More odds and ends today, but this time from the worlds of art, architecture, and poetry. So, you know…no Bigfoot.
MoMA has decided to auction a Monet from its collection to “benefit the [museum’s] acquisition fund.” It’s expected to fetch $13.8 million. But as Jerry Saltz points out, “the market is now so distorted and tilted toward contemporary art that $14 million raised from the auction of a Monet is less than the cost of a large work by a contemporary art star like Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Peter Doig, and many others.”
When even starchitect Frank Gehry admits that “98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure sh*t,” one wonders what’s become of his profession. It’s not just Gehry, either. In a recent New York Times column, establishment architect Steven Bingler wrote that, “for too long, our profession has flatly dismissed the general public’s take on our work, even as we talk about making that work more relevant with worthy ideas like sustainability, smart growth and ‘resilience planning.’”
I’m old enough to have taken both high school and college courses in which memorization was a requirement. As a result, I can still recite the Gettysburg Address and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116—among other, less useful things. These days, though, teachers have somehow come to the conclusion that memorization = not learning, and seem to go out their way to discourage it. Mike Chasar explains why we should consider returning to the days when “poetry memorization was freighted with unusual importance.”
