Felix Salmon

With some

fanfare, The Garfield Building – otherwise known as 142 Henry Street,

on the lower Lower East Side – had its first open house this afternoon.

I’d been keeping an eye on it for some time, since it’s a beautiful building

– at least on the outside – with fantastic views in a neighborhood

which, against the Manhattan odds, has still managed to keep it real. A tasteful

renovation which really respected the building and the location could easily

have been something of an architectural triumph.

It was not to be. The Garfield Building, in its latest incarnation, is a paragon

of obnoxiousness, the epitome of everything that is soulless and evil about

yuppification gentrification. Rather than take any cues from the rich

architectural heritage of the Lower East Side, the apartments in the building

are bland modernist spaces with no original features at all. Actually, scratch

that: there is one original feature left – the stairwell, with a lovely

wrought iron balustrade. Other than that, everything’s clean straight white

lines and a light maple flooring. ("We’re putting on the final coat,"

apologised one of the sales agents when we got to the model apartment, explaining

why we had to take our shoes off.)

The photograph above comes straight

from the official website:

it’s the model view of the model apartment. And it’s dominated by those brand-new

square white beams, both horizontal and vertical, which might look fine in a

house by Frank Lloyd Wright, but which seem utterly out of place in a manufacturing

building built 92 years ago.

It’s worth calling bullshit on the official

floorplans, too. For one thing, there ain’t no way the floor-throughs are

1900 square feet. We’re actually given the exterior dimensions of the building:

25′ wide by 84’7" long. We’re also told

that the perimeter walls are 18" thick. So knock three feet off each axis,

and you have a gross interior per floor of 1,794 square feet. Then subtract

the elevator and stairwell, call it 200 square feet there, and you have a total

area inside the apartment of maybe 1,600 square feet if you include everything

from closets to the area underneath interior walls.

And, of course, the developers have been very careful not to include any interior

walls in their show apartment. If you actually want a bedroom with a door, or

heaven forfend you need any closet space, suddenly the beautiful

long vistas disappear. Even if you’re happy with a one-space loft-style

layout, your guests still have to navigate a very narrow kitchen before getting

to the bathroom.

Realistically, however, most people will build at least one bedroom, if not

two. And just look at the proposed two-bedroom layout: both of the bedrooms

are, not to put too fine a point on it, tiny. If I’m spending $1.675 million

on a Lower East Side apartment, (and that’s before all manner of closing fees

and transfer and mansion taxes), I think I’m going to want a lot more space

than this. Hell, for $2.5 million I can get a 4-story townhouse

on Broome Street, complete with private garden and at almost 3,000 square feet

of usable space.

If you’re any kind of art collector, of course, you couldn’t even dream of

moving to the Garfield Building: there aren’t any walls to put your art on.

Maybe if you’re a would-be Tribeca loft-dweller who’s been priced out of Tribeca

and will make do with the other side of the island, this might work for you.

(But there aren’t any fancy restaurants south of East Broadway, I’m afraid.)

Most likely, the developers are hoping to snare a handful of twentysomething

Wall Street traders, their seven-figure bonus burning a hole in their pocket,

looking for a snazzy bachelor pad not too far from the financial district.

I wish them luck: this building has taken many years to get to this point,

and it’s clearly something of a labor of love on the part of Ron Castellano

and Christopher Hayes, who are the owners, the architects, and the general contractors,

all rolled up into one. I’m just a little wistful for what might have been:

apartments which retained some kind of Lower East Side feel, which might have

been larger than those down the street but which weren’t trying to import a

whole new aesthetic. As it is, we can place 142 Henry next to 7

Essex as condo developments where rich yuppies can slum it on the LES while

living in a beautiful white bubble far removed from the reality of the street.

Really, it’s obscene.

From preachers in Birmingham to rap stars in the Bronx, it has long been the

case that many of America’s greatest rhetoricians have been black. In the Democratic

primaries, the manner in which Al Sharpton effortlessly showed up his opponents

was, frankly, embarrassing. On the pop charts, Public Enemy and their successors

changed forever the way in which popular musicians can speak to a mass audience.

And over at National Public Radio, the fastest-growing program for the past

few years – indeed, the fastest-growing radio show in NPR history –

has been that of Tavis Smiley, a black radio host whose racially-charged programming

found an audience of 900,000 listeners a week, most of them white.

Smiley has now decided to leave

NPR, claiming that the network has "has simply failed to meaningfully reach

out to a broad spectrum of Americans". In a short interview

about his decision in Time magazine, Smiley essentially says that he didn’t

want to be the token black at NPR, and he saw precious little evidence that

the rest of the network was taking its stated commitment to a more diverse audience

seriously.

What interests me, however, is Smiley’s choice of words when he’s asked what

he thinks of being namechecked on

the new Nas album: he says he felt "stupid" and "humbled".

Far be it from me to lecture any African American on the subject of humility,

but are these really the mots juste? "when a rapper drops my name

in a song and says something positive, I’m humbled," says Smiley: why should

that be? The reaction of most of us, I’m sure, would be quite the opposite.

My suspicion is that "humbled" has a second meaning, which is almost

the opposite of its primary

meaning. Look at George Galloway (another great public speaker, as it happens),

after winning his libel case in the UK high court, saying

that "I am glad and somewhat humbled to discover that there is at least

one corner of the English field which remains uncorrupted and independent and

that corner is in this courtroom." Galloway isn’t using "humbled"

literally here. He hasn’t been humiliated by the court: in fact, the court agreed

with him entirely. What he means is that he feels that he’s managed to find

an entity greater than himself, one to whom he can happily cede authority.

Smiley’s use of "humbled", I think, is similar. It’s become something

of a cliché for politicians to claim

humility upon their election or appointment to senior posts: it’s just another

iteration of the "you’re not working for me, I’m working for you"

speech. Just as Galloway was placing himself below the high court, so do these

people place themselves below those who elected them. In Smiley’s case, maybe

he’s simply saying that being namechecked by Nas only serves to remind him that

there are greater black communicators out there, Nas being one of them.

Even so, I think maybe Smiley goes a little bit far when he says that Nas’s

song made him feel "stupid". This is not irony, nor is it even antiphrasis,

really. It’s probably closer to false modesty, but even that’s not quite right:

no matter how undistinguished or mediocre a person you are, being namechecked

by Nas does not make you feel stupid. If Smiley considered himself a nonentity

in relation to Nas, then his natural reaction to hearing the song would probably

be closer to pride.

Still, it’s interesting to examine the literal implication of Smiley’s words.

What sort of a person would genuinely feel stupid upon hearing the song, and

would literally feel humbled by it? The answer is someone who considered himself

superior to Nas in every way: such a person would think it stupid that a mere

rapper would presume to compliment him in a song, and would feel, perhaps, dragged

down to the rapper’s level in the process.

Now I’m not for a minute suggesting that Smiley feels that way. But I do wonder

if we’re not seeing a new rhetorical device here: call it false hubris. The

idea, I suppose, might be that if you implausibly claims emotions only a raving

egomaniac would actually feel, then you’re not a raving egomaniac, and in fact

you’re probably just a cool, regular guy.

Of course, I’m almost certainly taking a throwaway five-minute conversation

with a newsmagazine journalist far too seriously. Most likely, Smiley was simply

trying to say something along the lines of "I don’t consider myself worthy

of this honour", without sounding pompous and, well, stupid. It’s just

interesting to see how someone hailed as one of the great communicators of our

day actually went about doing so.

I went back to Dia:Beacon on Sunday, one of those wonderfully clear and bright winter days which New York seems to specialise in. The light was streaming through the huge windows, and the John Chamberlain sculptures literally glowed. All great art benefits from repeated viewing, of course, but there’s something which makes revisiting Dia especially rich for me – maybe its something to do with the sheer simplicity of the works on show there, that you almost can’t believe how much you missed the first few times round.

It’s also weird which works grow on you and which works don’t, so much. Everybody I know who’s been to Dia has been blown away by the Sandbacks the first time they see them. It’s a bit counterintuitive, perhaps: they’re much more subtle than, say, the Heizers or the Serras, but they more than hold their own in comparison.

On repeated revisits, however, I’ve found myself spending less time with the Sandbacks, as though they’ve done pretty much all they’re going to do for me. It’s amazing what you can do with little more than a piece of string, but maybe ultimately it’s limiting as well.

This time around, it was the Richters which I really discovered for the first time. There’s definitely a sense of art overload when you go to Dia the first couple of times, and it’s hard to give the Richters the time and the concentration they deserve. If they were displayed on their own in a little chapel somewhere, you would be forced to sit down and really engage with them; as it is, they’re almost a corridor, something you pass through on your way from Donald Judd to Sol LeWitt.

It was the light which did it. Richter’s work is profoundly genuine, subtle and beautiful: he’s carefully angled a set of six pairs of gray mirror paintings so that they reflect each other, and the clerestory windows above, in different ways. On Sunday, with sharp, direct light creating reflections in reflections in reflections, it was hard not to be awed by the depth and richness of these ostensibly utterly featureless works. When I next go back to Dia, I’ll have a much better idea of what to look for, even if the light isn’t as bright.

In fact, it seems to me now that Richter, more than any other artist at Dia except, perhaps, for Robert Irwin, has really engaged with the space and created something unique and site-specific. On Monday, the day after my trip to Dia, I went along to their Chelsea location to hear the excellent Anglo-American artist and teacher Michael Craig-Martin give a talk on the subject of Donald Judd. Judd’s greatest work is permanently installed in Marfa, Texas, and Craig-Martin made a compelling case that it really engages with the landscape in much the same way as Greek temples did thousands of years ago. Judd’s work is not land art, either in the Richard Long or in the Robert Smithson sense of the word: he’s not making art out of nature. (Quite the contrary: he’s making art out of cast concrete.) Rather, Judd is siting his work very specifically in relation to the Chinati mountains outside Marfa, and setting up a tension and a dialogue in that otherwise featureless landscape.

At Dia:Beacon, which was put together long after Judd’s death, the curators basically had to fit pre-existing works into a brand new space. They did a reasonably good job, but necessarily the work doesn’t articulate and reveal the space in the way that it would had Judd been able to make something specifically for it. The Sandbacks do a better job: they force you to feel yourself walking in and around them and the room in general, and draw the eye up to the intersection between the wall and the ceiling, or down to the small cracks in the poured concrete floor, making you notice architectural features which you’d otherwise ignore. That’s really what this kind of art is all about – creating a heightened awareness of your own surroundings – and I finally realised, on Sunday, how deeply Gerhard Richter really understands the Dia mission.

Most Richters, after all, are relatively conventional paintings – objects to be admired in and of themselves, rather than as a site-specific installation. At Dia, however, Richter places himself much more in the tradition of artists like Robert Irwin and, to a lesser extent, Robert Ryman, by presenting a piece which deals much more with the room itself than with any incident on the surface of the work. The single most important part of the Richter installation, indeed, is the clerestory windows at the top of the gallery space. In contrast, most of the rest of the work at Beacon could quite easily be moved to another museum elsewhere, without losing much if any of its effect. The Sol LeWitt piece is marvellous, of course, and remains my favourite work at Dia, but it certainly doesn’t need to be there as opposed to anywhere else.

At the end of his speech, Craig-Martin talked for a little bit during the Q&A period about the way in which his own work addresses the same sort of questions. If he paints a wall green, he said, all he’s doing is creating a green wall. But if he then puts an image on it, you see the wall better. Craig-Martin’s recent work, he said, is an exercise in trying to replicate the experience of a Judd – directly experiencing the art object in space and time – while at the same time introducing something Judd religiously shunned – the pictorial element. Craig-Martin’s work oscillates between object and picture, in much the same way, I suppose, as Ed Ruscha’s oscillates between painting and word.

Both Craig-Martin and Ruscha, however, can easily be exhibited pretty much anywhere. Give Craig-Martin a gallery space, any gallery space, and he’ll start painting on the walls; his art, once exhibited at Gagosian, can then be sold to a collector and recreated in the buyer’s own home. The work is site-specific, but not uniquely so. Irwin, Judd (at Marfa), and Richter, on the other hand, have created work which really needs to be exactly where it is, otherwise it simply will not work. Marfa’s hard to get to, but Dia isn’t: next time you’re up there, spend a bit of time with the Richters. You might be surprised how good they really are.

Greg Allen has thrown

down the gauntlet. Give him a "well-argued explanation of the damage

incurred by $20 tickets and what MoMA could/should realistically do to remedy

it," he says, and he’ll give you a pair of free passes to MoMA, good anytime

through 2005.

So, given that I can never resist a freebie, I’m going to give it a go. After

all, the free passes are worth a good $40, which means that if I get them, I’ll

have been earning an effective rate of more than two cents a word. Wahey!

First of all, MoMA is a public organisation. It might not get much in the way

of direct public subsidy (although it does get some), but it only retains its

non-profit status because it provides a service to the general public. Its purpose,

you might say, is (1) to show great art (2) to "the

widest possible audience" (3) as effectively as possible.

Now spending somewhere north of $850 million on a major renovation basically

addresses the third part of that purpose. I haven’t seen it yet, but I have

all faith that the renovation is just as wonderful as everybody says it is.

(I was going to say "spectacular" before I realised that was almost

exactly the wrong word.) I’m very pleased that MoMA now has extensive gallery

space for contemporary art and that all our old favourites will look even better

than they did before, hanging in the perfectly-formed new spaces designed for

them.

Furthermore, the "great art" part of the equation is a no-brainer:

for all that MoMA has been selling

off masterpieces

of late, it still has easily the greatest collection of modern art on the planet.

Show the Demoiselles

on its own anywhere else in the world, and I’m sure you’d have lines round the

block of people waiting to spend $10 or $15 just to see that one painting.

It’s also a no-brainer, however, that charging $20 to get in will put a lot

of people off, and that one of the best ways of attracting the widest possible

audience is to charge the lowest possible admission fee. Greg asks for specific

examples, so I’ll give him some.

1. The artists of the future. It’s not clear how much admission for children

   will be to MoMA, but in any case there are lots of artists of the future who

   are no longer schoolkids. Great art is not something you see once, ingest,

   and move on: it’s something you return to time and time again, learning something

   new each time. A high cost of entry minimises the number of people who will

   return to their favourite works.

2. The art-lovers of the future. Not everyone, Greg, is already as keen on

   art as you are. One of the great revelations of Tate Modern is that if a modern

   art museum is free, enormous numbers of people will turn out to enjoy it.

   Barriers to entry are bad things, and $20 is the highest barrier to entry

   in the museum world. What’s more, there’s a very strong feeling that once

   you’ve paid your $20, you should get your money’s worth. So you traipse around

   every single gallery, spend more time reading wall panels than looking at

   art, and leave drained, exhausted, and with little if any enthusiasm for ever

   going back. You really need to be pretty cavalier with your money to spend

   $20 on MoMA admission, wander over to one painting, spend some time enjoying

   it, leave, and repeat the process as many times as you want. But that’s the

   way to really build up a love and appreciation for art.

3. The poor. Obviously. Take, for instance, a schoolteacher trying to support

   a family in New York City. Where is that person going to find $20 to visit

   MoMA?

4. People who aren’t (yet) interested in modern art. A $20 admission fee basically

   means you’re preaching to the converted. People who know what lies on the

   other side of the turnstiles might be willing to cough up; people who don’t,

   on the other hand, will simply stay away.

Greg also gets invidious when he starts talking about how much a ticket to

MoMA is "worth". In the art world, you see, things are worth whatever

someone is willing to pay. And I’m sure that even if ticket prices went up to

$2,000, there would still be people willing to pay that in order to be able

to visit the new MoMA. Clearly, the idea of trying to put a value on a MoMA

ticket is impossible.

There’s also the idea, which has been lurking in the background of the debate

all along, and which is implicit in the fact that the price hike coincides with

the reopening, that a bigger and better museum helps to justify the $20 admission

fee. Greg, in his post, goes on at some length about the insane amounts of money

which have been poured into MoMA over the past couple of years, as though it’s

somehow the job of MoMA’s visitors to amortize the costs of construction.

In fact, it’s simply not true that admission to large museums can or should

be more expensive than admission to small museums. We have all experienced museum

fatigue: beyond a certain size, it becomes impossible or inadvisable to try

to see any more art in one go. The Guggenheim might charge more money per square

foot, but the fact is that a good Guggenheim show is all that one person can

comfortably take in in one go. The Frick, to take another example, does not

have an enormous collection, but size doesn’t matter. A visitor gets just as

much out of a visit to the Frick or the Guggenheim as they do out of a visit

to MoMA.

There are many, many reasons, then, why MoMA should be actively encouraging

repeat visits. For one thing, they’re the only way it’s really possible to see

all the artworks on show. Moreover, if visitors come for one of the big shows,

they’ll probably not bother with the permanent collection at all. And if someone

does spend $20 to come in and have a look around, and sees something they like,

it should be as easy as possible for them to come back and really learn to appreciate

it.

Greg asked for ideas about what MoMA should do, so here are some.

1. Make tickets valid for two days, rather than one. (If necessary, ask people

   to sign their ticket when they get it, and then again when they want to reuse

   it the following day.)

2. Make memberships much cheaper. $75 is a very large amount of money to spend

   up front on museum admission. Bring that number down a lot – to $25,

   say – and you’ll have many more people taking advantage of membership

   and really using the museum as a resource.

3. Allow people to pay for their membership over time, either on some kind

   of installment basis, or through ticket purchases. Set things up so that when

   you visit the museum for the third or fourth time in a year, you can trade

   in your ticket stubs for a membership back-dated to your first visit.

Most importantly, however, MoMA should get its priorities straight. At the

moment, it seems 100% about getting the architecture perfect, and 0% about making

it as accessible to as many people as possible. How come the trustees were asked

to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars for renovation, but nothing

at all to help bring down ticket prices? The architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, famously

told MoMA that if they gave him a lot of money, he would build a great museum;

if they gave him even more, he would make the architecture disappear. At that

point, some hard questions should have been asked about how to spend that extra

couple of hundred million dollars. Was invisible architecture the way to go?

Or should it have been spent instead on bringing down ticket prices?

Glen Lowry expects about two million visitors a year, paying $20 each. That’s

$40 million in ticket revenue. Cut the ticket price in half, and the number

of visitors will increase – let’s say you’d get $25 million in ticket

revenue at $10 a ticket. The cost of that would be $15 million a year, or a

net present value of rather less than the amount that Taniguchi’s budget was

increased over the course of the construction process. And you’d get more visitors,

which, of course, is a good thing in itself.

But MoMA doesn’t seem to think that way. Rather, it was built by billionaires

so that they could look upon the greatest possible art museum they could make.

The Great Unwashed are welcome to come in, but they’ll have to pay whatever

they’ll have to pay.

Think about it this way: the last person to donate $40 million towards the

costs of construction basically made sure that the mullions were that little

bit thinner, the walls floated that little bit more perfectly, the wood floors

were that much more expensive and perfectly polished. Alternatively, they could

have put that money towards making the entire museum free to everybody for a

full year. It’s obvious to me which would have been the better use of money.

And it should be obvious to Greg as well.

Julie Taymor’s new production of Die Zauberflöte at the Met is

an unqualified triumph. My guess is that it will last at least as long as the

David Hockney production it replaces (14 years), and might, conceivably, even

outlast The Lion King on Broadway. Some reviewers seem to hope that

it will serve as the ideal jumping-off point for the millions of New Yorkers

who have never been to an opera before; my only worry is that it will spoil

such people for the much more boring productions they’re bound to go see if

they do catch the opera bug. Either way, this is certainly the best production

of Zauberflöte that I’ve ever seen, and although there have been

countless others over the past 200 years, I’m sure that it’s one of the best

ever, anywhere.

The wonder and the curse of Zauberflöte is that it’s an utterly

magical opera, makes very little sense, and simply can’t be "played straight".

If the design team got the loudest ovations at the premiere on Friday, that

was partly because of their magnificent achievement, but also because it makes

no sense to criticise them from departing from the "normal" way of

doing things. With this opera, more than any other, you can’t just hire Franco

Zeffirelli to put on a lavish and utterly unimaginative production: it requires

colour, imagination, and inventiveness.

In the past, the Met has tackled this problem by hiring visually stunning artists,

like Hockney and Marc Chagall, to design striking sets for the opera. In choosing

Julie Taymor to direct it, however, they’ve tacked a little: she’s credited

for costume design, puppet design and overall production, but it’s her colleague

George Tsypin who gets credit for the sets. The result is a much less static

opera than Zauberflöte normally is: there’s nearly always movement

on stage, something to surprise and delight the audience even after their initial

awe at the staging has worn off. The moments which stick in the visual memory

are not the bits when the curtain rises, so much as individual scenes: dancing

bears, or Papageno’s puppet-feast, or the grand entrance, on a revolve, of the

Queen of the Night.

Moreover, for all its unprecedented theatrical innovation, Taymor’s production

is actually very conservative when it comes to what really matters – the

music. The overture is played from beginning to end with the curtain down and

nothing happening on stage at all, and when a cast member is singing, he or

she is always standing up, facing the audience, with nothing interfering with

our ability to enjoy their work. There are a few scrims in this production (regular

readers of this blog might recall that scrims are something of a pet peeve of

mine), but they’re used rarely, and never in between a singer and the

audience. No one is asked to sing while lying down, or sitting down, or hanging

upside-down from a trapeze, or even to navigate a precarious rake. The whole

production fits neatly inside the proscenium: Taymor is confident enough of

her theatrical abilities that she doesn’t see any need to break the rules for

effect.

I have to say, then, that I’m extremely puzzled at the extremely curmudgeonly

review

that Tony Tommasini gave the production in the New York Times."Ms. Taymor’s

production is so packed with stage tricks, so peopled with puppets, kite-flyers,

dancers and extras of sundry description," he says, "that the exceptionally

fine musical performance given by the conductor James Levine and a strong cast

was overwhelmed". Tommasini goes on to give specific examples: armed guards

are "rendered irrelevant" by puppets; Tamino "looked distracted,

as if trying to remember and execute a predetermined pattern of stylized poses";

other puppets have the unfortunate effect of preventing us from "pondering

Papageno’s romantic dilemma".

I’m sure that if Die Zauberflöte is presented in concert performance,

that might help the audience concentrate a bit more on the music. But the whole

point of opera as an artform is that it is the confluence of music and theatre;

Taymor’s Zauberflöte simply constitutes theater just as magical

as the music.

I really don’t understand Tommasini’s point at all: of all the operas in the

world, Zauberflöte is one of the least fragile. To put it mildly,

this particular opera isn’t exactly famous for its piercing psychological insights:

the libretto makes no sense at all, even by operatic standards, and the number

one reason to go see it is simply to listen to a large chunk of the most beautiful

music ever written. Now I didn’t go to the exact same performance that Tommasini

did (I went last night, to the second performance), but I vividly remember that

scene with the armed guards where he says they "might as well have been

performing from the orchestra pit". And I can distinctly remember what

I was thinking as I watched that scene: that the staging was hugely impressive,

that the music was gorgeous, and that – foremost – the singing was

some of the best in the opera.

In Zauberflöte of all operas, there’s really no need for the

singers to be the most important thing on the stage, visually speaking. Tommasini

does have a shadow of a point when he talks about the costumes: they weren’t

really up to the standard of the staging or the puppets, but that didn’t really

matter because the voices were so good. I’d say it was an excellent ensemble

cast: no one really stood out, but everybody sang their parts with accuracy

and feeling. There’s no doubt who the audience favourite was, though: the spirit-guide

boy trebles, who were perfectly in tune and in time with each other.

Julie Taymor, with this prodution, has finally taken the weight of the story

off the shoulders of the singers – and for that we should be grateful

rather than aggrieved. "It’s my job to make the libretto and the staging

magical," she seems to be telling her singers: "your job is to do

the same for the music". And, under the masterful direction of James Levine,

that’s exactly what they did.

I had the most wonderful night at the opera last night, thanks to a cast and

crew of hundreds. Of all the people who contributed to the evening’s success,

Taymor, though crucial, was only the third most important. Levine was number

two: he absolutely nailed the score, and reminded me that the Met’s

band is still one of the top five orchestras in the world. Number one, of course,

was, and is, and ever shall be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Taymor did what she does best, without interfering with either Levine or Mozart,

and that is probably her greatest achievement of all. And with all due respect

to Tony Tommasini, anybody who thinks that Mozart’s score can’t stand up to

a couple of puppets is in dire need of an injection of general musical enthusiasm.

Then again, I fear that Tommasini might not have been alone. Yet again, I came

away sorely disappointed in the quality of the Met’s audience, which seemed

to be comprised last night mainly of a large contingent from the Upper West

Side Hospital for Acute Bronchial Disorders. Given that the average age seemed

to be somewhere north of 70, you’d think that they’d’ve worked out by now that

the overture is actually part of the opera, and that when the orchestra is playing

music, it might be a good idea to discontinue their conversations. But maybe

this is what happens when you bring Julie Taymor to the Met: you get people

who think that if they can talk and cough in The Lion King, they can

talk and cough in Zauberflöte. Idiots.

When I was 16, a concert changed my life. I’ve written

about it here before: it was the London Symphony, under Kent Nagano, playing

Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise. Read my piece from

2002 if you want to know that story; my point here is to say that that one concert

was sufficient to get me hooked on new music in general.

In the two or three years following that evening, I actively sought out all

the new music I could find. Most of it was played at the Purcell Room in London,

one of the most acoustically perfect concert halls in the world, small (and

subsidised) enough that adventurous programming was welcomed with open arms.

It was there that I learned about all the big names of the post-war classical

music world: Boulez, Xenakis, Cage, Stockhausen, and more relatively unknown

British composers than you could shake a stick at. I basically got my classical

education by working backwards from these guys: occasionally a Webern piece,

say would come up, I’d get into him, and then at the next Webern concert I’d

find something even more mainstream, and so on.

Meanwhile, my mother, emboldened by my enthusiastic response to the Messiaen,

started educating me on her favourites, especially Bartók. Wonderfully,

Sir Georg Solti was still very much alive and active on the London scene, and

I went to many concerts he conducted of his beloved fellow Hungarian. To this

day, Solti remains the conductor I feel most fondly towards: I can still vividly

remember his kindly face, and the blood-quickening sounds he could get out of

the LSO once he really got his teeth into something like Mahler’s First. There

are many conductors I respect, but Solti had a knack of engendering something

closer to love – I daresay Leonard Bernstein did something similar in

New York.

Solti was one of those conductors who inspires enough devotion among his listeners

that they will follow him to pastures new. Simon Rattle is another: when he

turned people on to classical music, it wasn’t a narrow swathe of Brahms and

Beethoven, but a vast range of music from Handel and Monteverdi to Henze and

Messiaen, and beyond.

Rattle is one of those conductors – Michael Tilson Thomas, in San Francisco,

springs to mind as another – who makes successful attempts to place new

music at the heart of any concert season. Such people are rare, however, and

the example of Nicholas Kenyon, who always throws an enormous quantity of new

music into any Proms season, only really goes to show what is possible when

you’re supported by Auntie Beeb rather than octogenarian subscribers who start

getting nervous when they see Richard Strauss on the bill.

A couple of weeks ago, the Toronto Symphony caused a small stir in classical

music circles when they announced, in the

words of Greg Sandow, that "they’re going to banish new music from

their regular season, at least for this year, and stick it off by itself in

a few concerts next spring". (I can’t link to the original story, because

it’s behind a subscriber firewall, and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of

press release on the official Toronto Symphony website.) Sandow, along with

Alex Ross,

refused to condemn this action: if new music isn’t working in what Ross calls

a "ghastly ritual, generating reams of five- and twenty-minute pieces that

serve no vital function", then why not try an alternative method of delivering

it?

While I understand where Sandow and Ross are coming from, I fear the Toronto

experiment is doomed to failure. Full-scale symphony orchestras are expensive

animals, and new-music concerts aimed at under-30 members coaxed with $10 tickets

are guaranteed to lose large amounts of money. The minute that the orchestra

runs into budget difficulties (and there isn’t an orchestra in the world which

doesn’t run into budget difficulties), the new-music concerts will be the first

to go. New music simply doesn’t work as a bolted-on afterthought: it has to

be an integral part of what an orchestra does, or it is nothing.

One way of doing this, of course, is for an orchestra to specialise in new

music. The experience of the Brooklyn Philharmonic is disheartening, but a look

across the pond at the London Sinfonietta shows that it is possible to run a

successful, high-profile orchestra with consistently interesting and daring

programming.

In the US, the prime example, although of course it is not an orchestra and

therefore doesn’t have nearly the same kind of struggles with overhead costs,

is the Kronos Quartet. I went to see them perform Terry Riley’s Sun Rings

at BAM last night, and it was quite a sight to behold, even before the performance

started. The large opera house was completely sold out, even though there were

three separate performances featuring nothing but this single piece by a composer

who’s mainly known for one work he wrote in 1964.

Clearly, there’s a huge audience for new music if it’s done right. And the

main lesson of last night’s concert, for me, was that the audience really has

to be able to trust the performers. A couple of posts ago, I worried

about going to see a new opera at Glyndebourne: evidently, I don’t completely

trust the house to put on a great show. And the Death of Klinghoffer

fiasco last December was

proof enough for anybody that the Brooklyn Philharmonic and BAM are not the

kind of brand names which can be trusted with new music.

The Kronos Quartet, however, with more than 30 years of history, has managed

to create a brand name which people know they can trust. The score for Sun

Rings did not require particularly virtuoso playing: probably there are

a dozen other quartets who could have sat in those chairs and done an equally

good job. But the production here was immaculate: no costs were cut, the very

best designers and singers were hired, and everybody worked with each other

to create a whole which was greater than the sum of its parts – quite

the opposite of the regrettable Klinghoffer situation.

I’m not going to say much about Sun Rings itself: while I greatly

enjoyed the concert, and am extremely glad I went, I have serious misgivings

about the final movement, with visuals straight out of the annual report of

a major multinational polluter and an annoying woman’s voice intoning something

about One Earth One People One Love. Other than that, the piece is excellent,

and the video footage of the surface of the sun, especially, was glorious.

My broader point is that the audience clearly had a great experience last night,

and, if given the choice, most of them will come back for more. There are many

wonderful works written for full orchestra rather than for string quartet which

could get a similar reaction. What New York lacks – what, I daresay, America

lacks – is an institution which has successfully invested itself in performing

those pieces. The problem, as I see it, with the Toronto approach is that if

it doesn’t work, little if any harm is done to the orchestra as a whole. New

music is hard work, and if the costs of failure are low or even negative, then

no one’s going to expend much effort in making sure it works. The Kronos Quartet

managed to sell out BAM for three successive nights because their audience knows

that they care about new music, and have a history of getting it right. There

are precious few other US organisations about whom the same can be said.

One of the biggest surprises, for myself along with many people, of Dia:Beacon

was the fact that Dan Flavin’s work looks so marvelous in natural light. So

when I heard that the head of Dia, Michael Govan, had curated the new Flavin

retrospective at

the National Gallery of Art in Washington, I was looking forward to more surprises

and new ways of looking at Flavin.

I must say now that it’s a very good retrospective, and if you’re anywhere

near Washington you should check it out. But it’s not a great show, and in fact

it might well look much better when it moves on to Fort Worth and Chicago next

year.

The show starts off well, at least from the outside of the gallery. The National

Gallery of Art does not go in for what James Traub calls

"unthinkably garish and self-aggrandizing" banners on the outside

of its pristine IM Pei building, but if you approach from the other side of

Constitution Avenue, it’s easy to see that something interesting is going on

inside. The big long North-facing window which helps illuminate the gallery’s

atrium has been filled with a beautiful green glow, thanks to the installation

of Untitled (To You, Heiner, With Admiration and Affection) just inside

it. That’s it at the top of this post.

But look at the photograph, which comes from the estate of the artist, and

anybody who’s actually visited the show will notice a couple of things. Firstly,

the photo is taken at dusk, when the interplay with natural light is minimised.

During the height of the day, it becomes obvious that the Flavin has been placed

in the darkest place in the whole atrium, as though the curators didn’t have

faith that it could actually stand up to untrammeled daylight. There’s a big

roof above it, extending both inside and outside the window, so the piece is

permanently in shadow. While it looks great from the outside, it’s less impressive

from the inside, shunted off to the edge of the atrium where it has much less

ability to really dominate the space.

Flavin was a master at dominating light-infused spaces – think of his

twelve-sided tower of pink fluorescent lights rising all the way from the floor

to the very top of the Guggenheim spiral in New York. Obviously, he couldn’t

install something similarly site-specific here: he’s been dead since 1996. But

Dia has shown how even his early works can be spectacular in a large space,

and the rather bland and empty atrium of the National Gallery was crying out

for something much more in-your-face. In the exhibition proper, for instance,

is an enormous installation of red, white and blue lamps which is somewhat uncomfortably

installed in an irregularly-shaped space with a spotlight weirdly shining down

from the ceiling. Could that, perhaps, have been moved to the museum lobby?

The other thing worth noticing about the photograph above is the lamps’ reflection

in the polished museum floor. If you leaf through the catalogue, you’ll find

that’s true of every single piece: a glowing tube, with light reflecting off

the wall, the ceiling, if visible, and always the floor. It’s part of the work:

it’s not only all around you, in the way that an Irwin might be, or a Serra;

it’s also below you, in the manner of an Andre – sometimes you

feel as though you’re floating in light, and frequently over the course of walking

through the exhibition I was reminded of the gallery installations of James

Turrell.

But the lobby installation is the odd work out in the National Gallery’s show:

every other work is exhibited on a dark grey carpet. It’s hard to think of a

floor surface more ill suited to Dan Flavin, and in fact the show is at its

theatrical best when you climb the spiral staircase to the second floor and

find yourself entering, head-first, the pure bright light field emitted by Untitled

(to Henri Matisse) – four lamps, of pink, yellow, blue and green,

which together combine to produce a gloriously rich white.

What’s great about this show is the ability to see a lot of Flavin’s work in

one place, over his entire career. The installation in Beacon is beautiful,

but limited; here, you can get a much better idea of what a first-rate colourist

Flavin was. The range of things he could achieve with stock lamps is astonishing:

by facing some towards the viewer and some back towards the wall, he could fill

different parts of the room, especially if the piece was in a corner, with an

astonishing array of colours and textures.

And at the end of the exhibition is a room of Flavin’s works on paper, which

I had never seen before, many of which are very beautiful indeed. It’s ironic,

though: the studies for light works are gorgeous, while the pieces which are

meant to be more self-contained are of little more than art-historical interest.

Still, the room of drawings is a very weak way to end an exhibition with such

hard-hitting pieces. Most people, I wager, will go back to the corridor works,

or some of the other large-scale virtuoso installations, for their final impression

of Flavin. I retraced my steps, doing the whole show backwards, and noticed

that the few works marked "exhibition copy" seemed brighter and cleaner

– and not necessarily in a good way – than the other pieces in the

show. Even after skimming through the exhibition catalogue, I’m none the wiser:

is this because flourescent lamps have changed since Flavin started using them,

or is it because older lamps fade over time? In other words, which is closer

to the art as Flavin created it: the old work or the new? Can anybody help me

out on this?

A few months ago, a series of blue boxes appeared in the World Financial Center

marina. If you walked past them, you’d realise they were making funny noises.

It turns out that they were a site-specific art

work by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger called Blue Moon. You can read about

it here

(be prepared for artspeak about "the inherent temporal cycles of the broader

bio-sphere"), or see pictures here:

the installation clearly wasn’t designed to be visually impressive.

I’m a big fan of Creative Time, the public art non-profit which organised Blue

Moon, but this was everything that public art should not be. Most people encountering

it wouldn’t notice it at all; those who did generally had no idea what it was.

The best-case scenario, really, was that someone might suspect that it was "meant

to be art". In order to appreciate it, you needed to arrive armed with

the foreknowledge that it was there, and of its deeper structure, involving

strategically-placed "tuning tubes", tide-activated switches, and

clever real-time harmonic sound mixing. In a gallery context, people might be

expected to find out about this kind of thing; in a public space, you simply

can’t make such assumptions. This was not public art: it was private art –

art for the cognoscenti – in a public space.

Creative Time is by no means alone in making this kind of mistake. I admire

the work of public art organisation Minetta

Brook, for instance, but when they take over a storefront in Beacon, New

York, and convert it into a video installation by Matthew Buckingham, there’s

very little public about the art. The video is a long, slow, black-and-white

silent film of the Hudson River: beautiful, to be sure, but also boring in the

way that most video art installations are boring. The storefront might be open

to the public, but there’s nothing really to invite Beacon residents in, and

certainly nothing to engross or delight them once they’ve entered. This, again,

is art by an established member of the art world, designed to be viewed and

appreciated by other such sophisticates.

The people who sponsor public art are normally – necessarily, even –

art-world people. They have artists they admire, and they like to see what those

artists can do in a public, as opposed to a gallery, setting. Few if any artists

will substantially change the kind of work they create when they are given a

public-art commission, so there’s definitely an art involved in picking artists

who will speak to the general public.

Many very good artists, it turns out, are also very accessible. Jeff Koons,

with his hugely-loved Puppy, springs immediately to mind, as does the

world-famous team of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who are coming

to New York in February. Other artists might seem more forbidding at first

glance but are embraced by the public all the same: I’m thinking here of Rachel

Whiteread’s House,

or Jonathan Borofsky’s Man

Walking to the Sky, which was so well received by the citizens of Kassel

when it was exhibited there at Documenta in 1990 that it was bought by the city

permanently.

Borofsky, of course, took his Kassel man and made first a female

version, in Strasbourg, and now a group

version, which has been

installed at Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller Center has a great track record

when it comes to public art: the Koons puppy looked wonderful in the space where

the Christmas Tree goes every year, and subsequently there have been excellent

installations by Louise Bourgeois, Nam June Paik and Takashi

Murakami.

While some of these artists might be considered more serious than others, all

of them are genuine art-world heavyweights who have managed to create large

crowd-pleasing installations in midtown Manhattan. A bit further uptown, however,

the

story is very different. There, the Marlborough Gallery has joined forces

with the Broadway Mall Association and the Parks Department to create something

called "Tom Otterness on Broadway".

Here, the problem is not that an institution like Creative Time is foisting

highbrow art on people incapable of understanding it: quite the opposite. Tom

Otterness, his past association with the likes of Kiki Smith and Jenny Holzer

notwithstanding, is a truly vulgar mass-market artist who appeals to the type

of people who don’t know much about art, but know what they like. His pieces

are excruciatingly literal-minded: one, called "Marriage of Real Estate

and Money", shows some money getting married to a house. Ha! Otterness

talked to the New York Times:

I don’t underestimate rich people’s sense of humor either. You’d be surprised

at the number of real-estate guys who have collected `The Marriage of Real

Estate and Money.’

No, Tom, I wouldn’t. Real-estate guys are precisely the sort of people

I’d expect to buy (not "collect") this piece – and not necessarily

because they’ve got a particularly well-developed sense of humour, either. The

ultimate real-estate guy, of course, is Donald Trump, and he has just the kind

of taste that the Marlborough Gallery is looking for in Otterness collectors.

Here’s James Traub, profiling

The Donald last weekend:

Maybe it’s an example of what Marxists call ”false consciousness,” but

Trump really is a populist plutocrat — and not because he’s philanthropic

or even liberal-minded. It’s the opposite: people seem to like him because

he loves his money and spends it just the way they would if they had it —

as if he had just won a reality show himself in which the prize is absolutely

everything.

What makes Trump Trump is not just what he has but what he doesn’t care about

having: status. Trump is not a patron of the arts; he does not sit on the

boards of museums or universities or think tanks. His self-love simply will

not brook the idea of a superior station to which you gain access by virtue

of taste or values or behavior or whatever it is you might be supposed not

already to have. Trump does not even recognize that some people look down

on him; he assumes they must be looking up.

"Populist" is the operative word here, and in fact it comes up again

in the Otterness piece:

Mr. Otterness, 52, is well suited to the diversity and commercial energy

of Broadway. He is both popular and populist — an artist whose sculptures

are intended to work everywhere and be understood by almost everyone.

Now that we are living in the era of the death

of the middlebrow, it’s hard for me to consider populism quite as benignly

as that. Anybody genuinely populist cannot be admirable: Trump is admired by

the ignorant public, not by fellow businessmen, and Otterness has created a

huge business churning out sculptures of cute bears which has no more basis

in the art world than does Thomas Kinkade. The Broadway Mall Association, here,

is essentially throwing its hands in the air and saying that the only way it

will be able to find something popular is by sacrificing all quality-related

criteria. Given that Rockefeller Center has provided many obvious counterexamples,

it’s hard to see why Otterness was chosen, beyond the obvious fact that his

gallery is funding the entire installation.

I’m hopeful, however, that the city’s other public-art installations, like

Mark di Suvero in Madison Square Park and Roy Lichtenstein in City Hall Park

– not to mention Christo in Central Park – will show that good

public art is not some kind of oxymoron. Even today, as Nicholas Serota will

attest, you don’t need to be populist to be popular.

One of the funniest scenes in the new Stephen Fry movie, Bright

Young Things, happens when one of the eponymous socialites, played by the

fabulously-named Fenella Woolgar, fails to recognise the Prime Minister when

he joins her for breakfast. It’s a cheap joke, but it’s effective: it manages

to perfectly encapsulate the bubble of privilege surrounding posh youngsters

in England between the wars.

The really shocking thing about the film (which is only new to Americans: it

came out ages ago in Europe) is not how much England has changed since the 30s,

but how little. The vile bodies of the book

upon which the film is based are still out in force; the public still salivates

over the excesses of the rich and famous, and the hypocrisy of the landed and

monied classes is as egregious as it ever was. In England, as in America, we

are living in what Paul Krugman calls a "new gilded age", and whatever

lessons were learned during the war have evidently, by this point, been forgotten.

What’s more, the clubby world of the Eton-and-Oxford privileged classes is

very much alive and well. And as both the film and the book show, the superficially

attractive life of its denizens is often very unhappy indeed in reality. The

fact that rich people can be unhappy is, of course, nothing new, and certainly

not unique to England. But the English public school system is, I think, particularly

good at ratcheting up the misery for those who are for whatever reason not so

good at playing the game.

This fact was hammered home for me recently, when I spent some time with a

real world Eton-and-Oxford type: let’s call him Carlton Fitzsimmons. He grew

up, of course, in a wealthy family, with only the briefest exposure to those

less well-off than he. He certainly sounds to anybody hearing his voice for

the first time like an archetypal braying young Tory, but there’s also the slightest

touch of the nouveau about him: his father is a property developer who named

his first-born son after himself. (Hence the Carlton: it’s actually a middle

name, used to distinguish him from his dad.)

Carlton did not have a happy childhood. Sent off to boarding school at a young

age, he never really fit in with his peers, and spent most of his time at Eton

bullied and friendless. A bit of a nerd, he was good at mathematics, and retreated

into a world of maths problems and videogames. And his public school sheltered

him: he never needed to leave its walls, never needed to practice human interaction

with normal people – never even got much of an opportunity to meet girls.

At school, he scrounged some measure of self-confidence from his high grades,

while at home he learned contempt for the lazy poor from his father.

Today, then, Carlton judges people by how intelligent he thinks they are –

a very narrow criterion, which mainly has to do with how good they are at mathematics.

He has no interest in – indeed, very little comprehension of – the

type of insights that other people might have and he does not: for him, being

socially adept, for instance, is something to be envied, perhaps, but not admired.

Carlton even has a certain amount of contempt for his mother, who, despite the

fact that she’s responsible for maintaining basically all his family’s friendships,

doesn’t have the analytical nous of his father.

Eton persuaded Carlton that academic success was synonymous with intelligence,

even as his family’s wealth gave him an idea of how he was going to operate

successfully in the real world. All he needed to do was stay on the right side

of his parents, and he could end up running a fleet of flats in Fulham, making

a very nice income – something, with his head for figures, which he’d

probably do very well. Without his parents’ wealth and property, on the other

hand, he would be forced to fend for himself in a world in which he found it

extremely difficult to interact with people or understand what they were thinking.

Carlton’s entire future, then, was tied up in inheriting his father’s properties.

When he got accepted to Oxford to read mathematics, it was either the best or

the worst thing that could have happened to him, depending on your point of

view. He managed to go to the one place where he could remain coddled in privilege,

and get through three years of university without being forced into unpleasant

encounters with the real world. During the summer, his father got him an internship

in the mortgage department of an investment bank, where he worked long hours

in a testosterone-filled environment learning the virtues of hard work and the

rewards of analytical thinking.

Carlton is an adult now, albeit far from grown up; he has had the best education

money can buy, but doesn’t know who Dick Cheney is. All the same, he has political

opinions: "I’m a conservative," he charmingly says, "because

my parents are loaded". Pushed on the subject, he’ll go as far as to say

that state education should be abolished altogether: if you can’t afford an

education, you shouldn’t get one.

A moment’s reflection, of course, would lead Carlton to realise what a stupid

idea that is – but somehow his education hasn’t trained him to think in

that way. His world is almost unthinkably narrow: it doesn’t include things

like social mobility and economic growth, but consists mainly of video games

and maths problems. In the ridiculously overspecialised world of the English

university, that’s not going to change.

Occasionally, of course, Carlton does meet people from outside his upper-class

bubble of landed privilege. The problem is that it doesn’t take most of them

long to work out that they don’t really like him, so he remains largely untouched

by the outside world, and reinforced in his belief that, well, nobody really

likes him. He’s driven increasingly inwards, into a world where self-pity takes

over from any idea that he might be able to change himself into someone that

people get on with.

I have no idea how all this is going to end up. My guess is that the chances

of Carlton seeing the world, opening his horizons, and getting some perspective

on his family’s place in the grand scheme of things are probably diminishing

quickly at this point. The English public school system has failed him, and

has created someone as well-rounded as a Donald Judd cube. What’s more, his

father was probably much the same, and if Carlton ever does find someone to

marry and settle down with (probably by sheer force of pounds sterling), his

son might well carry on the family tradition. Evelyn Waugh understood this,

but so did Philip Larkin.

I’ve long

been a cheerleader for the WTC redevelopment. Even when others started griping,

I was still optimistic about

the prospects for the site and the likelihood that it could become a vibrant

and world-beating neighborhood. In recent days, however, I’ve started getting

a little more pessimistic, the release of a very

sexy new site rendering notwithstanding.

The new picture is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the

Freedom Tower pictured is almost exactly the same, as far as I can tell, as

the one which was unveiled

nine months ago. That Freedom Tower was a last-minute thrown-together compromise,

and since then the foundation stone has been laid, and some kind of construction

has begun.

There are two possibilities here. The first is that over the course of the

past nine months, zero progress has been made on what the tower is going to

look like, especially its upper half. The second is that David Childs and Larry

Silverstein do have a good idea of what they’re building, but they’re keeping

it secret – maybe because they fear what the public and/or Daniel Libeskind

might think of the changes. Neither of these two possibilities makes me particularly

hopeful about the future of construction on the WTC site.

That said, there is one obvious difference between this rendering and the one

which was released in July. Look at the trelliswork at the top: the old rendering

is on the left, the new one is on the right.

Doesn’t it look to you that the top of the Freedom Tower has been glazed?

If you magnify the image even further, it’s clear that the buildings viewed

through the top of the tower are much less clear than the ones viewed to the

side – DBox, the renderers, clearly want it to look as though we’re looking

through glass. What’s more, the windmills, which were never much in evidence

to start with, seem to have disappeared altogether. Is the top of the Freedom

Tower going to become a useless glass box? I do hope not.

My guess is that neither rendering looks much like what we’re eventually going

to get. I stand by what I said

in February: the spire will look very different from what it’s being rendered

as right now, the sloping roof is likely to go, and there’ll be some kind of

observation deck at the very top.

And the really big picture, of course, is that the Freedom Tower is a camel.

As Paul Goldberger explains in his new

book, it’s essentially the product of wishful thinking by George Pataki,

who somehow managed to convince himself that David Childs and Daniel Libeskind

– both big-time architects with a strong impression of what the new tower

should look like, and an even stronger conviction that the other guy was wrong

– could somehow be forced to fruitfully collaborate on the skyscraper.

It was never going to happen, and the final building is quite probably worse

than either man would have come up with on his own – although I daresay

it’s better than Childs’ Bear Stearns building in midtown.

Other

bits of the new rendering are also interesting. Look at the detail on the left:

not only has Dey Street

been restored, but Cortlandt Street is just visible as a vehicular street as

well. That’s good news: it shows that in at least one design shop New York City

has won out over the floor plate Nazis, although of course none of this is final.

The one thing I can’t work out is the jagged reflection in the office tower

behind Santiago Calatrava’s PATH terminal. It seems to be the reflection of

some kind of building, but which building is not at all clear. This is actually

the most annoying part of the rendering: I would much have preferred an idea

of what we’re going to see in four or five years, rather than a wishful-thinking

plan including four large office towers which probably won’t be built for decades

and in any case won’t look anything like this if and when they are built. Hidden

behind the middle two, for instance, is most of the Wedge of Light and all of

the Millenium Hilton: I still don’t really have any idea of how the PATH station

and the Wedge of Light are meant to interact and point pedestrian traffic coming

from the Brooklyn Bridge, say, down towards the memorial.

What we do see quite clearly in this rendering is the memorial, and the way

in which it’s almost entirely at grade. Libeskind’s pit of memory is long gone,

and what remains of the slurry wall will be as nothing compared to the edifice

which so impressed Libeskind and the people who chose his design from the shortlist.

More generally, when I reread what I wrote back in 2002, I feel a sense of opportunity

squandered:

It all starts down in the dirt, by the huge slurry walls which stop the Hudson

River from rushing in to the site. These were and are true engineering marvels:

as Liebeskind says, they "withstood the unimaginable trauma of the destuction

and stand eloquent". He keeps them exposed, 70 feet below ground, and

then spirals up and out, into the rest of the site and beyond.

At the bottom is the museum and the memorial; at the top is a vertical "gardens

of the world", rising in a glorious spike well above the rest of the

skyline. The buildings in the rest of the site are extremely strong as well,

especially the ones which border on what Liebeskind rather unfortunately calls

the "wedge of light". This is a triangular plaza which will have

no shadows each year on September 11 between the hours of 8:46am and 10:28am.

It’s mirrored by the Heroes Park, one of three or four green spaces in the

plan.

What’s left of this vision? The slurry walls are gone, the spiral walkway is

gone, the gardens of the world are gone, the spike is rapidly going, the wedge

of light won’t have no shadows at the crucial time, thanks to the Millenium

Hilton, the Heroes Park has all but disappeared… as Goldberger says, Libeskind’s

plan has been "ground down" to the point at which we can reasonably

ask ourselves why we needed a major architectural name to design the WTC site

at all. With all the compromises which have been made, it’s looking increasingly

as though the high-profile competition was little more than a shiny toy which

took the eyes of the public off the places where the real decisions were being

made – mainly the offices of George Pataki and Larry Silverstein.

As Goldberger says, what was needed here was someone with a strong vision and

the ability to make it happen – someone like Francois Mitterand, who did

something similar in Paris. Pataki was not that man; I have a feeling that New

York’s deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, with the wholehearted backing of Michael

Bloomberg, might have been.

New York City, which has had very, very little say in the development of the

WTC site, had a wonderful plan for Lower Manhattan as a whole, much of which

– especially housing – has been jettisoned by the Port Authority

and the LMDC. The cooks in charge of this particular broth were the wrong ones,

I fear: some deal surely could have been done whereby New York City received

the land under the World Trade Center from the Port Authority, in return for

the land under JFK and LaGuardia airports. Doctoroff would then have had much

more power, Pataki would have had much less, and there might well have been

many fewer compromises along the way.

Just look at the results of the competition for the cultural buildings: the

Joyce Theater and the Drawing Center are going to be the anchor tenants at the

new site, because their competition, mainly the New York City Opera, was considered

to be too big to fit into the small gaps remaining between office buildings.

I’m all for facing up to realities, but there comes a point where you simply

can’t give office buildings which might never be built priority over an institution

like the New York City Opera, which isn’t all that big to start with. If Ground

Zero is too small to accommodate one medium-to-large cultural institution, then

there has to be a strong case for revisiting the whole question of why so much

space has to be set aside for offices.

I might look as though I’m contradicting myself here: Last September, I wrote

that

In theory, Silverstein could be bought off with a cash settlement rather

than office space. But he doesn’t seem to understand the cashflow situation

here: far from the taxpayer giving money to Silverstein to go away, Silverstein

is actually the central, necessary source of funds for rebuilding the WTC

site in the first place. It is Silverstein who held the insurance contracts

on the World Trade Center, you see, and without those insurance proceeds,

nothing is going to get built on the site at all.

But the situation has changed. Silverstein’s insurance payout is barely going

to be able to cover the cost of the Freedom Tower, after his legal expenses

and his rent to the Port Authority have been paid. Yes, Silverstein does have

a contractual right to rebuild 10 million square feet of office space –

but surely there’s a case to be made for crossing that bridge when we come to

it. No one expects Silverstein to exercise that clause in his contract any time

soon, and in the meantime there’s a whole new neighborhood to be built.

I went to a press conference

with Daniel Libeskind this week, and if I’ve learned anything from being a journalist

for the past ten years, it’s that the fewer questions someone answers, the more

worried they are. Libeskind, on Wednesday, answered very few questions, and

fell back time and time again on the stock answers that he’s been wheeling out

for the past two years. The only news we got was regarding new projects of his,

nothing pertaining to Ground Zero, where I get the feeling he’s been doing very

little work this year.

I would like to think that Libeskind will get the commission to design at least

one of the new cultural buildings, and that being able to get involved with

the minutiae of a real building on the site will bring his enthusiasm and involvement

levels back up. But the bigger battle has been lost, I think: at every turn

since the initial choice of Libeskind as master planner, political realities

have trumped the larger vision. While I’m still optimistic for the neighborhood

in the long run, I don’t think it’s going to be the greatest piece of urban

planning that the world has ever seen. And it should have been.