It is a delight to see a new “hotel style” hospital — reaching 10 storeys at a cost of $220 million — that also poses as a work of Art on a blighted landscape. Here’s the new Cooper University Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. The building glows in the twilight.
Is this beautiful rendering of a “Death of a Slave” an erotic meeting of impermanence and inevitability — or is it more a cold, moral homily, against the wages of living a sacred life?
Continue reading → Death of a Slave as the New American Dream
Should cities be in the business of drawing lines in the sand between what is free speech and what is not?
Or should the public — the community of citizenry — be the overlord of deciding what is and what is not acceptable conduct in the public square?
Continue reading → The Community of Citizenry and City Censorship
Not all creativity deserves expression. Editing passionate inspiration with the instinct of a formed aesthetic is a necessary filtering of the creative impulse.
Yesterday, in my WordPunk article — Built for Beautiful Failing — I wondered if Art hates or heals. Yesterday, in the New York Times, I received a reply to my query in a story concerning an Art display in a vacant Midtown store: “The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama.”
As we struggle to make our way along a dark path without stumbling, I wonder if Art helps us navigate the pitfalls of life, or if Art only tempt us with unreachable pinnacles that wallow in the ugly truths of the human condition?
Is Art subjective or universal? Is this image of the living, human, form found prone on the floor an indicator or eroticism, abuse or something else?
When you create art, or when you write something, you always risk offending someone somewhere.
I do not like April Fool’s Day. I find it dull. The only worse day of the year is “Speak Like a Pirate Day” — that I battle each year with “International Never Speak Like a Pirate Day” — because one idiocy deserves another.
It’s a pain to put up with everyone trying to put one over on you on April 1. Have you ever been played as the April Fool? If so, how did they “get” you?
Gordon Davidescu wrote this article.
When I was a kid and we took a long road trip from New Jersey to sunny Orlando, Florida for our first visit to Walt Disney World, one of my parents made an observation about strip malls.
No matter where we went, it seemed, the stores were pretty much the same. They were the same on the outside and the same on the inside. What a peculiar thing, I thought. At home we had such stores as The Princeton Record Exchange and dozens of other small stores – owned and operated by individuals or small groups of people, not large corporations.
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