Felix Salmon

Anthony Tommasini is on holiday; in his place yesterday (the "critic’s

notebook" feature on the front page of the New York Times arts section),

the Metropolitan Opera ran a 2,000-word

fundraising drive under his byline. Or maybe he wrote it himself; if he

did, the Met couldn’t have wished for anything more fawning.

Terry

Teachout paraphrases:

ChevronTexaco, which has been sponsoring the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday-afternoon

radio broadcasts for the past 64 years, is pulling the plug at the end of

the current season. (They now have other corporate priorities.) The broadcasts

cost $7 million a year, and the Met doesn’t have that kind of cash to

spare.

Tommasini makes it as clear as he can that it’s ChevronTexaco who’s the villain

in this piece – he even calls down the wrath of Wotan on what he calls

"the merged company that has pulled the plug". The contrast, you see,

is with the virtuous pre-merger Texaco, which underwrote the broadcasts for

62 years, and whose CEO said in 1999 that "sponsoring the Met has become

part of our corporate DNA".

The difference between Tommasini and Teachout is that the former clearly sees

the potential demise of the broadcasts as disastrous for global civilisation,

while the latter is less sympathetic, saying that "I don’t believe

in sinking money into obsolete cultural ventures that have largely outlived

their utility, and it occurs to me that the Met’s radio broadcasts—at

least as presently constituted—may well fall into that category".

His argument is that

the future of classical radio lies not in what has come to be called "terrestrial

radio" (i.e., conventional radio broadcasting) but in satellite and Web-based

radio, which make it possible to "narrowcast" a wider variety of

programs aimed at smaller audiences. I suspect that’s where the Met

really belongs—not on terrestrial radio. And if I had to guess, I’d

say that the Tony Tommasinis of today would be more likely to listen to the

Met on their computers than on high-quality radios bought by their parents.

He’s wrong. The Met radio broadcasts reach 11 million people – vastly

more than will listen to classical music on their computers worldwide over the

course of a year. Tommasini makes the point that the broadcasts "have been

a cultural lifeline for generations of listeners, both those who live in places

far removed from any opera company and those who may live just a subway ride

from Lincoln Center but can’t afford to attend". Teachout, it would seem,

would restrict them to the lucky inhabitants of the affluent side of the digital

divide, those with satellite radios and broadband internet connections.

Teachout even gripes that he’d "like to know how many of the Met’s

11 million listeners live in the United States" – as though non-US

listeners are second-class opera buffs, about whom we shouldn’t really care.

Terry, those non-US listeners might well number millions in Latin America and

China – people who are certainly not going to get satellite radios any

time soon. Would you deprive them of what is quite probably their only access

to opera just because they’re not smart enough to live in the USA?

Teachout just doesn’t get it: he writes that he’s never listened to the broadcasts,

implying that therefore there’s something irrelevant about them. But Teachout

is a member of the cultural elite that they aren’t aimed at –

the people who, if they fancy some opera, can just hop on the subway to Lincoln

Center, pull out some of their disposable income, and experience it live. If

those people never listened to an opera on the radio, it really wouldn’t matter.

It’s everybody else – those without easy access to an opera house

– who are the people that the radio broadcasts are trying to reach.

That said, I do agree with Teachout on the subject of what Tommasini calls

"compensation to commercial radio stations" – something which

accounts for an undisclosed chunk of the cost of the broadcasts. Subsidising

the wide dissemination of opera is a good thing indeed, but I’m not sure it

should go so far as to directly contribute to the bottom line of for-profit

radio stations.

But I also think that the whole debate is a little bit overblown. For the fact

is that the Saturday broadcasts will go on, even if the Met can’t find a big-name

corporate sponsor to replace ChevronTexaco. The Annenberg Foundation has already

given $3.5 million to keep them on the air, and both Joseph Volpe, the Met’s

general manager, and Beverly Sills, its chairwoman, have personally pledged

that the programme will continue.

Why? Certainly, it’s close to their hearts for all the reasons that Tommasini

rehearses. But, more prosaically, it’s crucially important if the Met is to

continue to receive funding from the large foundations. Tommasini’s article

appeared on the same day that George Hunka blogged

about how "Lincoln Center Theater, in particular, has an active education

department that seeks to bring young audiences into the theater (mainly for

the benefit of funders and New York Times reporters, it appears)".

I’m not nearly that cynical, but I’m sure that Volpe has done his maths: if

he doesn’t spend a couple of million on the radio broadcasts, he would risk

losing much more than that from the kind of foundations that are very keen on

public outreach, and very dubious about throwing money at institutions which

cater only to the rich opera-going elite. Anthony Tommasini can stop losing

sleep: the Met has every interest in ensuring that these broadcasts continue.

Firstly, many apologies for not updating this blog in a little while. I would

use the excuse that I was in Uruguay for most of the time, but that would be

disingenuous, since I had (a) laptop; (b) internet connection – albeit

dialup and spotty; and (c) lots of spare time while I was down there. It’s just

that the drive to blog was missing.

So instead, I decided to use that spare time to catch up on some reading. The

main course was The

Fortress of Solitude, the hugely ambitious new novel from Jonathan Lethem;

for dessert, I read The

Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts by Colson Whitehead. It’s an unoriginal

combination: not only are they both about New York City, but they even share

a publisher. And browsers

looking at the latter book on Amazon are encouraged to buy it in conjunction

with the former for a combined price of just $29.57.

My advice is to save your pennies, or at least the $13.97 that Amazon wants

for the Whitehead. It’s a small and slender volume, with very little substance.

If you want to get 90% of the benefit for free, wander into your local bookshop

and simply read the first real chapter (after the introduction), called The

Port Authority. It’s eight short pages long, and turns acute observation into

allusive, almost epigrammatic prose. Unfortunately, the book only goes downhill

from there, and since there’s no kind of narrative arc, there’s really no reason

to read on.

As the book continues, you’re bound to have an emperor-has-no-clothes moment

at some point. And once you’ve had it, there’s no going back. Would-be profundities

become silly at best, idiotic at worst, and reading any further loses all of

its appeal. Whitehead loves switching points of view, from first person to second

to third. But he also anthropomophises everything, from grains of sand to the

entire island of Manhattan, with less than happy results. Take the Coney Island

chapter, for instance:

Naturalized styrofoam bits recite pledges and names of presidents at the

slightest provocation.

The number of house keys lost this day will fall within the daily average

of lost house keys.

Their castles rise proudly from soggy plots of real estate, yet despite their

enthusiasm a very small percentage of these children actually go on to careers

in construction, it’s very strange.

The unseen infrastructure of waves. Events a thousand miles away find their

final meaning in these gentle little consequences begging at the shore.

Underneath the boardwalk is where they store failed mayoral candidates.

Never mind that you can’t fall within a daily average. None of these sentences

– and they’re a pretty representative sample of what you’ll find in the

rest of the book – means anything at all. They’re held together by nothing

but grammar: our minds desperately scramble to find some kind of meaning in

them, as though confronted by "colourless green ideas sleep furiously".

But the real response is much more simple: no, styrofoam bits don’t recite anything.

No, it isn’t strange that kids building sandcastles don’t all grow up to become

Donald Trump. No, underneath the boardwalk is not a store of failed mayoral

candidates.

This book is Whitehead’s first since he won a MacArthur genius

award in 2002, and it seems that the praise might have gone to his –

or his editor’s – head. If he’s a genius, he doesn’t need to worry about

whether he’s making any sense, right? It’s the same thing that happened to Jeanette

Winterson after she got praised to the skies for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

Bourgeois extravagances like plot and meaning got jettisoned, in favour of Art.

Well, excuse me, but I’d rather have comprehensibility.

So there’s no doubt that The Fortress of Solitude is much better suited for

someone like me. While there are no shortage of digressions and passages of

beautiful observational writing, there’s still a plot, something to keep you

turning the pages.

Once again, however, there are good reasons to stop turning at the end of the

first chapter. In this case, I hasten to add, the first chapter, called Underberg,

is 292 pages long, and makes for a wonderful and self-contained book in and

of itself. It tells the story of a kid called Dylan Ebdus growing up in Gowanus/Boerum

Hill in the 1970s, and is full to bursting with wonderful riffs on popular culture.

From the games children would play on the slate sidewalks of Dean Street, through

the birth of cultural phenomena from rap to graffiti to crack, Ebdus experiences

it all.

Every so often, this comes across as slightly boastful. Ebdus, who is clearly

modelled on Lethem himself, shows us his streed credentials at every opportunity:

all of us who didn’t grow up in a black neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 70s

have to concede that Lethem has one over on us. And because Lethem seems to

feel that Ebdus has to personally witness just about every important cultural

development of the time, the character sometimes loses versimilitude. Is it

really possible that a kid whose father spends all his time holed up in the

attic, whose pothead mother abandoned him at an early age, whose friends rarely

turn up to school at all, whose teachers barely notice him, who displays no

signs of academic ambition, whose only reading material seems to be comic books

– is this kid really likely to make it into Stuyvesant High School by

dint of sheer natural intelligence and/or whiteness?

It is at Stuyvesant, we assume, that Ebdus learns how to write, and once he

graduates, the third-person first chapter ends and we move into the first-person

second chapter. (There’s also a brief intermission, where you can get up, stretch

your legs, and go to the bathroom.) Ebdus moves on to a Camden College which

is entirely familiar from Less

Than Zero, where he becomes popular by wearing a Kangol cap "long enough

before the Beastie Boys made it widely familiar". He loses touch with his

best friend from Brooklyn, a black kid called Mingus Rude to whom Lethem shows

no mercy at all in terms of plot. No miraculous tickets out of the ghetto for

Rude: instead, we see a textbook descent into drug addiction and worse.

Lethem’s very good, actually, on the mechanisms which reinforce the class and

race divide in America. While Rude never has a chance, Ebdus’s friends from

Camden almost have too many:

"How’s Karen Rothenberg?" I asked, shifting to safer ground.

Euclid goggled. "She quit calling when she came back from Minneapolis

– rehab. Now she’s got this custom hat shop on Ludlow Street. They look

like hemorrhoids, if you ask me. But Dashiell Marks – you remember Dashiell?"

I lied and said I did.

"Dashiell got Karen’s hats listed on the Best Bets page of New York

magazine, so everything’s hunky-dory."

There’s a lot of such good observation where that comes from, although most

of it’s in the first half of the book. The second half spends too many pages

tying up loose ends from the first, as well as helping to explain why we kept

on running across a character called Robert Woolfolk rather more often than

seemed plausible. Turns out Lethem has something in store for him: a baroque

revenge fantasy involving a magic ring which gives its wearer comic-book superpowers.

In general, the first half shows and the second half tells. Confined mostly

to one block in Brooklyn, the childhood portion of the book manages to raise

the largest of themes (race, class, drugs) while keeping its feet on the ground.

Once Ebdus moves to California in Part II, everything is viewed through a distorting

veil of self-knowledge which the third-person narrration of Part I happily avoids.

Both parts, however, suffer from a surfeit of specificity. Most of the time,

this book says a lot more about a very specific part of Brooklyn at a very specific

point in time than it does about America or life more generally. People who

aren’t intimately familiar with Brooklyn’s geometry are going to get hopelessly

confused by the constant refrains about which streets divide which neighborhoods,

while readers who don’t particularly care about the evolution of popular music

from the mid-70s to the early 80s will find their eyes glazing over at the endless

musical references.

This novel was almost designed, you might say, to be read by an overeducated

thirtysomething New York-based book reviewer – such a person has all the

background knowledge and interests necessary to really appreciate it. Had it

been set in Detroit instead, then I daresay the reviews would have been less

numerous and less positive. The Fortress of Solitude doesn’t so much transcend

its setting to make larger points: rather, it relies on that setting to provide

a foundation for the whole project.

Lethem’s still a long way from the Great American Novel, then. But in this

book’s first 292 pages, he might well have written the Great Brooklyn Novel.

And that is no mean feat.

When I posted an entry

on 2 Columbus Circle last month, I said that "The lack of windows gives

it the feel of a prison: you imagine yourself stuck inside, unable to look out.

It is an exercise in claustrophobia, and the new design [with lots of glass

and light] constitutes a vast improvement." I also said that "the

mood in the city these days is that brand-new buildings are usually pretty good".

Maybe

I spoke too soon. Lockhart Steele has gotten

himself a press kit for the new New Museum building, which is going up on

the site of what is now a parking lot across from Prince Street on the Bowery.

And far from being a "pretty good" improvement on the brutalist nightmares

of the past, it seems determined to make every old mistake in the book all over

again.

Lock quotes the New Museum describing its new home as "a dramatic stack

of rectangular boxes, each with a different height, shifted slightly off axis

in different directions and clad in textured, galvanized zinc-plated steel".

The point of all this architectural cleverness, it would seem from reading

the New Museum website,

is to ensure that the building doesn’t have to bother with windows at all. After

all, they explain, "SANAA’s concept for the site proposes a series of shifting

sculptural boxes that allow for skylights on every level". And who needs

windows when you’ve got skylights?

Of course, art museums need wall space; they don’t need windows – although

places with great views, like the Tate Modern or Dia:Beacon,

use their windows to fantastic effect. The problem is not so much how things

feel on the inside, since with sunlight from above and intelligently-designed

lighting, the spaces will probably work perfectly well. Rather, my issue is

with the way the museum presents itself: it looks to the world like a dark fortress.

Added to the windowlessness is the problem of scale: the museum is going to

tower over its neighboring buildings without any attempt to integrate itself

in terms of either the street wall or the vernacular of the downtown tenement

building. There is no chance that the local residents are going to embrace this

building; rather, they are (rightly) going to consider it an eyesore and a bad

neighbour.

Here’s what the architects have to say on the subject:

We wanted to be as consistent as possible with the scale of the existing

surroundings. However, our building has to accommodate a much bigger program

than its neighbors do. By shifting the different levels of the structure in

relation to one another, we are also diminishing the bulk and establishing

a more effective, dynamic relationship with the buildings in the area. On

the other hand, because this area is in transition, we believe the New Museum

building should have a strong identity of its own in order to survive, especially

on a street as tough as the Bowery… To us the Bowery is less a boundary

than a neutral "demilitarized" zone between neighborhoods that have

very distinctive personalities—Nolita, the East Village, Chinatown.

This is gruesome stuff. I can’t for the life of me think how the shifting levels

establish any kind of effective or dynamic relationship with the buildings in

the area, none of which have any shifting levels at all. As for the idea that

the building "should have a strong identity" because it lies on a

"tough" street without a "distinctive personality" –

this is simply crazy. Architecturally, Nolita and the East Village are very

similar, characterised by low-rise, brick-built residential structures with

retail on the ground floor. The Bowery is much the same, enlivened by the Bowery

Mission and by the competing signage of the restaurant-supply and lighting shops.

It has a very strong and distinct character, none of which is reflected in this

design at all.

You might remember that when the New Museum bought this site and announced

that it was moving there, it made a big song and dance about how happy it was

to be remaining downtown and helping to revitalise Lower Manhattan in the wake

of September 11. Of course, Prince and Bowery is a world away from Lower Manhattan,

and many of us, at the time, thought that the New Museum was clearly trying

to come up with reasons to push the site after they’d already decided to move

there.

The rhetoric surrounding this building is similar: a Japanese architectural

firm comes up with a "bold" design, and then pays lip service to the

neighborhood, despite the fact that they obviously couldn’t care less. This

building would be equally ugly anywhere, but it certainly doesn’t belong in

residential downtown New York, where commercial high-rise structures are unheard

of.

In fact, it feels like nothing so much as Marcel Breuer’s Whitney

Museum, complete with windowlessness and cantilevered upper stories. The

only difference is in the cladding: zinc-plated steel as opposed to concrete.

No, I have no idea how or whether zinc-plated steel will age on a street full

of belching trucks rumbling to and from the Manhattan Bridge. Breuer’s building

is not well loved, and even architects generally admire it more as an important

piece of avant-garde 1960s architecture than as a perfectly-formed

art gallery. It’s squat, ugly, and generally pretty depressing; it certainly

can’t hold a candle to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim a few blocks uptown.

I have a feeling that the New Museum got sick of people walking straight past

its present location on Broadway without even noticing them, and decided that

in their new digs they were going to make a splash. But it would have been nice

if they did so by commissioning something beautiful and interesting, rather

than sentencing their new neighborhood to cower under a teetering pile of metal

boxes.

Meanwhile,

in Birmingham, the new

Selfridges has opened, and it, too, has no windows. Here, rather than a

neo-brutalist tower we have a biomorphic alien spacecraft. Both, however, are

primarily illuminated by skylights, and utterly fail to even try to fit in with

their surroundings.

Now I’m no curmudgeon who hates all new

buildings unless they look old and hates them even more if they try to do something

interesting. But if you’re open to the possibility that contemporary architecture

is good, you also have to be open to the possibility that it’s bad. And as a

rule, buildings without windows are bad buildings. (Of course, there are truly

great exceptions to the rule.) So just because a department store don’t

need windows, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have them. Indeed, department

store windows can look fantastic – just consider Peter

Jones in London, whose undulating curtain wall still feels very contemporary

despite the fact that it’s almost 70 years old.

It’s a psychological thing. When we look at a building, we naturally imagine

ourselves inside it, and no one wants to live in a building without windows.

The fact that no one does live in a museum or a department store is

irrelevant: when we’re simply looking at the outside of the structure, we want

to be able to look in, and, more importantly, we want the people inside to be

able to look out. It takes some kind of architectural genius to make us get

over that initial repulsion, and neither of these two buildings – nor

2 Columbus Circle, for that matter – has it.

It’s the battle of the ArtsJournal bloggers! Taking a perfectly good Boston

Globe editorial as their jumping-off point, Terry

Teachout and Greg

Sandow came to different conclusions about what National Public Radio (NPR)

can and should do with its $200 million windfall from Joan Kroc, wife of McDonald’s

founder Ray Kroc. Now Teachout has responded to Sandow directly, in an interesting

piece which addresses the whole raison d’être of what Teachout

calls "public entities".

Here’s Teachout today:

The difference between us—as I understand it, and I may be misinterpreting

Greg—is that I don’t start from the assumption that National Public

Radio has an a priori obligation to exist, and thus should ensure

its survival by any means necessary, even if that means scrapping musical

and other cultural programming in favor of Car Talk… The whole point of

subsidizing a radio network is to ensure that it will do things that commercial

broadcasters won’t do.

Well, of course he’s misinterpreting Greg. It’s a cute piece of rhetoric:

by spending most of his time expounding on Lord Reith and the role of a public-service

broadcaster in an otherwise commercial medium, Teachout essentially is saying

that the main difference between himself and Sandow is on the question of whether

NPR should compete at all with commercial radio stations.

In reality, I’m sure that the one thing that Sandow, Teachout and the Boston

Globe editorial board can all agree on is that NPR should do things which aren’t

already done elsewhere. Teachout thinks this means more cultural programming,

the Globe thinks it means more documentaries, and Sandow thinks it means the

kind of popular music (whole Neil Young album, for instance) which don’t get

airplay anywhere.

Teachout, meanwhile, is slyly pushing his reactionary views with a studied

nonchalance. Let’s say you want to persuade people that B. One way would be

to attack B directly, looking at the arguments for an against. Another way,

however, is to present a syllogism saying "A, and B, therefore C",

and then spend most of your time concentrating on A. Since you just throw in

B at that point, your readers are likely to assume that it’s relatively uncontroversial.

Here’s the genuinely controversial (and wrong) part of Teachout’s essay:

Between them, Big Media and the new media provide 24/7 news coverage in every

imaginable flavor. In what way does NPR’s news department do something that

isn’t already being done?

In other words, there’s no point in having loads of news on NPR, since there’s

already loads of news everywhere else and NPR, by definition, shouldn’t replicate

what you can get from FoxNews on the telly.

This is erroneous on two counts. For one thing, radio news is a very different

animal to news in print, on television, or online. Radio news is usually consumed

by people actively engaged in something else – driving, say, or ironing.

That means that it can give its listeners news in more depth than they get from

other news sources: while the average news consumer might not devote a full

10 minutes of their time to a TV news item or a newspaper feature, they don’t

mind listening to the radio for 10 minutes while stuck in a traffic jam.

Consequently, radio also has the ability to draw people in to subjects they

never knew were interesting. Most of us, I’m sure, have had the experience of

suddenly realising that we’ve been listening intently to a story about Bolivian

sewerage systems or Wisconsin filing-cabinet manufacturers – the sort

of subjects which would never make the television news, would never be sought

out on the internet, and which would be glossed over with one glance at the

headline in a newspaper. To paraphrase Reith’s formulation once again, radio

is uniquely placed to give us the news we didn’t know we wanted, and therefore

cannot be replaced with other news sources.

There are other great advantages to radio news as well: for one thing, it can

pull together expert commentary over the phone if needs must, since it doesn’t

need to set up cameras. That means it has access to a much deeper pool than

television, and that it can be more immediately responsive to events. It’s not

reliant on visuals in the way that TV is, and it doesn’t ignore other newspapers’

scoops in the way that print can. It’s also very fast: it can be faster than

the wires on reporting big local news first.

So Teachout is wrong to cite "Big Media and the new media" as reasons

not to support NPR’s news efforts. But even if he restricted himself to radio

news – which there is a lot of – he would still be wrong. For NPR

provides not only a different political slant to most other news programs –

it’s left where they’re right – but also a range of features and documentaries

which are expensive to produce and therefore nonexistent elsewhere on the radio

dial.

A similar argument can be put forward against Teachout’s dismissal of Car Talk

and All Things Considered. While commercial radio stations do have talk-based

shows which are superficially similar, they have very little, if anything, of

comparable quality. Teachout says that NPR’s talk-based shows cannot "justify

the continued existence of NPR as a subsidized public entity," on the grounds,

it would seem (he’s not entirely clear on this) that commercial stations have

talk-based shows too. Would he treat music-based shows in a similar manner?

No: he would differentiate between the high-production-value programming he

would like to see, and the lowest-common-denominator stuff churned out by the

likes of Clear Channel Communications.

I suspect that Teachout is, in this case, simply a curmudgeonly old right-winger

who objects in principle to NPR’s lefty programming getting public subsidy.

He’s just using a new approach to achieve an old end: rather than complain about

bias (yawn), he simply says that having any news at all on NPR constitutes a

dereliction of its public-service mandate. I’m not buying it.

I also note that Teachout has no ideas at all when it comes to addressing Sandow’s

point that the public – the very people NPR exists to serve – have

no desire for the kind of cultural programming that Teachout so desperately

desires. Here’s all he has to say on the subject:

Here’s where I agree with Greg: if NPR’s listeners won’t

listen to the cultural programs it does broadcast, then NPR should change

those programs, or create new and better ones. Do them creatively, do them

imaginatively, do them with an ear toward appealing to more than a handful

of listeners—but do them.

Surely Teachout is not so naive as to think that some magical injection of

creativity and imagination is going to start sending the audiences for such

programs soaring. Very creative and imaginative people have been working for

many years on precisely this problem, with no visible success. Of all the things

which Kroc’s $200 million could be put towards, a desperate attempt to buy widespread

popularity for cultural programming would probably be the most quixotic. This

money represents an enormous opportunity for NPR; it shouldn’t be wasted on

pipe dreams.

If you’ve picked up a reasonably highbrow magazine recently, chances are that

you’ve seen a feature on Diane Arbus. She’s all over the news because a major

retrospective, Diane

Arbus Revelations, opened at SFMOMA on October 25. It would be reasonable,

then, to assume that the show, barely a couple of weeks old, is packed.

Reasonable, but wrong. It turns out that anybody going to see the Diane Arbus

show between October 25 and November 4 – its first 11 days – more

or less had the exhibition to themselves. Not because the exhibition is bad

– far from it. But because of the incredible incompetence of SFMOMA.

The first 11 days of Arbus, you see, coincided with the last 11 days of Marc

Chagall, a major retrospective of the Russian artist which was on show only

in Paris and San Francisco. Chagall is a popular painter, and as the show started

coming to an end, people flocked to the museum to catch it before it closed.

None of this, of course, should have anything to do with Arbus. But SFMOMA’s

reaction to the Chagall crowds was so idiotic that almost nobody ended up seeing

anything else: the 5th floor, home to the Chagalls, was packed, while the rest

of the museum was a ghost town.

The reason was that SFMOMA clearly has no idea how to ticket a blockbuster

exhibition. The standard setup at the glitzy newish museum is to have two lines,

one for members and one for non-members. The line for members is generally shorter:

they can usually just turn up, get free admission for themselves and their guests,

and walk in. The line for non-members is longer, since everybody has to pay

to get in. Non-members can buy general admission, or pay $5 more to get into

the big shows.

Obviously, with a really big show, this system doesn’t work. Since

there’s no difference between the line for general admission and the line for

the blockbuster show, the would-be blockbuster-goers form a queue so long that

no one else would ever dream of joining it. Anybody wanting to see the permanent

collection, or even the Diane Arbus show, takes one look at the length of the

line and decides to come back another day.

Dealing with this sort of thing is not exactly rocket science: museums from

the Tate in London to the Natural History Museum in New York have separate lines

for the big exhibitions, as well as timed tickets which sell out when the show

is full, preventing people for waiting unnecessarily long to get in. And when

the crowds really start to metastasize, the museums stay open later –

the Tate opened its doors 24 hours at the end of its Picasso Matisse show.

SFMOMA, on the other hand, had other ideas. Firstly, they never had timed tickets

at all: the closest that they ever came was offering admission for a specific

day, which meant that if lots of other people turned up at the same time, the

queue to get into the show – even for ticket holders – could be

the best part of an hour long.

Also, SFMOMA never saw any need to change its ticketing situation. The Friday

I went, the members stood in a short line waiting for three employees to hand

out their free tickets, while the non-members stood in a two-hour queue

waiting for two employees to get around to serving them. Yes, that’s

two hours just to get into the museum, over and above the amount of time spent

waiting to get into the show itself. I fear to think what the situation was

come the weekend.

Even if you really, really wanted to see the Chagall show – say, because

you were in town with your mother, who named you (middle name, at least) after

him – the wait was daunting. The obvious alternative to standing in line

was to phone up SFMOMA’s ticketing agent, TicketWeb, and book a ticket for that

or a different day. But here’s where SFMOMA’s unique brand of genius comes in

to play: at the end of the Chagall show, when demand for tickets was higher

than it had ever been, the museum simply stopped selling them through TicketWeb.

No one was to be able to buy their tickets in advance: everybody had to suffer

equally in line.

And even the one thing that SFMOMA did do right – expanding its opening

hours – it still managed to cock up. For one thing, the only difference

between Chagall hours and normal hours was that the museum stayed open a bit

later on Friday nights. More germanely, however, the new hours were not well

advertised: they were nowhere on the information line, and only on the special

exhibition page (not the general information page) of the website.

SFMOMA sits in the heart of Silicon Valley, where sporting stadiums are named

things like Network Associates Stadium and 3Com Park. It gets funding from Hewletts

and Googles and everything. But it can’t manage a basic technology like timed

tickets, with the result that whenever more people turn up than can fit into

the exhibition, the only mechanism it has to deal with the problem is to let

lines grow to the size at which people give up and go home instead.

Here’s what would have happened in a halfways-sensible world. We would have

turned up on Friday morning and the show would have been sold out, certainly

for the morning, and maybe for the rest of the day. Either by joining a queue

or by buying tickets from TicketWeb over the phone or online, we would have

got ourselves admission for a set time in the future. We would have gone off

to enjoy one of the most beautiful cities in the world, come back when our tickets

told us to, and entered with almost no wait: after all, with timed tickets,

the museum can ensure that it has never admitted more people than can fit into

the exhibition.

Here’s what actually happened: we turned up on Friday morning and waited interminably

for our tickets, then waited all over again to get into the show. Total time

in line: two and a half hours, give or take. Children, pregnant women, elderly

patrons, anybody without five hours to spare – all of these potential

patrons were denied any entry at all. And, of course, the Diane Arbus show languished,

all but unseen, a victim of the Chagall show’s mismanagement.

Meanwhile, the Chagall show itself was packed insanely tight, as harried SFMOMA

employees desperately tried to deal with the lines by letting in as many people

as they possibly could. Here, in a nutshell, is the difference between a timed-ticket

system and the lack of one. When you don’t have timed tickets, frazzled patrons

just want to be let in, with the result that so many people pack the galleries

that you can barely see the art. When you do have timed tickets, patrons complain

about the crowded galleries, with the result that the Royal Academy in London

(to take one recent example) extends its opening hours and reduces the number

of tickets that it sells for any given time, making life much more pleasant

for everyone.

A free suggestion, then, for SFMOMA: get a tech-savvy donor to give you a timed-ticketing

system. Your patrons will be happier, your employees will be happier, and when

people talk about your headline exhibitions, they might even mention the art

rather than just griping about how horrible they were to get into.

Oh yes, the art. How was it? Good, although the exhibition seemed intent on

presenting Chagall as an Important Artist rather than as the more or less unchanging

maker of beautiful paintings which he really was. There’s no real need for a

chronological approach in the case of Chagall, since his work from 1920 is not

all that different from his work from 1970.

Biggest disappointment? The emphasis on large-scale spiritual works meant that

my favourite part of his oeuvre – the heartbreakingly simple pastorals,

with maybe a goat, a tree and a farmhouse – were glaringly absent from

the show. Biggest revelation? The works on paper, stunningly preserved, with

a wonderfully vibrant immediacy.

Was it worth a 160-minute wait to get into the packed galleries? No: I can’t

imagine any exhibition which would be. Art appreciation is a solitary affair,

and tough enough in a popular exhibition at the best of times. When you’re physically

exhausted from the queuing process and mentally drained from trying to comprehend

the paintings through the crowds, there’s a limit to how much you can take from

any exhibition. I’d recommend going to your local museum and checking out its

two or three Chagalls instead. There won’t be any crowds, you can go back as

often as you like, and you can develop a relationsip with the specific pieces.

In the case of Chagall, there’s nothing bigger that you really need to know

about the artist’s life and work as a whole.

Terry Teachout chimed

in yesterday on one of those low-level debates which never seems to get

resolved one way or the other: whether it’s a good or a bad thing to applaud

an orchestra between the movements of a concerto or symphony. Teachout finds

a 1959 interview with maestro Pierre Monteux to bolster his case, which is that

such applause is "the most natural thing" and that anybody who sneers

at it is a "spine-starched prig".

I’m not sure if Teachout realised, but his comment came less than a week after

a minor

fiasco at the Sydney Symphony. The piece in question was Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique,

which I’m sure has received more applause between movements than any other symphony

ever. (It’s got four movements, but the third is the one which ends with huge

bangs and crashes.)

Sydney’s conductor on that Thursday was Alexander Lazarev, who is firmly in

the no-applause camp. When the audience started clapping after the first movement,

"he asked the musicians to return the applause, mocking the ignoramuses

in the audience," according to a report

on the web. The audience had no idea they were being mocked, of course, and

when the inevitable thunderous reception greeted the third-movement finale,

things got rather out of hand. Lazarev, very pissed off at this point, asked

the orchestra to stand up, and some members of the audience took their coats

and left, thinking it was all over.

Now I’m sure that Teachout will think that Lazarev’s behaviour was abominable,

and I would agree with him. Conductors are, of course, within their rights to

get angry at rude audiences who let cellphones ring, talk over the music, or

decide to leave their mid-row seat in the middle of the performance. Simon Rattle

once stopped in the middle of a New York concert to berate noisy concertgoers,

earning himself the heartfelt thanks of most present. But ultimately it’s the

audience which is paying the conductor, and the maestro should not sneer in

public at the lack of sophistication of his patrons.

Besides, as Teachout and Monteux point out, it’s not only hicks who like to

applaud between movements. An increasing number of sophisticated classical music

lovers are coming around to their way of thinking, and while standard advice

is still to keep schtum, some pretty high-profile

symphonies seem fine with the practice.

Certainly, it’s easy to think of times when applause would be both warranted

and harmless. Teachout uses the image of "obviously excited concertgoers

shamefacedly sitting on their hands," while, in the

best article I could find on the subject, Stephen Johnson, in the Guardian,

cites the end of Mars, the first movement in Holst’s Planets suite, during a

CBSO performance at the Proms.

Johnson immediately notes, however, that the audience, emboldened by their

applause of Mars, felt that once they’d started they couldn’t stop, and went

on to clap at the end of the second movement, Venus, as well. Venus is a slow

and quiet movement, and anybody who was genuinely responding to the performance

would have kept their hands by their sides. This is the problem with being too

all-inclusive: it inevitably results in the same kind of grade inflation which

gives virtually every Broadway show receiving a standing ovation every night.

People might start off clapping between movements because the performance demands

it, but it takes no time at all before they feel obliged to applaud every movement,

whether they liked it or not.

I’m sure that neither Teachout nor Monteux wants a world where there are six

breaks for applause during a single performance of the Planets, or, to use Johnson’s

example, where the conductor has to stop and wait for the clapping to die down

12 times during a single operatic act. Audiences these days can’t be trusted

only to applaud the good stuff: give them half a chance and they’ll cheer the

downright mediocre as well. And there’s no doubt that too much applause in the

middle of a symphony, opera or concerto can definitely break up its drive and

flow.

Besides, if people get the idea that it’s fine to clap at the end of movements,

they’ll start clapping at every false ending as well, with disastrous consequences.

I’m having visions here of people bursting out enthusiastically half a dozen

times within ten minutes at the end of a Haydn symphony: something I’m sure

no one thinks is a very good idea.

If asked, then, I’ll continue to tell novices to classical music that, in general,

one doesn’t applaud until the end of the whole piece – and even then,

one stays still until either everybody’s applauding or the conductor lowers

his arms. I won’t get annoyed with them if they don’t follow my advice, but

the fewer people clapping, the more quickly the conductor can get on with playing

the music, and the less disruptive the applause is.

On top of all that, of course, there’s also the question of respect for your

fellow concert-goers, the majority of whom still subscribe to the notion that

applause between movements is always wrong. They might be mistaken in their

belief, but it’s genuinely and firmly held, and you should know that they will

be annoyed at you if you clap. It’s a bit like splitting infinitives in a newspaper:

while you’re more than welcome to go ahead and split away, you should be aware

that there’s a lot of Bufton Tuftons out there who will start fulminating at

how ungrammatical you are, and there’s no particular reason to gratuitously

aggravate them.

So yes, if there’s a particularly fabulous aria or movement, and other people

are already clapping, and I know I’m not going to make a habit of it, and the

mood takes me, then I’ll join in the applause. And I’ll always clap at the end

of a performance: I vividly recall being completely flummoxed once after a long

ovation following a concert of Rachmaninov’s Vespers, when the woman

to my left turned to me, disgusted, and said that no one should have clapped,

because it’s a religious piece. It’s certainly possible to be too high-minded,

and I do disapprove of such an exclusive and unhelpful attitude. Equally, however,

I don’t think that encouraging more intra-performance applause at concerts is

a very good idea.

Sunday is clearly the day for long-windedness in the New York Times. The paper

leads with a 9,500-word investigation

of the Lackawanna terror case (don’t ask me), complete with a 1,300-word kicker.

And on the op-ed page, we’re subjected to 2,300

barely-coherent words by Tom Wolfe on the subject of 2 Columbus Circle,

complete with a note mentioning that this screed is only "the first of

two installments". (Update: The other shoe dropped today, Monday.)

Tom Wolfe, of course, is the author of From Bauhaus to Our House,

the favourite architecture book of the kind of people who have only ever read

one architecture book, or of people who don’t know much about art but know what

they like. Still, the book is deservedly popular: while Wolfe can be wrong-headed

a lot of the time, he’s also a great writer, and lots of fun to read.

He was a great writer, anyway. Back in the day, he could construct

265-word sentences which were masterpieces of virtuoso journalism. Nowadays,

as his op-ed shows, he seems to be of the opinion that any 265-word

sentence of his must, perforce, be a masterpiece of virtuoso journalism, with

the result that he rapidly degenerates into into little more than "coherently

challenged" babble, to use his own favourite term of abuse.

Wolfe is also much better when attacking architects than when defending them.

The point of the op-ed, one assumes, is for Wolfe to throw his weight behind

the preservationists seeking to restore Edward Durell Stone’s 2 Columbus Circle

and keep it more or less as is, albeit both occupied and safe – neither

of which it is at the moment. The alternative, against which Wolfe spends much

time wailing, is a plan by Brad Cloepfil to basically rebuild the structure

as a new home for the Museum of Arts and Design, completely revamping it inside

and out.

Here’s the building, as it looked when it was first built, as it looks today,

and as it is proposed to look after the refit.

Clearly, Stone’s gleaming white marble isn’t gleaming any longer. But the fact

is that the building was never all that good, and the arguments for its preservation

are generally pretty weak. Here’s

Robert A M Stern, of the Yale architecture school:

New York is where orthodoxies are challenged by new ideas. Two Columbus Circle

was just such a challenge, and it clearly challenges us to this day. Its provocations

are as important now as ever. It was and is a pot of paint flung in the face

of the high Modernist establishment. For this reason, if no other, Two Columbus

Circle must be preserved intact for future generations to enjoy, consider,

debate, and learn from.

The building must be preserved, if only because it’s provocative? This is the

height of silliness. Preserving great buildings, and even merely good buildings,

is one thing. But preserving provocative buildings is another thing entirely.

The fact is, the kind of people who love From Bauhaus to Our House

are exactly the sort of people who look at 2 Columbus Circle and consider it

a hideous eyesore. This building is one of the few things on which both die-hard

Modernists and most anti-Modernist laymen can agree: very, very few people actually

like it.

What’s not obvious from the photographs is the way that 2 Columbus Circle makes

you feel when you look at it in real life. It’s a tall building, even if it’s

not as tall as the skyscrapers which surround it, and the vast majority of its

height is simply a vast expanse of crumbling blank stone, with no features at

all, redeeming or otherwise. The lack of windows gives it the feel of a prison:

you imagine yourself stuck inside, unable to look out. It is an exercise in

claustrophobia, and the new design constitutes a vast improvement.

Wolfe’s op-ed appeared on the weekend of Open

House New York, the annual and incredibly popular event where interesting

buildings around the city are opened up to the public. I went to a few, and

would loved to have gone to more, except a lot of them were booked out very

early and in any case I was busy on Saturday with a wedding to go to.

But what is clear from the popularity of OHNY is that New Yorkers have a genuine

enthusiasm for new architecture, and that there’s lots of very cool and interesting

stuff going on at the moment. Now New Yorkers love old architecture as well:

some of the best bits of OHNY are where they open up an old lighthouse in Fort

Washington Park, or the Tweed Courthouse, or the Washington Square arch.

Still, I’m pretty sure that the mood in the city these days is that brand-new

buildings are usually pretty good. Places like the Hayden Planetarium are instant

classics, and although there are certainly some dull office buildings under

construction, the knee-jerk public reaction against nearly all new architecture

is a thing of the past. Think to yourself: if you heard that your local train

station or airport was being rebuilt, would you be happy or sad? Happy, I think:

such projects are nearly always improvements, these days, in contrast to the

days when the old Penn Station could be razed to make way for Madison Square

Garden.

It takes a particular type of pessimist to look at something like 2 Columbus

Circle and decide that although it has many failings, it must surely be better

to preserve it than attempt to create something better. To have that mindset

you basically have to work from the assumption that nearly all new architecture

is crap, and that as a rule the past is going to be better than the future,

architecturally speaking. That kind of defeatist attitude is not the kind of

thing which built the Chrysler Building, and it’s frankly unNew Yorkish. Wolfe

should retreat to his wood-panelled study on the Upper East Side, and leave

the rest of the city to the people who will inherit it with enthusiasm.