lpsy : lifeblog

simul justus et peccator

[lpsy]

#CharlesRay: "Unpainted Sculpture", fibreglass, paint, 1997 x #RenzoPiano Building Workshop: The Modern Wing, @artinstitutechi, 2000-09 + #FrankGehry: Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, #Chicago, 2004 // #art #architecture #travel #tbt (at The Art Institute of Chicago)

[frankocean]

[lpsy]

Enough here to wait out another four years, if need be... Thank you, @frankocean.

[timothyschenck]

Frank Stella, Black Star, at the Whitney.

[lpsy]

Nobody can keep open house in a great city. Nobody wants to. And yet if interesting, useful and significant contacts among the people of cities are confined to acquaintanceships suitable for private life, the city becomes stultified. Cities are full of people with whom, from your viewpoint, or mine, or any other individual’s, a certain degree of contact is useful or enjoyable; but you do not want them in your hair. And they do not want you in theirs either.

In speaking about city sidewalk safety, I mentioned how necessary it is that there should be, in the brains behind the eyes on the street, an almost unconscious assumption of general street support…. There is a short word for this assumption of support: trust. The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop, eying the girls while waiting to be called for dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist, admiring the new babies and sympathizing over the way a coat faded. Customs vary: in some neighborhoods people compare notes on their dogs; in others they compare notes on their landlords.

Most of it is ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level — most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone — is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized. And above all, it implies no private commitments. …

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow.

Jane Jacobs. “The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact.” The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

[lpsy]

Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull. …

When people say that a city, or a part of it, is dangerous or is a jungle what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks.

But sidewalks and those who use them are not passive beneficiaries of safety or helpless victims of danger. Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities. To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and its sidewalks.

Jane Jacobs. “The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety.” The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

[lpsy]

Holy Orders

A determined Pope Francis moves to reform a recalcitrant Curia.

If Francis seems to the general public a kindly avuncular figure, within the walls of the Vatican he has a reputation for toughness. In the interview with Civiltà Cattolica, he described himself as both “a little naïve” and “a little furbo” — shrewd, clever, even tricky. While he has distinguished himself for public gestures that point to a life of humility and selfless charity — paying his own hotel bill after his election as Pope, washing the feet of recovering drug addicts, and advocating a Church of the poor, for the poor — he has moved with equal assertiveness in his insistence on shaking up traditional forms of Vatican governance.

Alexander Stille. "Holy Orders." The New Yorker 14 Sept. 2015.

[lpsy]

There is no shame in the shadow of the Cross.

[lpsy]

There is not a person in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right or wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept! Precisely! We are moral creatures in an amoral world…. Or consider the alternative[:] … it is only human feeling that is freakishly amiss…. All right then — it is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave … lobotomized, go back to the creek, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.

Annie Dillard. “Fecundity.” Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. HaperCollins, 1974.

quoted in

Timothy Keller. “The Knowledge of God.” The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. Dutton-Penguin, 2008.

(Emphases mine.)

Annie Dillard saw that all of nature is based on violence. Yet we inescapably believe it is wrong for stronger human individuals or groups to kill weaker ones. If violence is totally natural why would it be wrong for strong humans to trample weaker ones? There is no basis for moral obligation unless we argue that nature is in some part unnatural. We can’t know that nature is broken in someway unless there is some supernatural standard of normalcy apart from nature by which we can judge right and wrong. That means there would have to be heaven or God or some kind of divine order outside of nature in order to make that judgment.

There is only one way out of this conundrum. We can pick up the Biblical account of things and see if it explains our moral sense any better than a secular view. If the world was made by a God of peace, justice, and love, then that is why we know that violence, oppression, and hate are wrong. If the world is fallen, broken, and needs to be redeemed, that explains the violence and disorder we see.

If you believe human rights are a reality, then it makes much more sense that God exists than that he does not. If you insist on a secular view of the world and yet you continue to pronounce some things right and somethings wrong, then I hope you see the deep disharmony between the world your intellect has devised and the real world (and God) that your heart knows exists. This leads us to a crucial question. If a premise (“There is no God”) leads to a conclusion you know isn’t true (“Napalming babies is culturally relative”) then why not change that premise?

The Endless, Pointless Litigation of Existence

I have not tried to prove the existence of God to you. My goal has been to show you that you already know God is there. To some degree I have been treating the nonexistence of God as an intellectual problem, but it is much more than that. It [the nonexistence of God] not only makes all moral choices meaningless, but it makes all life meaningless too. The playwright Arthur Miller reveals this vividly through the character Quentin in After the Fall. Quentin says:

For many years I looked at life like a case at law. It was a series of proofs. When you’re young you prove how brave you are, or smart; then, what a good lover; then, a good father; finally, how wise, or powerful or [whatever.] But underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. That one moved  … on an upward path towards some elevation, where  … God knows what  … I would be justified, or even condemned. A verdict anyway. I think now that my disaster really began when I looked up one day  … and the bench was empty. No judge in sight. And all that remained was the endless argument with oneself, this pointless litigation of existence before an empty bench …. Which, of course, is another way of saying  — despair.

What is he saying? We all live as if it is better to seek peace instead of war, to tell the truth instead of lying, to care and nurture rather than to destroy. We believe that these choices are not pointless, that it matters which way we choose to live. Yet if the Cosmic Bench is truly empty, then “who sez” that one choice is better than the others? We can argue about it, but it’s just pointless arguing, endless litigation. If the Bench is truly empty, then the whole span of human civilization, even if it lasts a few million years, will be just an infinitesimally brief spark in relation to the oceans of dead time that preceded it and will follow it. There will be no one around to remember any of it. Whether we are loving or cruel in the end would make no difference at all.

Once we realize this situation there are two options. One is that we can simply refuse to think out the implications of all ths. We can hold on to our intellectual belief in an empty Bench and yet live as if our choices are meaningful and as if there is a difference between love and cruelty. Why would we do that? A cynic might say that this is a way of “having one’s cake and eating it, too.” That is, you get the benefit of having a God without the cost of following him. But there is no integrity in that.

The other option is to recognize that you do know there is a God. You could accept the fact that you live as if beauty and love have meaning, as if there is meaning in life, as if human beings have inherent dignity — all because you know God exists. It is dishonest to live as if he is there and yet fail to acknowledge the one who has given you all these gifts.

[lpsy]

Held

Re: “Wanted: A Theology of Atheism,” by Molly Worthen (The New York Times Sunday Review, 31 May 2015):

To the editor:

Atheists have common sense on their side. It is hard for anyone to square with reality the version of events that form the bedrock of Christian belief. What is it then that tethers me to the church and its miraculous story?

Nonbelievers would say I use the church as a crutch, but that’s not how it feels. The feeling is one of being held and accompanied on this walk of life — not carried, not buoyed up, not even embraced — just held. The church holds me.

Fickle by nature, we shed stories as often as we acquire them, and yet this story has stayed with us for 2,000 years. It has inspired the most magnificent of human endeavors in music, art and architecture. Where are the works of comparable power and beauty inspired by the creed of atheism?

I suggest there are few because atheism’s central tenet — there is no God — is a denial, and something of beauty is, above all else, an affirmation.

MARGARET McGIRR Greenwich, Conn.

[lpsy]

If human rights are [merely] created by majorities, of what use are they? … Rights cannot be created — they must be discovered, or they are of no value. … [The value of rights] lies in that [rights] can be used to insist that majorities honor the dignity of minorities and individuals despite their [the majority's] conception of their 'greater good.' … [I]f God is dead, any and all morality of love and human rights is baseless. If there is no God, argues Nietzsche, Sartre, and others, there can be no good reason to be kind, to be loving, or to work for peace. … If there is no God, then there is no way to say any one action is 'moral' and another 'immoral' but only 'I like this.' If that is the case, who gets the right to put their subjective, arbitrary moral feelings into law? You may say 'the majority has the right to make the law,' but do you mean that then the majority has the right to vote to exterminate the minority? If you say 'No, that is wrong,' then you are back to square one. … The fact is … if there is no God, then all moral statements are arbitrary, all moral valuations are subjective and internal, and there can be no external moral standard by which a person's feelings and values are judged.

Timothy Keller. “The Knowledge of God.” The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York: Dutton-Penguin, 2008.

[lpsy]

[lpsy]

Project 1 in 4

An empowering, illuminating 100-day sketch exploration of the everyday struggles presented by mental illness by School of Visual Arts student Marissa Betley.

[lpsy]

If you are fortunate enough to be in our position, you probably belong to the 2 percent of the world population that is well educated, financially independent, can do what they want, can live and work where they want. If you belong to that 2 percent, then it is your duty to put yourself to the service to the other 98.

Paul Polman on leadership, being human, and the insanity and inanity of executive compensation.

I’ve never earned so much. I never thought I ever would. … I am fortunate, and I am sometimes ashamed about the amount of money I earn. It’s important that you then put it to good use. That’s the minimum you can do.

The board is trying to change the compensation and move it up, and we have steadfastly refused to do that—not for heroic reasons, but I think there has to be some sanity.

Most companies have salary policies that say, “We want to attract the best CEO, so we need to be in a top percentile,” and then you get a race to the top. That is really what has happened over the last decade or two. You have to break that. You don’t have to just go with the waves. I’ve always felt, as a philosophy in life, it’s better to make the dust than eat the dust.

Lillian Cunningham. “The Tao of Paul Polman.” Washington Post 21 May 2015.

[thisiscitylab]

[lpsy]

OMA: Fondazione Prada, Milano (2015)

More OMA handrail porn

A photo posted by Olly Wainwright (@ollywainwright) on May 2, 2015 at 8:15am PDT

In a scruffy industrial corner of Milan, beyond the railway tracks and the ring road, Rem Koolhaas and Miuccia Prada have made a dazzling art space, so vast it’s practically a city.

The complex has been masterminded by Miuccia’s go-to architect, Rem Koolhaas, whose practice, OMA, has worked with Prada for the last 15 years – an unusually long time for such a relationship to have continued without reaching the limits of the client’s patience or coffers. … It has been an energising marriage of minds, the liberal patronage of Prada fertilising Koolhaas’s desire to rewrite the rules from scratch every single time.

…

Unlike the look-at-me klaxon call of Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which trumpets the invasion of the luxury brand into the contemporary art world by flouncing its billowing glass sails above the Bois de Boulogne, you might not even notice the Fondazione Prada. From outside, the only giveaway is a small golden tower poking up above the pantiled rooftops of the former distillery. It is 4kg of gold leaf, simply applied across the surface of an existing building. “Gold is a very cheap cladding material,” says Koolhaas, “compared to marble or even paint.” It has transformative properties too: even on an overcast day, this gilded beacon casts a warm aura over the entire site.

Enter the complex – which is walled around the perimeter like a monastic campus – and a sleek glass-box gallery slides into view, providing a shop window through which the current display of classical statuary is visible, muscular silhouettes marching across a terraced landscape inside, liberated from their plinths. Styled like a stripped-back Miesian pavilion, the gallery is topped with a second exhibition space that thrusts out in a dramatic cantilever, supported by a chunky exposed I-beam, just missing the building across the courtyard.

Such finely tuned moments of tension recur throughout the complex, where new and old hang in balance, not quite colliding – an effect amplified by unexpected material contrasts. …

Elsewhere, polycarbonate walls meet floors of wooden setts, brushed aluminium collides with travertine, metal mesh emerges from poured resin. It is a rich bricolage of the opulent and everyday that recalls some of OMA’s best earlier projects, like the Kunsthal in Rotterdam (1992) or the Dutch Embassy in Berlin (2003), but here wrought with an unparalleled attention to detail – in a large part thanks to the care of Italian project architect, Federico Pompignoli, and a substantial (but undisclosed) budget. …

This level of craft enriches spatial sequence as it unfolds across the site, keeping your attention primed for what might appear around the next corner. … Such variety of experience is the guiding principle for the whole project. Walking through the campus is like strolling through a catalogue of curatorial techniques and display strategies: there is the open-plan hall with its panoramic windows; there are the deep, raw concrete silos, with the industrial heft beloved of so many curators; there are narrow spaces carved out of the old distillery wings, and then domestic-scaled rooms in the golden tower. …

“We have tried to find ways to go beyond the gallery wall and create a real diversity of typologies and conditions for the display of art,” says Koolhaas….

Oliver Wainwright. "Rem Koolhaas crafts a spectacular 'city of art' for Prada in Milan." Guardian 6 May 2015.

[lpsy]

[lpsy]

Arthur Erickson + Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Robson Square, Vancouver (1983).