The lobby of the Dream Downtown hotel on West 17th Street is full of splendors: clouds of hand-blown glass lamps, acres of dark wood end-grain floor, and Alice in Wonderland-style tufted silver poufs. But the greatest splendor of all is a subtle one, a line of four new ibeams introduced into the structure, an iconic mid-century modern building by Albert C. Ledner, to support the new penthouse above.

These columns are dressed, simply and skillfully, in rolled stainless steel casings secured with flush bolts. They have such a subtle presence in the vast, open space that it’s easy to pass without seeing them, but once they catch the eye the rest of the lobby recedes. The enclosures are similar to those Mies Van der Rohe used at the Barcelona Pavilion, shown above. Stretching nearly fifteen feet high, each column at Dream cuts a spectacularly slender figure that dramatizes the strength of the steel inside. Polished to a mirror finish, they very nearly disappear. They’re sublime.

May 17, 2012 by Nalina Moses

At the checkout at the Indian grocery I’m always tempted to grab some of the Parle-G biscuits they keep there to placate three-year-olds. The packages, the size of soap bars, have a bright red-and-yellow graphic with the face of a jolly baby. Parle-G’s are nice with black tea, more flavorful than Nilla wafers and less filling than shortbread, an everyday alternate to super-sweet, luridly-colored traditional Indian sweets. They’re the best selling cookie in India, which might make them the best selling manufactured food product in the world.

The cookies take me back to my childhood, certainly, when they were an uncommon treat, but what grips me now is the loony, eye-popping graphic. The combination of red and yellow and baby is endlessly appealing. Indians vary in skin tone from coal black to snow white, but none of them have the cartoonish pink glow of this child. Perhaps we ought to be up in arms about the Parle-G lass the way we are (or ought to be) about Aunt Jemima and Chief Wahoo. Yet the baby is appealing: she wants some cookies and waits patiently for them. Over the years the wrapper has become cluttered with blue and green emblems touting the snack’s (dubious) nutritional virtues, and now it’s made from tear-away plastic rather than the thick wax paper that it used to be. I’m just thankful Parle hasn’t updated the blissfully innocent graphic.

May 16, 2012 by Nalina Moses

A friend gave me a bouquet of candy-colored pink peonies for my birthday, which I kept for two weeks on my living room table. They transformed from tight, dark buds to blossoms and then to balls of pale, withered, petals that fell to the carpet one by one. It was unexpectedly moving watching them bloom and then perish so quickly, like the piercingly lovely flowers in a vanitas painting.

The lessons of these paintings had hitherto been lost on me, perhaps because I was just too young. They say, Time moves forward and takes all things. While some of the still-lives are hopelessly didactic, incorporating skulls and bones, all have a rich physicality that invites sensual participation. They caution against the world and then lure us into it. Pleasures is fleeting, they seem to say, so take it while it is there.

May 15, 2012 by Nalina Moses

The Guggenheim has followed its virtually impossible-to-follow Maurizio Catellan installation with a powerful but more classically-bent John Chamberlain retrospective. The exhibit makes clear that while the building displays paintings functionally, it’s really a much, much better venue for sculpture. Surfaces have a hard time holding their own inside the extraordinarily plastic space but objects can compete on the same level. Almost perversely, the bigger, bolder and more egregious a sculpture, the more comfortably it sits within the museum.

Chamberlain’s pieces are beautifully scaled for the rotunda galleries, where one large freestanding work has been installed at the center of each bay. The arrangement allows visitors to circle them and see them from up close. I was fortunate to visit with a friend who has worked in steel fabrication and he called out the delicate bolts and solders that were holding the metal shards together, as well as the processes used to cut and color them. While at first glance the sculptures seem like giant tin foil balls, they’re actually exquisitely composed and have an overriding classical repose. They look most splendid from afar, and peering over the (precariously low) Guggenheim guardrail offers shifting, cinematic views of works across the way, works that you’ve just examined or expect to encounter soon. Mounted on the building’s canted floors and walls with concealed wires and angles, they have the sweetness and delicacy of hothouse blossoms.

May 14, 2012 by Nalina Moses