Posted By  richards on April 17, 2013    
				
				      Video still from Street (2011) by James Nares. (Courtesy      the Metropolitan Museum of Art / James Nares)    
    The morning after I arrived in New York last month for a weeks    visitthe city had been my longtime home until three years ago,    when I moved to EuropeI went to the Metropolitan Museum to see    the extraordinary new video Street by James Nares. A set    of continual tracking shots of New York life, it was shot from    a moving car, using a technique whereby each person captured on    camera becomes a sort of extreme slow-motion three-dimensional    Everymana flicked cigarette is as poetic in its eternal arc as    flapping birds. A dazzling hour of audio-visual meditation, it    is particularly suited to anyone whos just disembarked from a    plane and wants to plunge immediately into the city. Mr. Nares    told me that he wished he had made such a video when he first    arrived here, back in the mid-1970s. Seeing Street    prompted me to take the citys pulse, note its shifts, lament    whats been lost in the time since I lived here.  
    It seemed appropriate to do so in the pages of The    Observer, my lifeline to New York when I found myself    stranded in Milan in the 1990s, laboring as editor of the    magazine Flash Art. I would sneak off to the caf every    morning with my precious copy of the paper and sit with the    inevitable espresso, sipping with wry regret at the news of    all-too-distant Gotham, until my furious boss would burst    through the door shouting in his apoplectic and comically    accented English, why I was not at work.  
    The excitement of this city still rings out with the very first    announcement of its name at Heathrow, where I was thrilled to    hear, among a request for passengers to present themselves to    the departure desk, Mr. Brice Marden, Mr. Marden please.    Reading on the plane of the recent death of Mayor Koch, I    realized that many of my favorite friends in the city belong to    that last great generation that was already living there when    Mr. Koch took over in 1978, the pre-Koch posse of urban    warriors who knew downtown when it really was down in all its    now-unimaginable gorgeous poverty.  
    I stayed with one of them, the fabled artist Jan Frank, in his    untouched loft on Bond Street, one of those few remaining    absolutely authentic spaces, as far from the real estate agent    fantasy of artists loft as a cupcake is from a crack vial, a    place from which to step out and survey the ravages of    gentrification on the surrounding block. Jan was busy mounting    a group exhibition about the 1970s for the gallery White Box,    and his neighbor from across Bond came over the cobblesthe    impeccable veteran Minimalist Stephen Rosenthal, with his    elegant striped canvases from that era and tales of the    artists co-op in which hes lived forever. Joseph Kosuth used    to be there way back in the 60s, and they still have the    now-elderly art student once shot by Chris Burden as part of a    performance, the sort of celebrity who would hardly past muster    at the Herzog & de Meuron condo next door.  
    Best of all are tales of Doug Ohlson, last of the old-skool    boozer abstractionists, who used to be so drunk he would get    stuck in the fancy tree installed outside by developers, jammed    in the unexpected branches with his bottle, and who came to his    end on the pavement outside the latest luxury shoe boutique.    This was Carl Andres great drinking buddy, the man he is said    to have called after Ana Mendieta fell to her deathtry telling    that to the sippers of locally sourced milk at The Smile.  
    The particular sense of loss and promise that seems uniquely    generated by Manhattan is the source of much of its cultural    mythology. The long battle between ancient and modern is more    acute here than anywhere else, the lust for destruction, for    immediate profit, overwhelming heritage. Thus I had to note,    with a shock akin to a missing limb, the shuttered door of the    Grandaisy Bakery on Sullivan Street and, even more brutal, the    transformation of Gino into a shiny emporium selling spotlit    gourmet cupcakes, an extreme contrast with the osso buco    chiaroscuro and shuffling Sicilian waiters of the good old    days. I peered for the faintest trace of that famous zebra    wallpaper, any slightest vestige of that historic    interiorgone, only its echo at Royals townhouse on Archer    Avenue remaining now.  
    Thank the primeval Lords of Unrule that at least the Subway Inn    around the corner remains unchanged. There a stiff bourbon    mit chaser ushered out any lingering miasma of    nostalghia, for how easily at that notoriously sticky    beer-stained counter could one become like that perfect elder    WASP recently met, now in permanent exile on his Newport    estate, who explained to me why he could never return to New    York, had not set foot in the place in over 50 years: You see    I knew the city in its very greatest years, in the 50s    and early 60s, so it would be simply too devastating for me to    ever have to see it as it is today.  
    In the citys museums, too, I felt a sense of loss. In the    Mets wondrous new American wing, I was dismayed to discover    that the great painting The Quartette by my famous    relative William Turner Dannat, an imposing salon piece that    used to dominate a wall, had been stripped of its period frame    and stuck in open storage, where one can contemplate its fall    from grace through glass like some once-proud beast in zoo    captivity. I was heartened, though, at the Frick, by an    impeccable exhibition of Impressionist prints and drawings from    the Clark Art Institute, including some gathered by Robert    Sterling Clark himself in Paris after WWI, like works from the    Degas studio sale that he attended.  
    The contrast between the pleasures of the Frick and MoMA down    the road could not be more extreme, the latter having seemingly    turned into a processing machine for mass tourism with a    density of crowds and confusion to rival Toys R Us at    Christmas, vast packs of wilding youth barely checked by a    security force more suited to a high-security prison. MoMA    makes clear what happens when a museum becomes an obligatory    destination for every out-of-town visitor and every grade of    schoolchild, a sort of object lesson in the frightening    furthest limits of democracy. (Admissions figures at MoMA are    surely significant, for even if not everyone pays the full $25,    the sheer millions of visitors must add up to a pretty serious    annual total.) The main activity at MoMA would seem to be    textingevery gallery is dense with shoe-gazing teens on their    gadgets, tapping out aphorisms to each other, a dense mass of    incessant typing through which it is almost impossible to clear    a path. Yet among all this horror, the curatorial chops have    never been betterthere was a cracking small show on genius    junkie designer Robert Brownjohn and his Goldfinger    title sequence, and some clever soul had at last taken Pavel    Tchelitchews painting Hide and Seek out of storage and    installed it at the top of an escalator, where it gathers as    many admiring crowds, and quite rightly, as when it was the    museums No. 1 attraction.  
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Of Cupcakes and Condos: The Onetime Editor at Large of ‘Open City’ Returns to New York
				
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