New Ticket and Info Booth Offers Art Access on a Budget

The Ticket and Information Center—“The TIC”—officially opened yesterday on the ground floor of Lerner Hall. This past week, returning students have noticed the makeover of the student activities’ box office area. But it’s more than just a makeover­—with the TIC’s debut, the Arts Initiative intends to establish a major cultural gateway between the University and the city around it.

The new service aims to do the work of the old ticket office, and much more. Student groups will still be able to sell their tickets (or create RSVP lists for events), but they won’t have to cut classes to get the tickets to their audience. The leg work, the time-consuming management of the box office, the cash box, the accounting, and all the other not-so-glamorous details will be handled, free of charge, by the TIC staff.

The TIC’s professed goal is to offer one-stop shopping for numerous campus events, and these need not be arts-related—you can buy a ticket for the School of General Studies Spring Gala or RSVP for Adrian Roman’s upcoming thesis production of Ionesco’s The Lesson. The new center also hopes to give busy students a more convenient place to meet with CUArts, which has resided in the remote Prentis Hall building on 125th Street since its inception. Events and Outreach Coordinator Chad Miller, CC ’07, has been laying the groundwork to bring campus groups to the TIC and help them make the most of it.

Beyond on-campus events, the TIC plans to offer administrators, faculty, and students bargain tickets to events throughout New York City. The Arts Initiative staff will cultivate relationships and cut deals with event producers around town, using the collective bargaining power of the ever-desirable student market. Tickets will be available for everything from Broadway to the East Village. The TIC will also offer steep discounts on movie tickets.

But the organizers said the TIC was conceived as something completely different from a box office. “This has never been done, and frankly, it’s been thrilling to try to do it from scratch,” Arts Initiative Director Gregory Mosher said. “We avoid using the word ‘Box Office’ at all. It’s a ticket and information service. This service will be central to enlivening the arts on campus and connecting the campus to the arts and culture in the city around us. It’s a major step in fulfilling the Arts Initiative’s mandate.”

Mosher said the TIC consultants will help visitors of all kinds, from underground hip-hop enthusiasts to fans of classical Indian dance. “No art-related question is too small for us,” Mosher explained. “We don’t promise to have the answer to every question, but we’ll look it up and stay in touch.” Arts Initiative Program Manager Caralyn Spector, BC ’94, added, “This is the Arts Initiative in person.”

But not everyone is as excited about this change: some student groups formerly working out of the window in Lerner are upset about the loss of the face time they had with passersby as part of the old set-up.

From now until March , students who use the TIC to buy a ticket or place a reservation for an event can also sign up for a free year’s subscription to CUArts’ partner, Time Out New York magazine. With the opening of the Ticket and Information Center, the Arts Initiative places another strategic pinprick in the membrane that has for years separated Columbia from the cultural opportunities in the city of New York—pop goes the bubble.