Public Art

Living in (actually in the suburbs of) Raleigh is tough enough for a girl coming from Boston. But reading about all the wonderful things that happen in the rest of the world and realizing that you can't get that because of a bunch of stick-in-the-muds "politicking" is cultural agony.Not to say that I understand the full scope of all the aspects involved, but I do understand why I often get the answer "Raleigh is not there yet." Case and point. An internationally known artist. A benefactor to foot the bill. Why would a city possibly say no? The answers in Raleigh... Thank God that JetBlue has direct flights to NYC and soon to Boston; because that's the only way I can get the amenities, I'm used to.



“Cloud Gate,” the 125-ton stainless steel mirrored blob he unveiled last year in Millennium Park in Chicago, has been embraced — despite a cost overrun of more than $10 million — with near-rapture by Chicagoans, who flock to see their skyline in its polished surface and have affectionately nicknamed it the Bean. (“Let’s be frank,” The Chicago Tribune wrote recently, “the Bean is hot.”)



“Sky Mirror,” sculptor Anish Kapoor’s dish of highly reflective stainless steel almost three stories tall, is being welded and polished in Oakland, Calif.; it will make its way by truck across the country and be on view from Sept. 19 to Oct. 27. Its concave side will face 30 Rockefeller Plaza and invert the skyscraper in its reflection.

“It’s a space filled with mirror,” he said, grinning and adding that he sees the work partly as an “oculus in the space,” reminiscent of the oculus that lets in light at the top of the Pantheon in Rome, except that this one has no dome attached, a hole without the doughnut.

Of course, in Mr. Kapoor’s case, the mirror is curved and warped, a postmodern funhouse version of verisimilitude, one that, on its convex side facing Fifth Avenue, will stretch the images of passers-by into exaggerated El Greco elongations and, on the other, will turn them upside down, along with the rest of the world. “Upside-down clouds really do look upside down,” he observed. “They’re not the same. I don’t think New York will look quite the same either.”




“One of the things that ‘Sky Mirror’ tries to take on is that there’s so much monumentality, enmeshed, pushing up there,” he said, calling the mirror “a kind of phenomenological approach to the city as a concrete fact.”

But, he added: “Any kind of communication, any language, necessarily leads to meaning, and the job of abstract art today is to work with those residual meanings. A narrative arises. And I think it’s what you do with it that makes the work successful or not.”