The Ranting Economist and I went to New York city last week; the Ranting Economist for a conference and me for the hell of it. It was wonderful to get out of the small southern town we live in and go back to that electrifying city after a five year hiatus. We didn’t do much other than look at art, see friends, pig out and walk around the streets; streets in which the sense of public space is so different than it is here, and thus my cliched but apt adjective of “electrifying”. The air in New York feels alive in a way that the stultifying atmosphere here never does.
While in The Big City, we stopped at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery and saw a show by Zoe Strauss. As we were walking in, one of the beautiful people, or if not one of “them”, certainly a beautiful, tall, perfumed and well dressed woman was walking out after having turned her nose up in the air, perused the work without ever stopping to look at anything, and saying, “Let’s get out of here, these depress me!” We, mere plebes from the nether world, we were bowled over by the work; so much so, that the Ranting Economist even looked at the price list with thoughts of disposing of income that, after the fall of the stock market, we no longer have.
We walked through the gallery over and over again, just marveling at the pictures. We were so enthusiastic that Bruce Silverstein himself came out to talk to us. He asked us what we thought, and we conveyed our enthusiasm. We all concluded that she was the “real deal”. I told him we were from South Carolina and could understand them in a way New Yorkers couldn’t. He answered by saying that there is poverty in New York too, it’s just that most New Yorkers don’t engage with it. I did not pursue the argument, though I was not talking about the poverty that is depicted in some of the photographs. I was talking about the sense of space she captures, not without humor, in them; that desolate, empty, lonely space that one lives with everyday out here in "greater America" and that in New York City you have to go out of your way to find.
I wish we had had more disposable income....
While in The Big City, we stopped at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery and saw a show by Zoe Strauss. As we were walking in, one of the beautiful people, or if not one of “them”, certainly a beautiful, tall, perfumed and well dressed woman was walking out after having turned her nose up in the air, perused the work without ever stopping to look at anything, and saying, “Let’s get out of here, these depress me!” We, mere plebes from the nether world, we were bowled over by the work; so much so, that the Ranting Economist even looked at the price list with thoughts of disposing of income that, after the fall of the stock market, we no longer have.
We walked through the gallery over and over again, just marveling at the pictures. We were so enthusiastic that Bruce Silverstein himself came out to talk to us. He asked us what we thought, and we conveyed our enthusiasm. We all concluded that she was the “real deal”. I told him we were from South Carolina and could understand them in a way New Yorkers couldn’t. He answered by saying that there is poverty in New York too, it’s just that most New Yorkers don’t engage with it. I did not pursue the argument, though I was not talking about the poverty that is depicted in some of the photographs. I was talking about the sense of space she captures, not without humor, in them; that desolate, empty, lonely space that one lives with everyday out here in "greater America" and that in New York City you have to go out of your way to find.
I wish we had had more disposable income....
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