, Bang and Olufsen reads the market

By Heather Lee

Oh, so cool

Luxury consumption and Bang and OlufsenThe luxury products market is growing so much that despite the economic recession sales are still strong. However, there are voices of concern that consumption of luxury products encourages overspending. This leads to why people think so negatively about luxury products. Of course, each person has different reasons for consuming them. Some people buy luxury goods because of the value-conscious consumption, the parade of wealth, the demand for bling, and the bandwagon effect. To be wholly honest, I currently own Bang & Olufsen's H95 headphones and I adore them. Traveling to New York in March, I visited the Bang & Olufsen Store for the first time and I was excited.

THE UNLIKELIEST ART TWINS IN THE WORLD

Hipster Director Martin McDonagh and Flannery O'Connor believe in a quite interesting God

By Zonghao Mo

Look at what that movie character is reading

We tend to think in differences, both big, small, and in-between, and this goes for artists, countries, people, everything. And so, we can miss connections that are sometimes staring us right in the face. On the surface, there could be no greater distance than that between Martin McDonagh and Flannery O’Connor. He’s a cosmopolitan Londoner, married to the equally cosmopolitan Phoebe Waller-Bridge and O’Connor was a hyper-religious Southerner from deep rural Georgia. You won’t find these two at the same party, but there are more than a few, fascinating connections between them, and they have to do with how they understand God and Man.

THE GREAT FEMINIST REVENGE FILMS OF 21ST CENTURY KOREA

The wild women of Korean cinema

By Fiona Xu

Served up cold

South Korea is going through a feminist revolution that is as quiet and subversive as it is radical. It’s a difficult cultural shift to actually pin down. Many aspects of Korean society achieve a real equality between men and women, but there are other aspects that are, how shall we put it, much less progressive. This makes for an interesting and volatile situation and what’s fascinating, besides the cultural and sociological ramifications, is how feminism is represented in art, and especially the movies. Almost any contemporary Korean movie you see will have interesting takes on feminism and women, especially young women. We could literally choose from hundreds, but these three are especially relevant: Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005); Cheol-soo Jang’s Bedevilled(2010) and Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Ji-young, born in 1982 (2016).

MISINTERPRETATIONS ABOUND AROUND YU HUA'S THE SEVENTH DAY

Or, what Chinese and American critics get wrong

By Kellie Wu

In comparing the American and Chinese reviews of Yu Hua's The Seventh Day, we can see a number of interesting problems. One, there's something about Yu's novel that has the quality of a strange mirror. It reflects the world back at the reader, but what the reader gets is not a true reflection of the world, but one distorted by ideas of justice and care. It is a powerful literary vision, but one that generates misinterpretations, both in Yu’s home country of China and in America, and those misinterpretations say more about the critics and their countries than about Yu’s brilliant work.

MAGNUM OPUSES COLLIDE

Lawrence Argeant's Venus is more San Francisco than we could ever imagine

By Katherine Cooke

It makes you think...of many things

Part I:

Venus

This morning San Francisco woke again to begin its daily grind, unaffected by its current state of despair. Another day, another dollar; another man dead with a needle in his arm and no one is left to cry. The departed man’s face is frozen, his body motionless, strewn aside, cascading down the cold marble stairs that descend from ‘C’era Una Volta’ piazza, nestled within Trinity Place in San Francisco’s ‘Mid-Market’ sector. The man’s face hangs, stuck in a state of shock. Pallid and blue in complexion, any life left in his face is now long since flush. His mouth gapes open, once gasping for air; but in this moment, no breath fills his lungs, and none comes out. Only a crispfall zephyr sweeps across his sallow face, a reminder of how callous our city has become.

THE ART OF THE MONOGRAPH

Three beautiful pieces

By Jaden Fuhrer

Stunning Juxtopositions

In the world of photography, everybody has a story to tell, whether it is through photojournalism, fine art, or everything in between. One can find series online that people have carefully curated showcasing an artist’s body of work. But where else would one be able to tell their story or speak their truth? Photographic monographs tell stories and portray feelings in carefully curated editions. Any consumer of art should look to monographs for three reasons: curated inspiration, ease of access, and a storytelling experience unlimited by traditional cultural distinctions.

AN ESSAY ON JEFF GOLDBLUM

yes, really

By Eli Cather

He's fly

Since landing his first lead role as Dr. Seth Brundle in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum has been on a steady and escalating path to becoming “Jeff Goldblum”, a man who is more than “Jeff Goldblum” the actor, and the actor “Jeff Goldblum” who is approaching mythic status, or maybe I’m going a bit too far. He has starred in some of the highest grossing films of his era, including Jurassic Park (1993) and Independence Day (1996), along with a myriad of other lower-budget independent films such as The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Earth Girls Are Easy (1988). He has even been known to branch out into different forms of art making, like directing the short film Little Surprises in 1996, or into the world of music in the last few years with his own jazz band.

THE MOST HUMANE ANIMATION

the very human art of stop-motion

By Jiwon Kim

Stop-Motion People in action

Many people think that we are living in a world of choice and that as artists we can tell a story in many different ways and that the choices we make are neutral and relatively unimportant. This is certainly true in the world of animation. There are so many different methods, styles, and forms. At this moment in animation, the choice is between the overwhelming dominance of computer animation and everything else, especially what I think is the most sophisticated and human form of animation: stop-motion animation. As a result, I am going to not only be writing a defense of stop-motion animation but also how it is a deeper expression of what it means to be human than computer animation.

K-POP AND THE POLITICS OF SPEAKING OUT

The sneaky music videos of NCT 127

By Yuquin Lin

Here are the guys

Could there be anything more worthless than a K-Pop video, probably in my mind and yours these walking song advertisements are one of the most dispensable pieces of non-art you could possibly encounter. In the eyes of most people who do not know K-Pop, K-Pop music videos are all about young boys and girls wearing gorgeous clothes, singing and dancing in colorful backgrounds, and looking sad or happy for no apparent reason. The content of the singing is always young love, without too much of a demand for emotional engagement of any kind. But, I'm going to tell you that not only are K-Pop videos complex artistic creations, but also, and this is the important point, they make political and social statements that people would be afraid to make in any other forum.

SHIN YUN-BOK COULDN'T HELP HIMSELF BECAUSE HE SAW THE WORLD

And depicted it with bold strokes

By Jiwon Kim

Women on the move

Delicate lines, bold and colorful colors are the most prominent features of the paintings by artist Shin Yun-bok (1758-1813) from the late Joseon Dynasty. Shin painted people in everyday life, and he was especially interested in the social lives of aristocrats. His style was subtle and realistic and is still praised by many people to the present day. However, Shin’s paintings were not welcomed during his time, most likely because of the frankness of his depictions of the sexual lives of everyday people: a married gentleman meeting a prostitute; a man meeting his lover under cover of the night; and a monk secretly looking at naked women taking a bath. The question is why does Shin chose to paint scenes that he knew would make government censors upset: the answer is a complex relationship between his artistic upbringing and in his own artistic inclinations.

THE FILM THAT CHINESE AUDIENCES ALMOST LOVE

the strange case of Big Fish Begonia

By Huiwei Feng

A growing fish

Big Fish Begonia is an epic Chinese animation film directed by Liang Xuan and Zhang Chun (2016). The story is inspired by Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi. Xuan studied at Tsinghua University as a thermal energy major and had a dream about a small fish who went to the sea and kept growing. He loved his dream and told his classmate Zhang Chun about it. The two decided to make a short-animated film, which not only won a lot of awards, but also got the highest number of clicks on the Internet at the time. With this encouragement, they decided to make Big Fish Begonia into a full-length film.

THE STRANGEST ART FORGERY OF THE 21ST CENTURY, SO FAR

the Lee Ufan forgeries

By Hae Jeong Cho

Between a rock and a strange space

The Lee Ufan art forgery case (2016) is one of the strangest incidents that has ever happened in the history of art. Of course, art forgery is quite a fascinating subject that raises many questions: What is the difference between an original and a forgery? How are they distinguished? And who is the actual victim of a forgery? Is it a crime against the artist or the public or, maybe, merely money? Our concept of art and ownership originates back to the 18th century and on a basic level has come to mean that there is a strong, really, unbreakable connection between a piece of art and the person who creates it. With this idea, the protection of artists’ rights became an important issue and copyright law came to define the work as a product with known authorship and provenance, a fancy art market term for proper ownership.

THE BUSINESS OF SUBCULTURE

the haphazard genius of Jhonen Vasquez

By Kai Newquist

The artist at work

The story of one artist can easily become a case study of the effects of fame, and how it can affect the trajectory of a career. One such story, often portrayed as a success by his fans and peers, is the career of Jhonen Vasquez. Having created the cult classic comic series Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (JTHM), its multiple spinoffs, and the hit TV show Invader Zim, Vasquez is touted as the king of goth entertainment, and is celebrated as a genius by his fans… or would it be more accurate to call them followers? Vasquez’s work has certainly garnered a variety of reactions, and for good reason: his work advanced two separate mediums, and both JTHM and Invader Zim are solid pieces of entertainment. And yet, what else has Vasquez managed to achieve in his 47 years on Earth- and is he still worthy of the lofty title of ‘genius’?

WHAT IS IT?

Stephen King's brutal attack on inhumanity

By Mae Ware

The Original It

You wouldn’t think that Stephen King, master of horror, would also be the master of dealing with difficult topics like racism, child abuse, etc., but the truth is he’s a master at giving shape to what we barely can say. His 1986 novel, It, is a perfect example, as he shoves raw image after raw image into the reader’s mind with all the subtlety of a jackhammer attacking a flea. King’s books take an unfiltered look at difficult topics, showing his audience that a fictional monster is nothing compared to the horrors humans inflict on one another. There are severe forms of violence that are impossible to forget and these scenes force us to ask, what really is the source of the novel’s terror: monsters or people. Every scene seems to stick in your head no matter how important to the story it is, and that’s because of the way King approaches fear and horror. He takes mythical monsters and gives them power over real world terrors. As terrifying as it is, it’s only as terrifying as what people do to other people.

THE QUESTION OF THE WEATHER

the incredible artificial vision of Olafur Eliasson

By Shannon Chung

This man is thinking of something big

As soon as a piece of art goes public, everyone's a critic: the general public, critics, administrators, everyone, even the artist’s family. But interpretation, specifically, the artist’s or museum’s interpretation is always suspect to other possibilities. This is certainly true of one of my favorite artists, the Icelandic-Dutch phenom Olafur Eliasson. His sculptures and installations are intensely beautiful. If you have the luck to see any of his works, you will not only be overwhelmed by how great they are, but also, rather strangely, you will be subject to Eliassson’s, his curators, and critics telling you what they’re about. He claims and his many supporters do, too, that his main subject is climate change, but the question is: is it really, or is it about something else? I’m going to choose something else, but with a caveat. Of course, it’s about climate change. However, it’s more about the process by which art attempts to address the most memorable concerns of human consciousness than whatever subject matter it supposedly addresses.

SUSHI OR JAIL?

the story of Ufan Lee and Hyong-Keun Yun

By Hannah Kim

A Korean Story

Once upon a time in Korea, there were two friends, Ufan Lee and Hyong-Keun Yun. They both wanted to be Artists. But even though they both got what they wanted – they are famous artists – one ended up in a fancy Sushi bar in Tokyo and the other in a Seoul prison. Here are two of their paintings...

MULTIPLE SELVES

the problem of identity in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

By Yao Wei

The real and the comic

How we think about our lives sometimes seems a mystery. Most of us just live day by day, week by week, decade by decade, and don’t think about what’s happening as having any greater meaning than that we’re living a life. But that’s not always true, sometimes we’re living in the midst of radical political change that has the power to change how we live and the way we live. Now, does that mean that our lives are inherently political; well, that’s a good question and I’m not prepared to answer it, yet.

APPLE FAILURES

the brilliant mistakes

By Brian Bohan Yu

A Meeting of Minds

Apple is one the most successful design technology companies in the world. They have had so many successes and breakthroughs in the past decades that we tend to simply just list their accomplishments. Their ability to merge high level electronic products and cool design is unparallelled. Their Industrial and User Experience Design make their competitors seem like children. After all these years, the company is still the overall leader in technology today. But what I’m interested in is not Apple’s great successes, which are many and incredible, but Apple’s failures. Because it is precisely in those failures that we can see the true genius of the company.

NATURAL BORN ARTIST OR SELLER

the Jeff Koons Experience

By Madison Brooks

The man and his creations

The name Jeff Koons has buzzed through the art world for nearly two decades. He is distinguished for his sculptures that depict pop culture icons like Michael Jackson, his Neo-Geo and Neo-Pop installations, as well as his work with his porn star wife, at the time a member of the Italian parliament. Fundamentally different from his peers Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Sol, Eric Kesha and Francesco Clemente, Koons is first and foremost a businessman or an artist who thinks that an artist is first and foremost a business. And on the level of business, well, Koons pieces have sold for record auction prices: $58.4 million for Balloon Dog (Orange) in 2013 and $91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019. Koon’s financial success has brought him many detractors and critics, almost all of whom start with accusations of Koons’ previous career as a commodity broker on Wall Street (1979-1984). The question becomes: Is Jeff Koons a natural born artist or natural born seller?

BACK TO CHICAGO

the show that presaged a movement

By Jaya Reddy

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist born in Chicago, IL, 1939. She is known for her gallery and museum installations as well as being involved in one of the first and most important feminist art exhibitions: “Womanhouse”. As a young woman in the 60’s, Chicago recounts being told that “she couldn’t be a woman and an artist, too.” But even as a little girl, she decided that she was not only going to be a feminist artist, but that she would also contribute to its history. Believing strongly in a feminist pedagogy to educate women artists, Chicago started the first Feminist Art Program at California State University, Fresno in 1970. She and her students embarked on a series of experiments that would come to be recognized as the foundation of feminist art and philosophy. And with that, they came up with "Womanhouse."

HOW TO TELL A STORY

or storytelling the Pixar way

By Robin Parks

It all starts with an idea. That idea sprouts into a story. There is a right way and wrong way of telling it and Pixar thinks it knows the way. From as far back as Toy Story in 1995 to their most recent, Turning Red (2022), Pixar has engaged in what I can only call a philosophical dissection of what a story is and they have given us numerous good and seven disastrous examples of how to do and not do it. People have problems with systems and art, but not Pixar: they have 6 basic rules for storytelling, as well as 22 acute observations about how to pull it off. Is this a problem? Well, maybe or maybe not…

A Traditional Tale

how the samurai story goes global

By Kimiko Shiro

Old Master

The idea of the Samurai is a complex one. In many ways they represent a conservative Japanese nationalism, but, conversely, they also represent the promise of radical, revolutionary change. And it’s not just in Japan, but every time the Samurai figure appears, and remarkably they have appeared in many, many different cultures and in many, many different guises. Even now, new stories and movies are being made that explore the particular brand of conservative and revolutionary change that these figures have come to represent. The history of the Samurai is a tragic one. The once noble group of warriors who served in the name of the Emperor with status and admiration fell in standing during Japan’s Edo period from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth century. The Samurai Clans were forced to disband and became wandering mercenaries known as Ronin, masterless Samurai. Although historically the Samurai evolved with the nation for almost 700 years, the Samurai are always trapped between two competing ideals, that of the master and that of what is moral and good. It is this conflict that we see played out over and over again in non-japanese Samurai movies.

Dream Perfect Regime LIVE

the birth of Korean Hip-Hop

By Sungyun Kim

It's a dream

K-Hip hop is not just a music genre, but a culture and lifestyle. And to understand it we’re going to have to ask a much more basic question than what is hip-hop or what is Korea; instead, we’re going to have to understand the origins of Korean hip hop and how this genre ever happened in Korea. To do this, we must delve into the strange cultural interchange between American and Korean popular music. For those of you who don’t know, hip-hop is the name of an American music genre that started in the United States. It was pioneered by socially disadvantaged African-Americans in the United States, who suffered from the poverty, violence, and indemic racism of the 1970s. They wanted to depict their lives as they actually experienced the world and to express a spirit of resistance. We should also say that it started in the form of party entertainment, cheap enjoyment designed to liven up any party. In any sense, hip-hop has developed into a culture of resistance and conflict as well as huge best-selling music that is a reflection of specific American social conditions and cultural conflicts.

THE WARNING

science fiction is telling us to be scared

By Jiwon Lee

The future is coming

Science fiction films aren’t just “science fiction” anymore. They are now becoming documentary films of how we live today, or, maybe, how we will live soon. They deal with issues such as DNA manipulation, duplication of organs, and high-tech artificial intelligence, radical technologies that are influencing our lives. In a way, these films function as danger signs of the possible ethical and moral issues that we are about to face. And so like Gattaca, The Island, and Ex Machina are a form of criticism and a warning that the decisions coming our way will be difficult and complex.

MULAN PROBLEMS

questions of authenticity and appropriation

By Anqi Li

Mulan Makeup

The story of Mulan is one that most Chinese people know and has been popular for thousands of years. At its most basic, the story goes something like this: Mulan is born during the conflict between the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589), when China was divided ethnically and politically. The regime decreed that each family must choose a man to fight in the war, but Mulan's father is too old to join the army. So, Mulan decides to join the army in place of her father. It is quite difficult for her to disguise the fact that she is a young woman, but she does, fulfilling her mission and returning to her hometown a decade later, her secret identity still undiscovered.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU SHOP

the new you in meta-verse consumption

By Min Ji Kim

It’s always been true. What you buy is who you are. Whether you are consuming food, clothes, cars or houses, it all paints a picture of who you are. This isn’t something new, but a part of our culture since the beginning of the 20th century and what we might call the “Age of Consumption.” And if the 20th century was bad, the 21st seems to be the worst and you can see it everywhere: in television shows, the marketplace, and the emerging meta-verse.

THE BIRTH OF A GENRE

the contemporary prequel

By Zoe Holtzman

The Terror We Know

What is a contemporary prequel? The Showrunners of Bates Motel (BM) think they know, because they are the ones who made up the term and the genre. BM is the story of Norman Bates and his mother Norma Bates, pre-Psycho. What’s odd about it is that the show takes place in a time period after the time period of the original that it’s supposed to be leading up to. So, right away, the time sequencing is wacky. As far as I know and as far as the Internet knows, this incredible innovation has never, ever happened before. And yet, the pleasures of the prequel (if there are any) are not lost, because a huge part of the tension is the buildup to what we know is coming. And what is coming is horrific and, of course, famous, and caused millions of American citizens to forgo showers as a means of cleanliness.

DESIGN AND HONESTY

a kind of manifesto following Dieter Rams

By Hank Fish

Dieter Rams, a photograph

When you talk about modern/contemporary industrial design, it is hard not to talk about Dieter Rams, a legendary designer whose half-century old work is still hugely influential to this day. If you have ever owned an apple product, you have probably experienced Rams' design language. Rams' influence is also seen in tech, kitchen appliances, bathroom appliances, furniture, and many other products. If there were saints in the design world, Rams would probably be one.

CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS (CCA)

an institution on the precipice of...change

By Fia Pitre

The Coming Utopia

California College of the Art’s legacy in the Bay Area is undeniable. Since the school’s opening in 1907 in response to the European arts and crafts moment of the late 19th century, CCA’s mission has been to educate and support upcoming generations of arts and craftspeople. Supporters of this moment advocated for an integrated approach to art, design, craft, and culture, and the school’s founder Frederick Meyer envisioned a “practical art school” that has grown into an internationally recognized institution today. In 1922, the four-acre James Tredwell estate in Oakland was purchased to house the school, and the formerly California College of Arts and Crafts has remained in Oakland exclusively until recently.

UTOPIAN DREAMS

what CCA(C) is leaving behind

By Sophie Smith

You're on public notice

The California College of the Arts, founded in 1907, is an art school… in California. For the past 100 plus years, it has promoted a unique approach to the teaching and learning of arts. The school used to be called California College of the Arts and Crafts until one fateful day in 2003 when the crafts died an ignoble death for branding purposes. While the dropping of the craft seemed like an innocent choice, a vision of greater inclusivity across the arts, that wasn’t the full story. Internally, this was the school refocusing their sights on new design programs which had been introduced in the 1980s and ‘90s. Notably, when you look up “CCA name change 2003” on Google, the top result is a prison complex Corrections Corporation of America (aka CCA) going through a name change as well. This might be a bad joke, but it gets at the tricky truth of institutional identity.

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