One of New York’s premier diving spots

The diving boards

The new Whitney Museum, writes Dalrymple, is the

perfect place from which to commit suicide, with what look like large diving boards emerging from the top of the building, leading straight to the ground far below. Looking up at them, one can almost hear in one’s mind’s ear the terrible sound of the bodies as they land on the ground below.

There are also, he notes,

The industrial chimneys

some — for now — silvery industrial chimneys, leading presumably from the incinerators so necessary for the disposal of rubbishy art.

He points out that the structure (cost: $422m) illustrates on the one hand the egotism and cack-handedness of the architect Renzo Piano and his kind, and on the other the

complete loss of judgment and taste

The torture chambers

of modern patrons.

The façade, which is practically without windows,

looks as if it could be the central torture chambers of the secret police, from which one half expects the screams of the tortured to emerge. Certainly, it is a façade for those with something to hide: perhaps appropriately so, given the state of so much modern art.

Headquarters of the secret police

A monument to the vanity and aesthetic incompetence of celebrity architects

If the building were not

a tragic lost opportunity (how often do architects have the chance to build an art gallery at such cost?), it would be comic. It is as if struck already by an earthquake and in a half-collapsed state. It is a tribute to the imagination of the architect that something so expensive should be made to look so cheap.

New York at last has a building that would truly have gladdened their hearts

 

Kimmelman makes Buridan’s ass seem positively decisive

Silly ass: Michael Kimmelman cannot, or more likely dare not, decide

How fear of appearing reactionary can lead to absurd extremes of critical pusillanimity

Dalrymple comes across an article by Michael Kimmelman, architecture correspondent of the New York Times, about the new Whitney Museum. Dalrymple writes:

At no point did Kimmelman offer a clear indication of whether he considered the building good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Instead, he used locutions such as the following, compatible with any value judgment whatever:

It ratifies Chelsea.

The museum becomes . . . an outdoor perch to see and be seen.

Mr Piano’s galleries borrow from the old downtown loft aesthetic.

The new Whitney Museum: simultaneously a ‘headache’ and a ‘signal contribution’

They’re nonprescriptive places . . . that may prove to be the ticket.

They may end up a headache.

It is a deft, serious achievement, a signal contribution to downtown and the city’s changing cultural landscape.

The new museum isn’t a masterpiece.

It’s an eager neighbor.

It exudes a genteel eccentricity that plays off the rationalism of Mr Piano, and of Manhattan’s street grid.

Dalrymple’s comment:

I have seldom read a piece of criticism in which the fundamental question was avoided in so pusillanimous a fashion, and in which the writer so delicately refrained from passing aesthetic judgment.

Why does Kimmelman not pass any judgment whatever on the building? Dalrymple suggests that it is a matter of

fear of disagreement or appearing reactionary.