The Wright Brothers’ field isn’t located in Kitty Hawk proper but in a neighboring North Carolina community called Kill Devil in Dare County not far from Nags Head.  The names conjure a landscape that is not a warm, bountiful refuge but a place to move away from.  The brothers relocated here, to the outer banks, from Dayton because the climate and wind speeds are optimal for test flights.  There is a flatness and lowness to the landscape, and a softness to the light too, that opens the landscape dramatically to the sky.

The brothers were bicycle repairmen, so their first machines look like bicycles with wings.  Their first motorized machines look like steampunk superhero fins strapped to a pilot.  The machine used to complete the first powered flight in 1903, a replica of which is on display at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, seems implausibly bulky, a structure arrived at after countless rounds of trial and error.  It’s the Wright Brothers’ earlier, unmanned test gliders, which in photographs appear as light as figures on a page, that capture most clearly the dream of moving away.

An Andy Warhol painting, a 1963 four-pane acrylic silkscreen self-portrait called, deliciously, “Self-Portrait,” just sold for 38.4 million dollars to a private collector at Christie’s.  The media is shocked by the vast sum of money.  What shocks me is how banal the work really is.  It looks like a contemporary illustration accompanying a magazine piece about the artist.  Here Warhol is rendering photo-booth shots of himself that don’t have the canonical pop that his shots of Marilyn and Liz have, and he’s using four different shots, blunting the power of the repetition.  Even his “Flowers,” completed at the same time, and so entirely and self-consciously superficial, have a stronger graphic sense.

This painting doesn’t seem like product, like so much later Warhol does, but it seems wrong.  I don’t question the attribution.  Like other artists Andy Warhol made mistakes, and made paintings that didn’t really work but were essential to get to other, better paintings.  But I question how a painting like this prompted a bidding war.  It certainly wasn’t about the work.

Food Lion is my new favorite grocery store.  Based in Salisbury, North Carolina, the chain has over 1,300 locations throughout the southern states.  Inside are all the products you’d expect, as well as specialty items not available in northern stores, like gallon-sized tea bags, sheets of beef jerky, and three flavors of instant grits (butter, cheddar, and American cheese).  The aisles at Food Lion are ten-feet wide and the linoleum floors shine like marble.  The cashiers ring up the discount price before asking if you have the insiders’ saving card, and then they offer to carry your bags to the car.

The finest thing about Food Lion is its logo, a squarish crest with the stylized profile of a lion standing (and roaring) above the store’s name, which is rendered in a slender, elegant font.  It’s not a cuddly storybook lion or a ferocious wild lion that’s pictured, but a heraldic Anglophilic lion, a bit like the old Pringle of Scotland dragon.  The logo is simple and enigmatic.  It could stand for for any entity: a rugby team, a marching band, or an investment bank.  For this regional grocery store designers fashioned a corporate identity that confers a genuine sense of pride.

George Vanderbilt’s great and grand home in Asheville, Biltmore, was designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt.  Completed in 1895, it remains open to the public as a kind of museum of upper class living.  The rooms, immaculately maintained, are stuffed with original furnishings and lavish flower arrangements.  Visitors wander through, amazed by the scale and sumptuousness of the master’s bedroom suite, the breakfast room, the painting gallery, the bowling alley, the swimming pool, and the pastry kitchen.  Uniformed guides observe that the house is most beautiful at Christmastime, when rooms are decked with holiday trim and candles.

I’m not easily impressed by grandeur but I’m impressed with Biltmore.  It’s not the grandeur of the lifestyle, really, but the grandeur of the building’s architectural ornament.  The trim on the facade, executed in a clear, luminous limestone, is especially stunning.  The decoration doesn’t clumsily imitate European models, as so much nineteenth-century American architecture does, but proposes a lighter program.  The reduced area of ornament on the facade and the plainness in the coursing give the work, undeniably profuse, real refinement.  Historical photos on display in the Biltmore basement show the temporary railroad that brought workers and supplies from the city to the site.  Most workers rode in on flatbeds but the masons traveled in covered cars.  From the look of things that princely treatment was justifiable.