Postcard from New York City - Art
The hotel charges for wi fi! Where the hell are we, Paris? In the wooly wilds of Norfolk you go into a pub with wi fi and ask for the password and you get it, here in the Westin you are expected to pay an extra charge? That might have been acceptable, just, in 1998 but not today. At least the view is free. The Mandarin Oriental has a much more enlightened approach, simply asking you for your room number and password. If it works like it did in the hotel in Dublin, wi fi is included in the price of your room.
Or possibly I'm missing something. New York is all about making money after all and if you gave away your wi fi you'd not only lose out on that charge but also on any money you might make charging for your adult entertainment channels. A hotel, I suppose, has a right to ensure that they can continue to make a dime from those traditional bastions of adult entertainment, porn flicks and kickbacks from hookers.
Walked through Central Park. There are play areas dotted around the outside edge so that New Yorkers don't have to walk across the park to let their kids have a go on the swings. Presumably this means that the kids are in no danger of mixing with kids from other, potentially rougher, neighbourhoods. Because Christ alone knows it's bad enough that your toddler has started using Romanian it's picked up from the nanny without learning Spanish curse words too.
The Alice in wonderland statue is impressive and also surprisingly sinister, the Mad Hatter in particular looks like a demented ken Dodd, with enough teeth to give an ivory poacher a hard-on for a month. The giant mushroom is shiny at the front, where millions of children have polished the bronze with their bums.
Spent the morning in the Whitney gallery, home to the largest collection of Edward Hopper paintings in the world. Seen in the flesh, or rather in the pigment, the paintings are astonishing. Previously I'd only seen them in books, post cards or posters. The custodian gave a broad grin when the lift doors opened and I gasped at the size of the paintings, no doubt sensing a rube among the sensitive bohemian gallery goers that normally frequent the place.
They were all impressive, but also had that subtle Hopper menace. Not just a sense of isolation or loneliness, but the real sense that waiting, just out of picture, is a serial killer. Of course such a sensation is unfounded, unless Hopper himself was the malign presence always just out of shot...except in self portraits. Much more likely to be a serial killer is the sort of person who goes fluently to the exhibition pretending to be a sensitive bohemian.
Of course they were not all disturbing. One painting totally devoid of menace and instead suffused with charm was 'Early Sunday morning', a picture of a typical street in a small town anywhere in America. The painting is to art what Ray Bradbury's stories are to literature, evoking a nostalgic time, a golden age in the life of small town America that may or may not have actually existed but, mythical or not, is instantly recognisable. Hopper blurred the writing on the storefronts in a deliberate act of making the street anonymous. He did such a good job that I think the place resembles not only a small town I passed through once on a visit to Colorado but also a little place I know in the Cotswolds.
The gallery is also home to early photographs of New York city, antique black and white images of steam and skyscrapers that could have been taken yesterday.
As well as Hopper, the are contemporaries of his exhibited here also. The Charles Burchfield paintings were of shopfronts and streets in the snow, essentially depicting the sort of towns that H P Lovecraft used to write about, looking like they were pictured just before everything kicked off in the tentacle and madness department. He's in good company here. If Hopper's early paintings are Ray Bradbury, his later ones are Stephen King. All that's missing from 'Gas' is the shadow of a Lurker. The paintings are fascinating to look at, but I'm not sure I'd want one hanging in my house, they are definite candidates for the sort of pictures that the owner starts to notice disquieting changes in and are usually purchased from Peter Cushing in a portmanteau horror film from the 1970's.
Top prize for disquieting painting? 'Blue evening'. The image alone is terrifying enough, with the scariest clown ever in the centre of the composition, smoking (what's the only thing scarier than a clown? A clown with a fag on), but my travelling companion managed to ratchet up the tension by asking: 'did the audio guide mention a clown? I don't think it mentioned a clown. What if we are the only people that can see the clown, what if when they make reproductions of this thing there is no clown, just an empty chair? Why are you crying?'.
Can you see the clown? If so, it doesn't mean that everyone can see the clown, it just means that you can see the clown too!
The other curious painting is one of a shop with an unclear purpose. Hopper's wife called it a 'blind pig', that is, a shopfront that was essentially camouflaging a speakeasy. Of course, let's have a sinister term to describe what was, up until I heard that, a rather good picture of a shop in the sunshine.
Or possibly I'm missing something. New York is all about making money after all and if you gave away your wi fi you'd not only lose out on that charge but also on any money you might make charging for your adult entertainment channels. A hotel, I suppose, has a right to ensure that they can continue to make a dime from those traditional bastions of adult entertainment, porn flicks and kickbacks from hookers.
Walked through Central Park. There are play areas dotted around the outside edge so that New Yorkers don't have to walk across the park to let their kids have a go on the swings. Presumably this means that the kids are in no danger of mixing with kids from other, potentially rougher, neighbourhoods. Because Christ alone knows it's bad enough that your toddler has started using Romanian it's picked up from the nanny without learning Spanish curse words too.
The Alice in wonderland statue is impressive and also surprisingly sinister, the Mad Hatter in particular looks like a demented ken Dodd, with enough teeth to give an ivory poacher a hard-on for a month. The giant mushroom is shiny at the front, where millions of children have polished the bronze with their bums.
Spent the morning in the Whitney gallery, home to the largest collection of Edward Hopper paintings in the world. Seen in the flesh, or rather in the pigment, the paintings are astonishing. Previously I'd only seen them in books, post cards or posters. The custodian gave a broad grin when the lift doors opened and I gasped at the size of the paintings, no doubt sensing a rube among the sensitive bohemian gallery goers that normally frequent the place.
They were all impressive, but also had that subtle Hopper menace. Not just a sense of isolation or loneliness, but the real sense that waiting, just out of picture, is a serial killer. Of course such a sensation is unfounded, unless Hopper himself was the malign presence always just out of shot...except in self portraits. Much more likely to be a serial killer is the sort of person who goes fluently to the exhibition pretending to be a sensitive bohemian.
Of course they were not all disturbing. One painting totally devoid of menace and instead suffused with charm was 'Early Sunday morning', a picture of a typical street in a small town anywhere in America. The painting is to art what Ray Bradbury's stories are to literature, evoking a nostalgic time, a golden age in the life of small town America that may or may not have actually existed but, mythical or not, is instantly recognisable. Hopper blurred the writing on the storefronts in a deliberate act of making the street anonymous. He did such a good job that I think the place resembles not only a small town I passed through once on a visit to Colorado but also a little place I know in the Cotswolds.
The gallery is also home to early photographs of New York city, antique black and white images of steam and skyscrapers that could have been taken yesterday.
As well as Hopper, the are contemporaries of his exhibited here also. The Charles Burchfield paintings were of shopfronts and streets in the snow, essentially depicting the sort of towns that H P Lovecraft used to write about, looking like they were pictured just before everything kicked off in the tentacle and madness department. He's in good company here. If Hopper's early paintings are Ray Bradbury, his later ones are Stephen King. All that's missing from 'Gas' is the shadow of a Lurker. The paintings are fascinating to look at, but I'm not sure I'd want one hanging in my house, they are definite candidates for the sort of pictures that the owner starts to notice disquieting changes in and are usually purchased from Peter Cushing in a portmanteau horror film from the 1970's.
Top prize for disquieting painting? 'Blue evening'. The image alone is terrifying enough, with the scariest clown ever in the centre of the composition, smoking (what's the only thing scarier than a clown? A clown with a fag on), but my travelling companion managed to ratchet up the tension by asking: 'did the audio guide mention a clown? I don't think it mentioned a clown. What if we are the only people that can see the clown, what if when they make reproductions of this thing there is no clown, just an empty chair? Why are you crying?'.
Can you see the clown? If so, it doesn't mean that everyone can see the clown, it just means that you can see the clown too!
The other curious painting is one of a shop with an unclear purpose. Hopper's wife called it a 'blind pig', that is, a shopfront that was essentially camouflaging a speakeasy. Of course, let's have a sinister term to describe what was, up until I heard that, a rather good picture of a shop in the sunshine.
Labels: America, Cities, New York, New York City, Travel, Travelling, USA
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