By Tim Sanders

I hate sounding like an alarmist, but you need to know that mankind is teetering on the brink of collapse. Consider, if you will, an article in the December 3rd online edition of the BBC News. The article, by science reporter Helen Briggs, is titled "Chimps beat humans in memory test." According to Briggs:

"Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests devised by Japanese scientists.

The tasks involved remembering the location of numbers on a screen, and correctly recalling the sequence."

Dr. Tetsuro Matsuzawa and his colleagues at Kyoto University pitted three mother chimps and their 5-year-old youngsters against university students in a memory test involving numbers. "During the experiment, each subject was presented with various numerals from one to nine on a touch screen monitor. The numbers were then replaced with blank squares and the test subject had to remember which number appeared in which location, then touch the appropriate square."

The chimps won. And of course, once the results were released, Dr. Lisa Parr, of the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, described the research as "ground-breaking."

So here is the concept, devised by several influential people with advanced degrees at a prestigious Japanese university:

"I got an idea, fellows; let’s see if we can get a government grant to do some groundbreaking research to determine if a) chimpanzees are a lot smarter than we thought, or 2) college students are a lot dumber than we thought." (Followed by thunderous applause).

Ah, a scientifically significant, groundbreaking experiment! I can see it all now. Taking a coffee break in the hallway, with the chimps in one room and the college students next door, one research assistant says to the other:

"Hey Bruce, if you could keep the jumping, chattering, and screeching to a minimum in your room, I’d appreciate it. My chimps can’t concentrate."
So lots and lots of time and money went into proving that certain chimps are brighter than certain college students. I hate to burst anybody’s bubble, but I was a college student once, and long before I graduated I looked at my grade point average, gazed into the mirror and came to the same conclusion. And it didn’t take a research grant, either.

That is because counting and remembering sequences of numbers was not something I learned in college. That all had to do with, you know, like balancing checkbooks and budgeting and uncool stuff like that, which was absolutely useless in the brave, new world we college students envisioned. No, we studied meaningful things like cognitive dissonance and Sartre’s "Being and Nothingness" and minimalist art and hallucinogenic toadstools and so on and so forth–the kind of stuff that really comes in handy when you're looking for work.

PERSONNEL MANAGER: Seven years of college, and it takes you forty-five minutes to add those two columns of figures? A chimpanzee could do better than that!

YOU: Well, I’d like to see a chimp discuss the historical significance of Marcel Duchamp’s porcelain urinal, which shook the very foundations of the art world back in, uh ... 19-something-or-other. And by the way, listen to this: "Nicholas anon let flee a fart, as greet as it had been a thunder-dent" That’s Chaucer. Middle English poetry. I’ll bet not one monkey in ten could recite that!

PERSONNEL MANAGER: Next.

And if you’re not convinced that today’s universities can turn impressionable youngsters into babbling idiots, unable to compete with 5-year-old chimpanzees, how about Jerry Saltz?

Jerry who?

Jerry Saltz is a product of our modern university system. He’s the celebrated art critic for New York magazine, and the former art critic for The Village Voice. He has been nominated for three Pulitzer Prizes, and probably has more degrees than a thermometer. Many web sites display a photo of him posing proudly with former president Clinton, who was also a product of our modern university system, where he learned the subtle semantic differences between "is" and ... "is." This in itself is enough to establish Saltz’s academic credentials. Saltz also lectures at various universities, including Columbia University, which, for the most part, is comprised of college students.

And he is a loon.

On November 26, Jerry Saltz wrote a piece called "Can You Dig It?" which extolled the virtues of a work of art by a guy named Urs Fischer. Urs? The "work of art" was on display, sort of, at a New York gallery called Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. It was titled "You." Actually You was, or were, an eight foot deep, 38 by 30 foot hole dug with a backhoe into the ground floor of the gallery. Saltz eulogized You, by which I mean the hole in the ground, for several paragraphs, saying at one point:

"... it is one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a while. Experientially rich, buzzing with energy and entropy, crammed with chaos and contradiction, and topped off with the saga of subversion that is central both to the history of the empty gallery-as-a-work-of-art but also ..." blah, blah, blah, etc.

It’s a hole in the ground, for Pete’s sake! A HOLE IN THE GROUND!

In the meantime, if you want somebody to explain to you why modern university students are unable to compete with ... oh, say, chimpanzees, call Jerry Saltz. Tell him your kid just came home from Columbia for the holidays and dug a work of art in the backyard big enough for fourteen septic tanks. Tell him it’s buzzing with entropy and fruit flies, crammed with chaos and old McDonald’s bags, and you’d like him to analyze it for artistic merit.

Then ask if he could bring a chimpanzee with him. A chimp would have enough sense to shovel all that dirt back into your kid’s artwork. And while the chimp is shoveling, he could dispose of some of those nasty little masterpieces Picasso the Tomcat left out by the fence.