https://www.nalinamoses.com/events daily 0.75 2020-11-15 https://www.nalinamoses.com/events/2020/9/17/mentoring-session-women-in-the-profession-of-architecture monthly 0.5 2020-11-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1605484841275-BWFNCEYJ7QN40ICIIQT4/200917_WiPA_LINKEDIN.jpg Events - Mentoring Session, Women in the Profession of Architecture https://www.nalinamoses.com/events/art-omi monthly 0.5 2020-09-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1577068346766-SIMAMM3MS23JJBNF2FOO/Liesbeth+van+der+Pol_Haarlem+Richard+Holkade_1996.jpg Events - Opening Reception, Single-Handedly Exhibit at Art Omi in Ghent NY https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1577069000532-PGQWEWI0KOZDZYWWW297/ART%2BOMI%2BLOGO.jpg Events - Opening Reception, Single-Handedly Exhibit at Art Omi in Ghent NY https://www.nalinamoses.com/events/2019/9/11/opening-reception-art-by-architects monthly 0.5 2019-08-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1566769162237-FL3UF3HMTA75OH3XOBJU/HANK.jpg Events - Reception: Art by Architects, 09/12, Church of the Heavenly Rest, New York City (Streetscape with Red House, 2017, by Hank Abernathy) https://www.nalinamoses.com/events/cliffdwellers monthly 0.5 2019-04-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1556492878678-48P09NKC0ZYBOB5YW2AR/Singlehandedly.jpg Events - Chicago Book Event with Aric Lasher, 07/18, The Cliff Dwellers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1556490777424-XJIPIAU5O2JM3I0Q5AZF/Headshots_01.jpg Events - Chicago Book Event with Aric Lasher, 07/18, The Cliff Dwellers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1556492815168-PRFUSML3GBI1EYQCQ5HA/Sponsors.png Events - Chicago Book Event with Aric Lasher, 07/18, The Cliff Dwellers https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1556492830404-4IY19IS0NE261PORSVIV/Blick.png Events - Chicago Book Event with Aric Lasher, 07/18, The Cliff Dwellers https://www.nalinamoses.com/events/losangeles monthly 0.5 2019-04-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1556492725996-LXELJEAB37MJAWD6JLN1/Singlehandedly.jpg Events - Los Angeles Book Panel, 06/29, A + D Architecture and Design Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1552013194944-GUPALZIIHTB1RI8XMM5S/AplusD+Museum+Logo+Horizontal.jpg Events - Los Angeles Book Panel, 06/29, A + D Architecture and Design Museum https://www.nalinamoses.com/events/society monthly 0.5 2019-05-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1556492541327-9GUNO63DKVFOTDFUX6CF/Singlehandedly.jpg Events - New York Book Discussion, 06/11, The General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1556492574810-1SBXTWX5WABWOJBMK3TC/Logo_GenSoc-1.png Events - New York Book Discussion, 06/11, The General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen https://www.nalinamoses.com/events/rizzoliny monthly 0.5 2019-05-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1556491965728-PFPJTV8RO4YRGE5O9GKY/Singlehandedly.jpg Events - New York Book Panel and Reception, 05/08, Rizzoli Bookstore https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1556491835757-K83WCTI4E1BTDRJIDNAT/Rizzoli+New+York_Logo_ORIGINAL.jpg Events - New York Book Panel and Reception, 05/08, Rizzoli Bookstore https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1556491845944-YFWSVV4LYCP9WY2BC4T0/BLICK+TRANSPARENT.gif Events - New York Book Panel and Reception, 05/08, Rizzoli Bookstore https://www.nalinamoses.com/events/bac monthly 0.5 2019-02-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1548727580106-F6H6YC78Y34WBBW2D02Z/BAC_Logo_Correct.jpg Events - Boston Book Panel, 04/24, The Boston Architectural College https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty daily 0.75 2020-11-30 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/jake-tapper-cnn-news-media-journalism-television monthly 0.5 2020-11-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606602937381-C2UZHOLZJHXBCDC5XXK4/JAKE+TAPPER_03.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY - ALL THE NEWS https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/oma-amo-rem-koolhas-countryside-guggenheim monthly 0.5 2020-11-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606603237033-7ZO61660JZK30LKDG832/COUNTRYSIDE.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY - TAKE ME HOME https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/kamala-harris-india-sari-iconography monthly 0.5 2020-11-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606695822626-HX8TQQNX5SYR77S0EQVT/Hanifa+Abdul+Hameed%2C+Kamala+Aunty%2C+2020_SS.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY - STATEMENT DRESSING https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theyre-playing-our-song-what-is-the-soundtrack-of monthly 0.5 2020-11-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606697220387-0OHIGKS4G967UWLC9Y2Y/REM.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY - THEY'RE PLAYING OUR SONG https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/menstruation-taboo-pantone-color-gender monthly 0.5 2020-10-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514994315-2Y4FLGN4QRN37ZAEXP7R/c1a687a364cf5071a5bee5184a7151bf85ff9683.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY AND RED ALL OVER Well this surprised me. It’s Pantone’s new shade of red, Period, accompanied by the line diagram of a woman’s ovaries, fallopian tubes and uterus. The new new hue was developed in partnership with Swish feminine hygiene company Intimina. Pantone explains: “An active and adventurous red hue, courageous Period emboldens people who menstruate to feel proud of who they are.” Except that this red is not the real color of blood (menstrual or otherwise), period is a euphemism for menstruation, and the diagram depicts a uterus that has no entrance – no vagina. This anatomical cartoon sanitizes the female body’s unique powers of sex, pregnancy and childbirth. Intimina peddles feminine products like rubber cups, pelvic exercise tools, and an “intimate moisturizer.” While the company is body positive and honors women including Alexandria Ocasio Ortiz, Malala Yousef and Vivienne Leigh in a blog called #whilebleeding, its branding reinforces every retrograde stereotype about femininity. Its website is an orgy of bubble gum pink, as are its rubber products. Right now binary gender and its iconographies are under assault. Liberal parents are trying to raise gender-free children, empowered teenagers select their own gender, and adults freely switch genders. So why is a corporation celebrating biological femininity? Will we honor male bodily functions similarly? Other than to shock, what’s it for? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/and-a-microphone-architect-sekou-cooke-spoke monthly 0.5 2020-08-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514994127-49Q7MOSHDKKZEGIAQO9V/1bfe6d78e71b8d736c3ff1a341a142d7624b0840.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY AND A MICROPHONE Architect Sekou Cooke spoke last month in support of Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, a survey exhibit he curated at the New York Center of Architecture in 2019. He authored a manifesto on the subject, The Fifth Pillar: A Case for Hip Hop Architecture, in 2014, and is completing a book about it. I didn’t visit the show, which sounded gimmicky, but in photographs, and in Cooke’s presentation, the work collected has power and presence. So it’s strange that in both speech and in writing Cooke is reluctant to define what hip-hop architecture (HHA) actually is. In the article, after failing to find an adequate definition for “architecture,” he moves on to describe hip-hop as a “subculture” that is at its core countercultural and multi-disciplinary. At the lecture, when someone asked what the formal ideas behind HHA were, its Five Points, he paused, sighed tiredly, and said only that hip-hop architecture was many things, that it really had no rules. This echoes the words of Deconstructivists. And, formally, HHA might be the inverse of what that movement was. If Deconstructivism, in architecture, suggested forms coming apart centripetally, broken into smaller shards and sucked away into a vast neutral field, then the works Cooke showed might be understood as forms coming together centrifugally, of different parts from different places fitted together within a sliver of space in a city to make a vital new thing. That new thing is characterized by sculptural movement, calligraphic ornament, and percussive rhythm. The most beautiful works Cooke showed were from his own studio, a series of models made by 3D printing the mass of an existing single-family house while spinning the printer. The resulting forms are bright and bold, human scaled, and accepting and recharging an existing vernacular. Architecture is made, ultimately, of forms and materials, not of ideas. There’s an architecture here; let’s look at it. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/columbus-indiana-modern-architecture monthly 0.5 2020-05-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514993628-WLD85KC2DOK378LLH7JW/9e766489559c9e142cfe3b1d492df30d1d3f3273.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FIRST LOVE The movie Columbus, shot on site in the Indiana city, is about a young woman who has trouble leaving her home and her hometown, where she’s tantalized by the celebrated modern monuments around her. When a well-known professor of architecture is hospitalized there, his son and his protege visit, befriend her, and hatch a plan. The movie is shot almost entirely in one-point perspective, an optical scheme in which all orthogonal lines meet at a fixed point on the horizon, so the viewer is always looking flat onto a surface or deeply into a space. It’s a vantage that gives the city’s iconic twentieth-century buildings a grave formal beauty. The landscapes, lush late-summer lawns and ancient hardwood trees, are rendered similarly. The scenes, firmly and quietly composed, hold the buildings and grounds still so the characters can roam freely in front of them. The story unfolds slowly with generous spaces and silences that are unusual in an American film. We see that the young woman does not feel secure, the son does not feel loved, and the protege stifles any feelings that might arise. We see that all three characters are slightly unmoored and slightly enamored of one another. They move together and then apart, until they reach a kind of social detente. Columbus is the only movie I know that shows what it’s like to love a building. Not to find supreme beauty in it, but to be sustained by it. Each night the young woman leaves the home she shares with her mother and drives to Deborah Berke’s Irwin Union Bank, a small, elegant building with a bold parti and deceptively banal detailing. At night its upper floor – a glowing cantilevered bar – casts a cool blue light across the lot below, where the heroine sits on the hood of her car. This building is the only one part of her world that makes sense, that is correctly ordered, that gives her a home. This is a power of architecture, to hold one together, that’s rarely expressed. Deborah Berke Partners, Irwin Union Bank, Columbus IN, 2009 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/playing-dress-up-whats-the-difference-between monthly 0.5 2020-05-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514995382-P3Q0U95V1OC5JSSZC1N4/4f8ebf37e928290223d01e1ae1af8a1e09324f1e.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PLAYING DRESS UP I’ve always understood that costume is one person’s fantasy of another, while fashion is one person’s fantasy of herself. The Anna Sui retrospective at the Museum of Art and Design, The World of Anna Sui, flattens that distinction. When styled for shows and shoots Sui’s models have a boldly cluttered look. A woman might wear an Alice in Wonderland inspired dress over Op Art patterned tights with a fitted Victorian peacoat, a feathered hat, and elbow-length kidskin gloves. This rich layering and accessorizing drowns out the fineness and complexity in the tailoring. I don’t think any two dresses here share the same piecing; each one is crafted uniquely, inventively. To examine them individually is the great pleasure of the show. The princess seams of this coat, the fringe along this handkerchief hem, the embroidered yoke of this dress. It’s these details that make the garment, and also give them a costumey feeling. The garments are willfully overdone, joyfully baroque. The show is organized in thirteen clusters of mannequins, spread over three floors, organized by social type, including what the museum identifies as “cowgirls, grunge girls, hippie chicks, hula girls, Mods, pirate rock stars, Pre-Raphaelite maidens, and surfer nomads.” My favorite outfits are the ethnic ones, labelled “tribal,” perhaps to sidestep accusations of cultural appropriation. There are dresses whose silhouettes and embroideries are inspired by traditional Native American, Inuit, Indian, Ukrainian and Chinese dress. Each is so seriously and unironically executed that it seems less like a copy than a dream, in fabric, of a woman. Anna Sui’s clothing supports a woman being herself while allowing her to imagine that she is someone else. Photograph courtesy of MAD Museum.                                                                                                                                                                            https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/masquerade-an-art-history-professor-in-college monthly 0.5 2020-04-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514994009-GZOT8F4AZGOB9VB6SZII/ceae3b9afec6049c1f1064b6d76aebcefc8f65da.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MASQUERADE A professor of mine, the influential scholar of African art Sylvia Ardyn Boone, traveled to Sierra Leone in the 1970′s to study the aesthetics of Mende culture. She understood that the stunning, elaborately braided and sculpted hairstyles women wore were a measure of social prosperity. There were no beauty parlors, and the most fashionable styles demanded considerable skill and time. So only women well-positioned socially – with loving and supportive aunts, sisters, cousins and friends – had good hairstyles. Maybe this is also true of homemade masks. During video chats several friends mentioned they were wearing scarves bankrobber-style to the grocery store because they didn’t know where to get cloth masks. So I decided to make some to share. I spent hours online, researching what would offer the best protection. A non-medical grade cloth mask offers only partial protection, but fabrics that are natural, soft, dense and breathable are most effective. I chose a fitted design that cups the nose and the chin, used cotton poplin lined with cotton jersey, attached extra-long ties, and left the sides unfinished for additional layers to be slipped inside. The sewing had lots of starts and stops, weighed down by sadness. Friends have received the masks, shared selfies, and been wearing them for walks to the drugstore and through the park, which pleases me. They offer some protection. They signal social distancing. And they show that the wearer is cherished.  Fu Face Mask Pattern from Free Sewing, to be distributed freely. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-two-the-first-half-of-the-two-popes-the monthly 0.5 2020-04-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514994046-DOMCO7BWEHW5SZ2OWK55/3bce212841b231dcd483730e56a96c38d78cd7a2.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY TALKING OF MICHELANGELO The first half of The Two Popes, a movie about the friendship and rivalry between Pope Benedict XVI and his successor Pope Francis, is screamingly beautiful, offering astounding views of Rome, Vatican City and Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence. Watching, one feels goddess-like, peering into a resplendent private world. But then the overall formal beauty of the movie starts to oppress. In flashbacks we see Frances as a young priest in Buenos Aires forging a prudent and costly alliance with the fascist government, and then exiled in rural southern Spain. These scenes are shot in recognizable movie styles: the city in a romantic black-and-white, like Casblanca, and the country in flat acrid tones, like The French Connection. These palettes aren’t linked to any spirit, but serve as tinny pop cultural references. When Benedict, the reigning Pope, calls Francis to the Sistine Chapel one morning, before public hours, to broach his voluntary retirement, the opulence of the surroundings feels slightly obscene. The room is empty and floodlit, the frescoes rendered in crisp candy colors like wallpaper. One marvels at the architectural spectacle rather than the anguish in the human figures stretched across the ceiling or sitting quietly below. This scene made me remember my own experience at The Vatican. While waiting in line to enter an older man, dressed in a fine pinstriped grey wool suit that hung off his ravaged frame, threw himself from his wheelchair and crawled on elbows to the altar. There’s no expression of faith like that in this movie. Even Francis, a complex, articulate, and self-questioning priest, doesn’t emerge as a full-blooded person. He gets lost in the surroundings. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/oma-galleria-gwanggyo monthly 0.5 2020-04-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514996423-LID1U8RG3GG6KX7R9TMR/3c521cdd3da8e17c0de60b60697eccbbf3ea5a8c.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A BRAND NEW UGLY There’s lots of talk about beauty, but what about ugly? That which doesn’t possess beauty can be simply insipid, unimpressive, unimportant, while something truly ugly possesses its own power. It agitates, upsets expectations. OMA’s new building for luxury retailer Galleria in Seoul is ugly. Popping up in my twitter stream among prettily groomed interiors and houses, the masonry behemoth had a beastly presence. The structure’s dark outer skin is split by a run of faceted glass windows that swells like a cancerous growth at an outer corner. Its facade has no grid, no consistent measure except for its small stone triangular tiles, which blend like pixels into mud-colored strata. Its palette of dark stone and garish sea-green glass is unharmonic. The volume is rich in associations, none particularly flattering, and none architectural. This building reminds one of a geographical specimen, a molten chocolate desert, a subterranean mammal. But one can’t mistake this for bad architecture. It’s complex, vivid and deliberate. It makes no attempt to look like a building, veering courageously from convention, particularly in the service of a luxury retailer peddling established European brands. This building is admirably ugly; it might even be deeply ugly. Is it arriving ahead of a larger wave, forecasting a new normal? And is it quietly dismantling some flaw in our thinking, pushing us towards a new beauty? Photograph courtesy of OMA. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/notebook-journal-kengo-kuma monthly 0.5 2020-04-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514996323-4VPZX69VAPQZGWYC8CHO/31a527271a7cec81d8a7376885bf1b8af364799e.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY JOURNALISM There was a time, abruptly undone, when an Instagram feed – that stream of exquisitely-curated single images – was the consummate expression of social identity. Then it all shifted and the Zoom video chat – an array of live, grainy, eerily shifting, beloved human faces – became the standard. I’d like here to plead for physical expression, and more specifically the journal – a catchment for all manner of writing, drawing, recording, collecting, sorting, and salvaging. A friend in Europe, whose sensibilities are fundamentally literary, observed that the one-of-a-kind crisis we’re living through now resembles a war, and that we should all be looking around closely, taking notes, keeping track. A recent piece by Sloane Crossley in the Times, thoughtful and fantastically premature, wonders what kind of novels this period will produce, concerned that a universal experience like this “is poison to actual book writing.” But there are surely millions of perspectives and many millions of stories to tell. Short of a novel, a journal might be the richest, most supple form. One’s journal can be a book or box in which one leaves things: lists, poems, Post-it notes, receipts, rants, sketches, snack wrappers, lists. It’s a loose, low-tech, capacious form that requires no deep artistic or literary skill. As one’s ideas, feelings and observations build, the journal can take on an infinite number of shapes. At a moment when looking outward is painful and necessary, looking inward might offer some comfort, distance and, for those privileged to remain in quarantine, a way to mark the strange, stubborn stream of days. One’s journal is private and typically remains unseen, which might trouble some, especially youngsters. But it captures, if only for our future selves, what is happening now, and who we are becoming. Notebook by Kengo Kuma, 2009. Photograph courtesy the Moleskine Collection. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/noah-davis-painter-zwirner monthly 0.5 2020-03-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514996539-R1PBAA7D3W7G5YFTQBR5/bb54272ca7b197369c51050dd4e139a8868f423e.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS Painter Noah Davis’ posthumous show at David Zwirner in Chelsea is drawing attention and crowds, deservedly. The canvases are substantial in size and subject, and the installation fills the two main galleries richly. I visited on a Saturday afternoon, when a bright mix of artists, collectors, fans and hipsters gathered in front of different works in contemplation and admiration. Davis’ style is distinctive; he uses a palette of spoiled pastels and dulled greys, skimming fine lines over darker backgrounds. The paintings are strongly graphic and also strangely muted, pictorially flattened. His subject matter and format vary radically. The most-publicized works in the show are intimate family scenes, rendered in a loose hand that confers mystery and privacy. There are several other scenes in which staid bourgeois figures are rendered in surreal settings: a ballet troupe performing on a suburban lawn, a man in a suit crossing a desert, a family in Sunday finery at a summer barbecue. And there are fascinating one-offs: a moonlit cityscape of Los Angeles, the portrait of a man enmeshed in a painted grid, and the highly mannered view of a man and a deer confronting one another, in silhouette, on a mountaintop. What holds all together is Davis’ sense of composition, which is supreme. However strange or cluttered the scene, the images remains cool, balanced. Davis died in 2015 when he was thirty-four. What’s here is the work of a young painter trying his hand and everything, moving freely and whole-heartedly between different genres (portrait, collage, graphics), narrative modes (biography, fantasy, myth), and manners (figuration and abstraction). And this is what is saddest, that he is right in the middle things. Noah Davis, “The Last Barbeque,” 2008. Collection of Sam and Shanit Schwartz © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/book-blues-when-the-new-hunters-points-library-was monthly 0.5 2020-03-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514996622-697WZ1T66W8SA7X7DPM6/41fc65dc0102b24587157e973c6377ce2e4f1634.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BOOKISH, BLINKERED Steven Holl’s Hunters Points Library is the jewel in the Queens Public Library System, an audacious starchitect-designed monument built to serve a growing community. When it opened in the fall of 2019 Michael Kimmelman raved in the Times, calling it “one of the finest public buildings New York has produced this century.” And it is extraordinary when seen from Manhattan, across the East River, and approached on foot from the local subway station. The five-story concrete volume, eroded by gigantic worm-shaped windows, resembles the mute, enigmatic structures in Holl’s iconic watercolors, that lure one through their shadowy passages. But the magic ends as one steps inside the library. The worm-shaped windows are overscaled, and set with relation to the floors. The library’s trays, rising in a “V” from the ground floor entrance, are narrow, squeezed between stairs along its west and east facades that offer expansive river and city views. The circulation, in pinched paths along the railings and staircases, is contorted and cramped. When I wandered through one Saturday morning I came uncomfortably close to patrons perusing the stacks, reading the paper, and studying at tables, and starstruck architects taking pictures. We’re used to this kind of crowding in a city building, but not in a new building, or in a building this large, which frames so much empty space at its center. The library is currently facing ADA claims, which isn’t surprising. It seems to have been planned pictorially – to generate spectacular views within and without – rather than pragmatically. As a working architect one’s vision is continually tempered by realities of program and budget, and a structure is typically shaped to enclose the minimum square footage required. To design a public building as Holl has, squeezing and scattering its program through narrow plates in an immense volume which could have provided much more, is extravagant. To design a library as Holl has, that offers no welcoming space for reading, studying or resting, is criminal. The building opens itself generously to the outside, but it doesn’t hold people inside. Photograph by Paul Warchol. Courtesy of Steven Holl Architects. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/rachel-feinstein-maidedn-mother-crone-sculpture monthly 0.5 2020-02-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514996710-CVD1A8WSKR2XUFAOGHUQ/1e1d653636a4f607dfd622bb867f53fc81dd03a3.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MEDIA SAVVY Sculptor Rachel Feinstein’s retrospective at the Jewish Museum, Maiden, Mother, Crone, is less powerful as an examination of those female archetypes than as as study in various formal media. Feinstein uses different techniques to model the mostly life-size female figures here: painted wood, enameled aluminum, resin, mirror, nylon, foam, plaster, majolica, and plastic. Though they are shaped boldly, even sloppily, there is a balance and fineness to them. It doesn’t surprise that Feinstein first conceives them as drawings and small maquettes before building them to scale. They are more line and space than mass. The exhibit is an elegant affair. In one light-filled gallery there are maidens, mothers, and one madonna. In another gallery, dim, with silvered wallcovering, there are crones. This dichotomy reinforces the misogyny built into the archetypes, but that seems beside the point. The depictions all feel remote, intellectualized, with no real women implicated. Only two figures – Angel (a Victoria’s Secret runway model) and Butterfly (a stripper) – flutter to life, perhaps because they are rendered in overtly sexual postures, and rather unkindly, with pads of crazily-colored flesh smeared along their slender figures. Although they are meant to be ugly they remain, in line and form, poised. All the sculptures are undone, casually, by a series of small portraits hung on one wall in the maiden/mother gallery. The gentlewomen in them are rendered warmly, expressively, and particularly, with loose strokes of enamel on oval-shaped mirror panels, in the manner of eighteenth-century cameos. They move beyond caricature, getting at the character of the women depicted. These are not attractive women; they are rich, idle, haughty, bored, clueless and agitated. But they are real. And this undoes, casually, the archetypes in which women are everywhere elsewhere frozen here. Photograph courtesy of The Jewish Museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/vija-celmins-retrospective-painting-the-met-breuer monthly 0.5 2020-02-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514997229-SFZ24PT0Q1J9UMUTVLUO/d4f9b290faa4f3d797f9f446861b5e51e450585b.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY IT’S WHAT IT IS The Vija Celmins show at The Met Breuer is an exemplary retrospective, guiding one logically through this artist’s rich career, which seems to shift, at each stage, more deeply into abstraction. She began in the 1960′s painting everyday objects and found media images, and then turned in following decades to subjects that could be understood more simply as fields: spiderwebs, moonscapes and seascapes. Celmins’ iconic wave drawings from the 1970′s and 80′s fill the surface with an exquisitely rendered texture, like a tissue. They reproduce beautifully and, in print and on screen, capture majestic natural rhythms. When seen in person they are less obviously charismatic. They call one close to examine their marks and, the moment one takes that step, fall straight into abstraction. One finds only graphite on paper. Perhaps it’s naive to to make a distinction, and certainly a judgment, between figuration and abstraction in painting. But I found something uniquely magnificent and dramatic in the small figural canvases Celmins completed in the early 1960′s, when she first arrived in Los Angeles after art school. She painted household objects against blank backdrops on small notebook-sized canvases, in black and white with faints patches of color. There are, in the show, in this genre, portraits of an electric skillet, a fan, a two-headed desk lamp, a pencil, and an airmail envelope. In addition to the exquisite craftsmanship that brightens all of Celmin’s work, these canvases offer the blunt pleasure of representation. This is an electric skillet with eggs, and this is a pair of shoes. There’s one painting, larger and more complex, that caps this period. It’s the view of a freeway, painted from a snapshot Celmins took from the front seat one morning when driving to Irvine to teach. The view, somewhat off-center, of the straight, wide, open road ahead, framed by the car’s hood and wipers, blighted with billboards and blocked by an overpass, doesn’t romanticize the landscape. But the seamless brushwork – it basically disappears – and just-as-it-is rendering of powdery white Pacific light, give the scene a sweet illustionistic cast. One could look at this painting, and stay in this place, forever. Vija Celmins, Freeway, 1966. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tiffany-lamp-nyhistoricalsociety monthly 0.5 2020-02-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514997080-GCLKL4LF6FKMALTY1P5S/9f8b507fe21c57b857907b3bbd89c46b75798b2a.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER Like an Hermes scarf, a Picasso print, or a Rolls Royce, the Tiffany lamp is today so much of a signifier – of wealth, of culture, of connoisseurship – that we lose track of any very extraordinary physical qualities it might possess, the thing’s real beauty. A closer look at the Tiffany lamps on permanent display at the New York Historical Society allows one to ponder just this. The gallery, by the accomplished British architect Eva Jiřičná, isolates the lamps on pedestals in tall glass tubes so that they glow like fireflies, floating in clusters in the dark, still second floor gallery. They are offered up like jewels, against mute black floors, walls and ceilings. This drama does not serve them well. They are, in the austere surroundings, just too much. They offer too much color, too much light, and the shapes too many things woven in their shades: leaves, vines, fruit, flower, birds, clouds butterflies. Their most distinctive features, the intricate stained glass piecework of their tops, gets lost. They are, here, over-the-top, kitsch. Why weren’t the lamps woven into a display about late nineteenth-century interiors or industry, or about one New York family’s history? Isolating them like this, as precious objects behind glass, undoes their sensuality and their utility. What quality of light did they give off in a cluttered bourgeois sitting room? How did they light patterned wallpapers or tablecloths? What shadows did they cast over someone sitting nearby, or walking by? These are household objects. Why can’t we see them, and cherish them, as such? Pond Lily Table Lamp, Tiffany Studios, 1900-1906. Collection of New York Historical Society. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-pencil-is-a-key-drawing-center monthly 0.5 2020-01-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514997872-RUVLFS2052O5OD89NLH8/89899d19a89631dfda2c97903655ef047795a86b.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FREE SPEECH At an open reading I was part of long ago, after about a dozen amateurs (including myself) shared bits of self-conscious prose, a woman with dishevelled hair and a very big handbag shuffled to the mike, unfolded a piece of paper, and read a poem dedicated to her dead stepmother, which began: She combed my hair every morning She took me to school on time She packed me sandwiches with jam After she was done she looked up, smiled, and said, “She was the only person who really cared about me.” The Pencil is a Key, the recent exhibit at the Drawing Center in SoHo, reminded me of that moment. There’s an immense rage of drawings here, by artists from different cultures and ages, with different degrees of talent and training, who all completed these works while they were incarcerated. But each artist drew with the same urgency – the same fundamental need to communicate. And in the end the skill with which they’ve drawn (linework, perspective, composition) matters less than the fact that they’ve drawn at all. There are accomplished, professional renderings are, including works by political prisoners Honoré Daumier and Gustave Courbet. All the works are rich in feeling: sadness, pity, confusion, rage and grace. But the most affecting are those by untutored artists, perhaps because the content comes across so plainly. I was stunned by Angola prisoner Herman Wallace’s drawings. During more than forty years in prison he drew, over and over again, with relentless clarity, his cell in solitary confinement (bed, door, toilet) and the dream house he hoped to move to (two floors, bay windows, a one-car garage). Completed with pencil and ball point pen on scrap paper, these sketches were mailed to relatives and friends. It’s facile to compare art to language, and drawing to speech. But this exhibit makes a strong case that drawing is, like speech, a human need. Herman Wallace, 2002-07. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/boscobel-architecture-america-class-money monthly 0.5 2020-01-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514998163-X0T6SVLPE75XTRSZLVA2/tumblr_pwt4nulowF1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MORE FUN IN THE NEW WORLD Boscobel, the handsome nineteenth-century house-museum in Hudson County, New York, gives poignant testimony to the new American spirit. Built between 1804-1808 by farmers States and Elizabeth Dykeman, it was inspired by Boscobel Castle in Shropshire, England, where Charles II hid in a tree and then a priest hole after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester. It’s instructive to compare Boscobel to the Neuer Pavilion, the delightful summer home Schinkel built for Friedrich Wilhelm III inside the gardens of Charlottenburg in 1824. Both homes are built with two stories in a nine-square plan, with the rooms settled around a central staircase. And both are rendered in a restrained neoclassical fashion, built from flat surfaces embellished with raised motifs and flat patterns. The Pavilion, though originally a royal residence, is compressed and – because crafted by Schinkel – exquisitely proportioned and detailed. Its exterior columns and pilasters appear etched into its taut white stone skin. Boscobel, originally a working farmhouse, is about four times as large. It’s not perfectly symmetrical, with eccentricities in its plan. The columns, pilasters and festoons on its facade are cheerfully overscaled, like theatrical makeup. (Our guide suggested, kindly, that these motifs were designed to be seen from boats passing on the river below.) But if Boscobel is brasher and noisier than the Pavilion, it’s also looser and freer. Large windows invite the eye to wander off into the landscape. There’s room to move about inside, to pass others on the stair, to hide in the corners, to linger for hours inside one of its rooms. Its architecture seems governed by pragmatics rather than proportion, and its ornament by personal preference rather than rules. And that might speak perfectly about America, then and now. Photograph courtesy of Boscobel. House and Gardens. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/manitoga-architecture-house-nature monthly 0.5 2019-09-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514999230-XK1QHVK2OF18OAQ6JWMG/tumblr_pwtbhrxvFP1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SLEIGHT OF HAND Modern American product designer Russell Wright proclaimed, “The hand of man should not be visible.” Wright’s house-studio in Hudson County, Dragon Rock, set high into the rock face of an abandoned quarry, conforms to this dictum. The structure can’t be seen or understood completely from any angle on the ground, and gives no clear image of itself. It’s a deft act of camouflage, one that even an accomplished architect might not be able to execute. If Wright’s iconic midcentury dinnerware feel charmingly dated today, this house doesn’t. It has the rough, eccentric personal presence of those by Bruce Geoff and Bart Prince. It’s less an object of its time than a figment of its creator. It’s no surprise that Wright got his start in theater design; the house feels like a loose assemblage of moments rather than a cohesive structure. There’s a narrow passage that squeezes one from the studio into the main house, a twisting spill of rock stairs leading down to the dining room, and a low, skewed two-seat banquette in the center of the living room. Even on a sunny summer day the great room, framed with exposed wood beams and a tree trunk, felt shadowed and forlorn, as if the visitor were trapped inside its creator’s dark dreams. Wright shared many ideas (building into the earth, the open plan, motifs derived from nature) with his extraordinary architectural counterpart, Frank Lloyd Wright. But the master architect’s contemporary houses, scaled similarly, offer experiences that are physically and psychically expansive. They can overwhelm but they can also, often, dazzle. The rhythm of the ornament, the spatial complexity, the sly spatial transitions, can transport. One never feels, as at Dragon Rock, that the finishes are rough, the proportions pinched, or the connections between materials unconsidered. Russell Wright’s home is best understood as a personal experiment. To consider it as architecture is unfair; that discipline requires a firmer, more coherent hand. Photograph of Dragon Rock by Rob Penner. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/mrinalini-mukherjee-sculpture-textiles-met-breuer monthly 0.5 2019-09-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515000457-OON83YNQG6SRH54AYKRG/tumblr_pxhnw1aAFc1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ANIMALISTIC The work of Mrinalini Mukherjee, as installed now at the Met Breuer, has a ferociouscharisma. Though often classified as textile art because they’re made from hemp rope, they’d be better described as monumental sculptures. Scaled just larger than the human body, and hanging, standing and sitting directly in front of visitors, without vitrines, pedestals and labels, many have the fera; presence of Rodin’s figures. They’re so richly realized formally that they come alive emotionally. One almost expects them thrash about. The installation, with mesh curtains and a flat beige carpet pulling one through the third floor gallery in a meandering path, plays brilliantly off the museum’s rough concrete walls and ceiling grid. It opens a soft, secret, shadowed space within the building, a kind of grotto, for these fleshy figures. Some depict characters from Hindu mythology, some depict people, and some depict plants. All have a fundamental axial symmetry that recalls bodies and trees, and curved surfaces that recall organs and leaves. Weekend visitors were chatty, discussing, with various degrees of success, the iconography (”Look, it’s the peacock god!”), the work (”It’s meant to be seen in the round, not like this.”), and the artist (”She died in 2015”). It’s all rather priceless, since many didn’t know Mukherjee’s work until reading Holland Cotter’s rapturous review in the Times, or hearing about the show through word-of-mouth. At least this crowd took the work seriously. For many this show will be understood as womens art, Asian art, textile art, folk art, and craft, or, cynically, as a political corrective to museum shows  celebrating the work of well-known white men. This is, simply, figural sculpture. It can compete with the marble figures on display in the classical wing at The Met, and, in terms of sheer physical charisma, it can win. Mrinalini Mukherjee, Yakshi, 1984, hemp fibre, 225×105×72 cm. Photograph Courtesy of Jhaveri Contmeporary. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/spectacular-a-night-at-the-opera-at-the-mets-new monthly 0.5 2019-09-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514999172-XZ3J1LUJEZQU0ESMS761/tumblr_pn3es5OCSt1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SPECTACULAR A night at the Met Opera, seeing Rigoletto, left me impressed, and also wondering what specifically it is that opera does. This production, reset and reimagined by accomplished Broadway director John Mayer in 1960 Las Vegas, possesses, fittingly, loads of visual razzle dazzle. There are sumptuous silk and sequined costumes, and flashy, majestic sets by Christine Jones. The only other operas I’ve seen at the Met were both directed by Franco Zefferelli, and each left me feeling as if a distant world were unfolding below me on the round stage of the opera house. In Carmen a medieval Italian village came alive with beggars, peasants and farmers, and a donkey and a horse, as the performers carried on among them. The effect was stagey, but this village had its own texture and rhythms; it was a real place. Throughout Rigoletto I felt as if I were seeing a Broadway spectacular designed by skilled professionals. The conventions of popular theater certainly brought the story to life: the allover carpet stood telegraphically for the inside of a casino, the sleazy red miasmic glow a strip club, and the slashing neon lights a storm. The actors used broad gestures to communicate, borrowing from sitcoms. One actor dies while emerging from an elevator, and the doors open and close automatically, again and again, on her stiff corpse. The music, iconic, is performed expressively, particularly by tenor Vittorio Grigolo as the Duke. But it feels as if it has been dropped into the elaborate sets and staging, rather than resting at the heart of the performance. For opera, isn’t that the inverse of how it should be? One expects that the songs will carry the story, and then carry one away. Photo by Meghan Duffy, Met Opera Production Department. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/upon-a-time-the-new-quentin-tarantino-movie-once monthly 0.5 2019-08-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514999319-SOJGZCFPJT891KJKPPWO/tumblr_pw3rd7srRI1qdm8ato1_r2_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY UPON ANOTHER TIME Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is many things: a shoot ‘em up, a buddy film, a nostalgia trip, a revisionist history, and mostly, an essay about the fickle and devastating movement of time. The film, which runs over two and a half hours and never flags, shows how times past (fictional, historical, personal) course inextricably through the present. To paraphrase Faulkner, the past is never past, even when remembered incorrectly. As the movie, set in 1969 and framed around the Manson murders, marches towards its ugly conclusion, we spend time with three Los Angeles movie industry characters: past-his-prime television actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), Dalton’s stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and Dalton’s neighbor Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Each time we drop in on one we are served, in bright, lithe, brilliantly constructed flashbacks, a glimpse at the events that brought them to this point. As Tate watches herself fight in a movie, she remembers training for the stunts. As Doug meets a young television star, he relives a major failed audition. As Cliff fixes the antenna on the roof of Doug’s house, he recalls a life-altering conflict with is ex-wife. These memories flare up instantly and seamlessly, slicing cleanly through the present and then dropping the viewer right back into it. They lend depth to the main narrative without pulling it off on shaggy paths.  There has been criticism about the way Tate is portrayed here, as a glowy, speechless feminine archetype: smiling, dancing, driving on the freeway. But Rick and Cliff too are pictured mainly in small moments, many sadly domestic. We see Doug cracking eggs and making frozen margaritas, and we see Cliff opening cans of dog food and making macaroni and cheese. As a counterpoint, we witness all three of these characters in small triumphs. Tate hears a movie theater audience laugh at her on-screen pratfall. Cliff beats up an unsuspecting martial arts star on a Hollywood backlot. And Rick reshapes trite bag-guy dialogue to steal a scene. It’s in these small moments – often mundane – that they make themselves and their lives. Tate, as we see her, is young woman going about her days: running errands, meeting friends, listening to records. It’s an honorable way to depict her, or anyone. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/art-black-artists-politics monthly 0.5 2019-08-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606514999421-2EL606GIOIALEVJ6BSTF/tumblr_punp53hnsW1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY OF TWO NATIONS I walked into the exhibit Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963 - 1983 with questions. Was black power achieved in these years? Would all the artworks featured have a strident political focus? And would this art be good? This art is great. The exhibit features a cadre of American artists executing museum-caliber work in styles conversant with the dominant aesthetics of the time: expressionism, conceptual art, and the new figuration. Yet almost all of the artists were unknown to me, as if they had been working in a parallel hidden universe. Photographs by Roy DeCarava have spare compositions and a shadowy graphite-like finish. They render daily scenes with gravity, distance and mystery. Painted portraits by Barkley Hendricks honor their subjects, often himself, with particularizing details but without sentimentality. These life-size renderings possess awesome graphic authority, and bring the white-walled gallery to life. Canvases by Carolyn Mims Lawrence – packed with figures and words – carry the narrative force of epics, and call one closer. Why haven’t these artists been featured in prominent group shows or individual retrospectives, as their art world peers have? Are they best considered when isolated culturally, as they are here? Certainly many of the artworks tackle political themes, but all can also be understood formally. These artists are producing work that complements or exceeds that of their peers.  So why do most of them remain undersung? Barkley Hendricks. Blood (Donald Formey), 1975. Oil and acrylic on canvas. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/juvet-hotel-ex-machina monthly 0.5 2019-08-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515000808-Q70KQ0ICN1C8ZI92U7ZL/tumblr_phc14h47tr1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BOXED IN In Alex Garland’s movie Ex Machina  a tech mogul isolates himself inside his remote forest retreat, then gets busy prototyping life-like female robots endowed with artificial intelligence and something very close to artificial emotion. The movie was filmed at the Juvet Hotel in Norway, designed by Jensen & Skodvin, and this structure stands perfectly for the mogul’s values: physical and psychic isolation. The hotel, comprised of several smaller buildings, is not much to look at from the outside. Its box-like suites, the size of suburban garages, are clad in dark wood siding and, in select spots, with full-height glazing. These windows allow spectacular views of untrammeled forest into the rooms, which are furnished in an opulent version of Scandinavian minimalism. The mogul never steps outside, and spends much of his waking hours in the airless basement workshop. He works out obsessively and works obsessively, and that’s about it. During the day views of the trees, mountains and river rush inside, like dazzling images on the greatest HD screen. At night everything goes dark, and the rooms feel like bunkers. I can remember visiting an apartment in the Dakota years ago, on a wet fall day, and stepping out onto the turret balcony to see all of Central Park spread out before me. I felt like a medieval queen, with the wind pulling at my coat, birds circling above, and my dominion below. For centuries that power of survey – of looking and taking in what is yours – has been a measure of power. Now power might be what this mogul has – looking out onto a landscape without having, or wanting, any relationship to it. Nature is just another image. As the mogul concocts a female – for companionship and service – he holds the rest of the world at bay. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/those-days-the-exhibit-color-at-the-brooklyn monthly 0.5 2019-08-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515001051-K5NATO581U3ZVLJQKEUX/tumblr_pw5g5ew49F1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BACK IN THE DAY Gary Winogrand: Color at the Brooklyn Museum, has the most perfect format for a photography exhibit. Visitors sit in a dark hall on soft benches gazing at twelve different slide shows on the walls, each picture the size of a windshield projected for the time of a walk sign. The slide shows are staggered, so the eye wanders from one to the other and then back again, tirelessly, hypnotically, even as one loop begins to repeat itself. The 450 color slides here were selected from over 45,000 left by Winogrand at the time of his death in 1984, and have a scattershot quality. Most are good and some are perfect, but none are without visual and cultural interest. There are classic Winogrand themes: twinning (two teenage girls in matching striped sweaters looking different ways), layering (stooped men passing below stiffly pretty bridal mannequins in a window display), and voyeruism (one gentleman in the crush of a rush hour sidewalk turning a knowing eye to the photographer). Most of the photographs are from the early 1960′s, before hippies, second wave feminism, civil rights, and the Kennedy assassinations. It’s a gentler time. Winogrand’s photographs are restricted thematically, with only a handful of black and Asian subjects. Gender codes are inflexible; women wear dresses, heels and costume jewelry, and men wear suits and hats. At first the photos have a chic Mad Men gloss, but on closer inspection everyone inside them appears a bit ragged, run-down by the show. Winogrand’s compositions are typically about five degree off-kilter, with a center of gravity perilously close to the frame. This instability is telling. The photographer’s compulsion to capture every moment, every corner, every character, here feels less manic than sad. It’s as if the world he sees, that he’s sitting inside of, is tipping dangerously. And it is. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/af-klint-guggenheim-painting monthly 0.5 2019-08-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515001070-08GHCLFFFQUK1ED14L5O/tumblr_pn7crlzhhv1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PERSONAL STATEMENT The pitch of the Hilda af Klint solo show at the Guggenheim is that this early twentieth-century Swedish painter, a woman, mastered an uncompromisingly abstract style before all the men who are ordinarily credited with it (i.e. Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky) did, and that she has been tragically under-recognized. The former may be true, and the latter certainly is. But a better pitch would have focused on the extraordinary personal language she forged. I can’t think of another modern painter who’s syntax is so rich and remains so internally consistent. All the works here are of a piece; all were clearly crafted by one person. Klint’s forms are simple and evocative. The graceful, non-representational globules, strips and swirls she employs have a rational bent. These marks have precise meanings for her, which she documented neatly with pencil in ledgers, which are also here on display. They are deployed unerringly, on door-sized vertical canvases, against dull blank backdrops, in bright, slightly acrid, fruit-colored hues. The compositions recall biology illustrations, geometry diagrams, foreign alphabets, religious talismans, and alchemical equations. They have intellectual authority and graphic ease. The paintings command attention from viewers rushing down the crowded ramps, a perfect foil for the blank white curving walls behind them. Klint wrote with hope that her great late-in-life series of canvases The Paintings for the Temple would one day be shown in a spiral temple. Now they have been. Hilda af Klint, Altarpieces, Group X, No.1, 1915 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/second-impression-when-i-visited-grace-farms-two monthly 0.5 2018-11-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515001067-3TXJUVS8DE5ADAYCUUBN/tumblr_pgz6splNZw1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SECOND IMPRESSION When I first visited the River Building at Grace Farms two years ago I felt a chill about the place, with its dubious program and precious design. This community center, designed by by SANAA at a purported cost of 150 million dollars, consists of five small, separate, glass-walled pavilions (auditorium, cafe, library/bookstore, basketball court, and tea house) linked with a curving steel canopy. It seemed like a very grand, very expensive folly. Visiting again, on a chilly, sunny, fall afternoon, the building left an altogether different impression. Rather than the pavilions, it was the canopy that emerged as the primary figure, cutting an easy path through the landscape. Walking beneath it while dipping in and out of the pavilions, it shaped a lively and loosely-structured promenade. The canopy’s low flat roof allowed views to slip through from each side, and its slender steel posts – no wider than a coffee can – sliced them cinematically, framing stretches of the forest and horizon beyond. The curving glass walls had seemed, earlier, terribly diagrammatic, an element intended to allow the landscape “inside” and the pavilions to “disappear.” On this day they fashioned a compelling membrane between interior and exterior, catching and compounding reflections of sky, clouds, trees and lawn, complicating the profiles of the structures, and enriching one’s walk along them. The building surrendered to the grounds gracefully, making a gorgeous modern park. Photograph by Nalina Moses https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/bodysisekkingelez monthly 0.5 2018-10-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515001680-Y5NY3C36ZK5U1GCT9B2D/tumblr_pergf6n66K1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY CITY SLICKER The press surrounding MoMA’s retrospective of Bodys Isek Kingelez can’t really pin down who he is or what he does. It refers to him as a sculptor and an architect but he’s neither; he’s an artist who crafts maquettes proposing vibrant new cityscapes. He might most accurately referred to as a dreamer. This Congolan’s remarkable tableaux, built to scale on rigid bases, just as conventional architectural models are, propose brilliant new facilities for cities in Zaire and around the world. He has designed the shells for hospitals, laboratories, hotels, casinos and government buildings. His schemes are megastructures that have the bravura and unembarrassed grandiosity of themed amusement parks, gated resorts, and Olympic villages. Kingelez has no formal training as an artist, architect or planner. His assemblage are crafted from mundane materials: cardboad boxes, colored paper, tin cans, magic marker and crayon. They are impressive in their formal inventiveness and raw physical charisma. He devises structures with never-before-seen geometries, profiles and ornaments. He works in a palette of bright primary colors, highlighting elements with mirror, glitter, and foil. There’s no concern for good taste, restraint, balance or proportion, or for the fashions of modernism. Kingelez crafts cities that are intoxicated with the notions of progress and development, shaping a joyful new world of activity and prosperity. Bodys Isek Kingelez, Kimbembele Ihunga, 1994. Photo by Dennis Doorly © 2018 MoMA. Image used courtesy of the artist and MoMA. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/mile-long-club-the-mile-long-opera-a-biography-of monthly 0.5 2018-10-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515003898-PBG701VIGEV05AP1ZUO5/tumblr_pggomjjPbe1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY EIGHT MILLION STORIES The Mile-Long Opera, a biography of 7 o’clock, a choral work with music by David Lang and lyrics by Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine, premiered on the High Line last month. It’s a series of 26 linked songs staged along the length of the park, performed by 1,000 professional and amateur singers culled from city choirs. The work’s pedigree is highbrow; architecture office D S + R is credited as Creator and partner Elizabeth Diller as Co-Director, along with the accomplished choreographer Lynsey Peisinger. Yet the Opera is direct and moving. Almost impossibly, it succeeds in capturing the battered and eccentric spirit of the city right now. Carson and Rankine wrote after interviewing locals about what 7:00 pm meant to them. It’s a time when most shed a public identity and fall back into themselves. Some of the words stun: No we don’t talk but people get to know each other just by walking past each other all the time. Parts of us erase. Others are more lighthearted and, perhaps unintentionally, comic. I think about coffee cups a lot. Everyone getting their food delivered… no one cooks anymore. The songs are staged very simply, with the bulk of the singers dressed in street clothes and lit visors, standing out like firelies against the dusk. Their voices, mostly unamplified, float just above the roar of traffic. The piece resets the architecture of the park. A tier of benches becomes a stepped stage. Metal floor grate becomes a precarious membrane through which singers wail to passersby, Marry me. One brushes up against the performers in order to move on. Some stare ahead blankly, and others, convincing actors, engage a visitor directly, holding her gaze until she steps out of range. The experience is embarrassingly intimate, exposing how fraught one-on-one exchange can be. It might be a sign of our times. As one strolls north, towards Hudson Yards, individual singers and lyrics fade and one understands the opera as a constellation of small, brilliant, individual stories. That the singers are deeply diverse in age, race, community and singing ability adds another layer of truth. In New York City we live deep in the sea of humanity. There are around us millions of others – entirely unknown – to speak to, learn from, and love. Yet to remain whole, and to remain sane, we move past them and return to the familiar. Photograph by Thomas Schenk. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/httpswwwmomaorgcalendarexhibitions3931 monthly 0.5 2018-10-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515003889-2PENBHP8KNJ5RD0Y9FZ3/tumblr_periek9MAZ1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BRAVE NEW FORMS The architecture megashow at MoMA Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 highlights the era when the nation became politically and economically fortified after the second world war. It’s eye-opening for a number of reasons. First, it puts Yugoslavia on the map as a nation with an extraordinary legacy of modern architecture. The buildings documented here are stunning, and most likely unfamiliar to those who haven’t traveled through the country or studied the subject. The installation, featuring drawings, photographs (many commissioned for the exhibit by Valentin Jeck), video, and furniture, provides a rich context for the design. Second, the show makes a strong case for concrete over steel and glass, the preferred materials of high modernism. Valentin’s photographs have a graininess and grandeur that capture surfaces of aging concrete magnificently. One sees in these avant-garde concrete structures the innate plasticity of the material, the drama of sculptural forms, and the inventiveness of the architects. One sees traces of, and perhaps homage to, Le Corbusier, Lou Kahn and Paul Rudolph. And one sees a unique modern language emerge, one unconstrained by orthogonal geometries and open to emotional expression. Some of the buildings, through pragmatic in programing, have the feeling of science fiction. Finally, and most deeply, the show reminds one of what architecture, at its most elemental, can mean and do. Similar to South American architects today, the Yugoslavian architects featured here were operating at a nexus of shifting political and cultural identity, making forms charged with meanings that were in every case more than formal. The resulting buildings are hopeful, forward-looking, violent and otherworldly. At a time when so much of contemporary American architecture is cynically corporate, intended primarily to improve the value of a property, these buildings – that climb, spin, splinter and rage – elevate physical experience, and give testimony to history and place. Photograph by Valentin Jeck. Marko Mušič, Memorial and Cultural Center and Town Hall, Montenegro, 1969-75. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/giacometti-guggenheim-sculpture-portrait monthly 0.5 2018-09-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515003893-DIXFJ8A756PWGPOBCIR4/tumblr_pdj28ge86C1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY NOWHERE MEN After seeing the Giacometti retrospective at the Guggenheim, one considers his work in a new way. His figures are sculptures and also portraits. They are not abstract symbols for the human condition but depictions of this person and that person, though those individuals may not be named. Each figure has the nuances, character, and dignity of a real human person; it carries a soul. Some of the loveliest pieces are of his wife Annette. The show also offers lessons about scale. It’s a handsome installation, the best sculpture installation I can remember at the museum. Larger than life-size figures have been placed singly, in private niches on low pedestals, and cast dramatic shadows across the curving outer  walls. Small figures are collected in standing vitrines closer to the inner railing, and are swallowed in streams of museum visitors. Medium-sized pieces are set in groups on low curved tables that permit views from both the front and the back. Surprisingly, it’s these mid-sized pieces that have the most powerful presence. Together, they make engaging compositions that call one forward. Even those figures that share a platform or base seem entirely disconnected from one another, entirely alone. Whether walking about or standing still, they worry. To consider numbers of them at once is shattering. These impossibly elegant figures, who we see as real men and women, are doomed by their individuality, They cannot connect to the world around them, or to each other. Photograph courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/herzog-demeuron-parrish-art-museum monthly 0.5 2018-09-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515003885-OQHY13PUJ4BO73D15O1E/tumblr_pct5wmSYMk1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BARNRAISING As architects Herzog and de Meuron were designing the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, Long Island in the late naughts, the stock market plunged and, along with it, their budget, from 80 to 26.2 million dollars. They turned this calamity to advantage and deeply reimagined the original design, for nineteen individual sheds clustered together like a village, as two long conjoined sheds lying side-by-side. The simplified structure, completed in 2012, is dazzling. Inspired by local vernacular barns, its generous scale and gentle landscaping make for an elegant and unpressured art experience. To be sure, these are no ordinary sheds. Their shells are a severe poured concrete, their roofs are lined with a high-grade honey-hued plywood, their trusses are zealously detailed, and their interior proportions are more zen-like than barn-like. But the museum is sited at a distance from the road and set in a meadow of high grasses, so that its profile remains inconspicuous. (A friend who drives through Water Mill frequently told me she only noticed the building last summer, when an artist installed lit panels along its street-facing facade.) That Herzog and De Meuron reconceived the building so deeply to meet costs is admirable, and speaks to their architectural savvy. The museum doesn’t feel reduced. Compare this building to another suburban starchitect project, SANAA’s River Building at Grace Farms, which opened in 2015 at a rumored cost of 150 million dollars. The facility, a series of small glass pavilions built with triple-glazed uniquely curving glass panels and flush metal roofs with concealed gutters, yields a fraction of the usable space and occupies the site like a cartoon spaceship. Compared to that pretty folly the Parrish scores points for pragmatism and plainspeaking. This building feels right at home within the flat lands and old New England spirit of the South Fork. Photograph copyright Iwan Baan. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/chaim-soutine-jewish-museum monthly 0.5 2018-09-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515003890-SE1VISH5CJHGHT8U34Y3/tumblr_pdj1q8AHJs1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY CHARACTER STUDY I have a friend who’s so radically plainspoken that what he says often slides unintentionally into comedy or tragedy. I thought of him while viewing the small fine exhibit of Chaim Soutine’s paintings at the Jewish Museum, Flesh. Soutine is reknown for his still-lifes of slabs of meat and dead animals. As painted surfaces, they are incredibly charismatic. The impasto, in bold, often garish, hues, makes a scarred, shimmering skin. Their views are so dramatically foreshortened so that the objects crowd the air out of the space, leaving little relief. Yet these bloody views are also darkly funny. They have the format of heroic paintings. The meat paintings are nearly life-size, and the smaller tabletop still-lives are enlarged. But each one takes subject matter that is not heroic and trumps it up without any deeper connotations. There are no confused and whirling passions here, are those brewing beneath the similarly opulent oil surfaces of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon. Soutine simply seems interested in these objects before him – herrings on a plate, a vase of dried flowers, a dead hare, a group of slaughtered birds. His unwavering attention to the objects themselves contributes to the power of the image but does not elevate the subject. This dead cow is not a metaphor for the devastation wrought by the wars in Europe; this is just a dead cow. And Chaim pictures all objects with the same intensity. Two forks lying across a plate of herring seem trembling with life; they’re as vivid and characterful as human arms. In the end these paintings give vibrant testimony to the painter’s personality – his peculiar view of the physical world – than to the world around him. Chaim Soutine, Still Life with Herrings, c. 1916. Oil on canvas. Larock-Granoff Collection, Paris. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/schinkel-neuer-pavilion-charlottenburg monthly 0.5 2018-09-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515003885-VEZW4T1NNQUJKJGSQDU7/tumblr_pdd9ifX6Dw1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SQUARED I ended my European vacation perfectly, in Berlin, with a visit to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Neuer Pavillon at the Schloss Charlottenburg. This small villa, set a five-minute walk from the palace, was built for King Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1824 as a private retreat. I had visited once before, more than twenty years ago, in the fall, and photographed its handsome neoclassial exterior against bare trees. The building has since been fully restored and reopened in 2011 as a museum devoted to Schinkel and his work. The building has a nine-square plan, with a staircase at its center leading to a second floor. As one steps into the front vestibule this geometric order becomes perfectly clear. Each square is a single room and each room is generously proportioned, so that a group of three or four can sit inside comfortably. The interiors, which were restored to their original finishes, are surprisingly opulent. Each corner room has its own strong signature color scheme, with coordinating draperies and upholstery. One chamber is blood red, one sky blue, and one mint green. And each one is furnished with period-appropriate display cases, chairs and tables, in dark polished wood. (None of them are as refined as the chairs Schinkel himself designed, which are displayed in a gallery on the second floor.) This supremely traditional building feels, somehow, coolly modern. Its nine-square organization provides logical structure and circulation while allowing each room to maintain its own identity, creating drama as one moves from one to the next. One is delighted to walk all the way around a floor and then once again. The building’s exterior, as taut as a drum, is cleanly organized, with high narrow openings that don’t disrupt the integrity of the single volume. This building, rigorous in plan and modest in its facades, opens up to generous accommodations. It’s a lesson in the richness and complexity possible within geometric restraint. Photograph © Nalina Moses. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sweetness-and-light-the-greatest-pleasure-of-the monthly 0.5 2018-08-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515004069-TRXE82EKDS8JRPJJW9I6/tumblr_pdd87uIOz81qdm8ato1_1280.gif DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SWEETNESS AND LIGHT The greatest pleasure of the Acropolis is the Erechtheum, the small temple perched at its north edge, across from the Parthenon. This structure, the last built on the site, housed an ancient wood statue of Athena and shrines for other deities including Hephaistos, Poseidon and Erechthios (from whom the building took its name). Its architecture reflects these multiple purposes. It looks like a collection of small structures built over time, each with its own ground plane, scale and  orientation. It doesn’t possess an authoritative front, back or center, although its famous northwest porch, supported by six female caryatids, gives it an extraordinary imaginative charge. It is intimate in spirit, and invites a visitor to approach it from every angle, explore each of its corners, climb each of its steps, and stand inside each of its shadows. The Erechtheum takes strength in contrast to the Parthenon. It is eccentric rather than unified, lyrical rather than bombastic, charming rather than overpowering. The Parthenon, although ravaged, remains iconic; its array of massive swelling columns gives it an unassailable sculptural presence. It is a true monument, a single figure that can taken in all at once. The Erechtheum, instead, is best understood by walking around and through it. Now it is high, now it is dark, now it is mute, and now it is richly expressive. This building is many different things, a fleeting architecture, continually unreeling. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/not-the-real-thing-what-does-it-mean-that-when monthly 0.5 2018-08-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515004973-4OMIVSQ0FCAW16WC4ISY/tumblr_pct6e6nwaj1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY AIN’T NOTHING LIKE THE REAL THING What does it mean that when one performs an online search for “Parthenon,” the  first links and images are of its replica in Nashville, Tennessee? This historically accurate building was built as temporary structure for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in 1897, fortified with more permanent finishes in 1925, and rechristened as a city art museum in 1931. It makes perfect sense that someone would want to rebuild the Parthenon, as the original structure has suffered centuries of war damage and pillaging. And it makes perfect sense that Americans would want to rebuild the Parthenon on their own soil. It’s as a folly, spectacle, a circus act. It’s an act of possession, claiming a cultural history not available to us in the New World. And it’s an act of resistance, a refusal of time, loss and decay. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/what-remains-unspoken monthly 0.5 2018-08-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515004687-EELXUDWAL1AAGQEFALXB/tumblr_pct6i1yEtz1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY GREEK TRAGEDY The Acropolis Museum, completed in 2012 by Bernard Tschumi Architects, is a substantial piece of architecture and a substantial piece of work. Tschumi, whose best-known projects have a cerebral anti-sensual bent, was an unlikely candidate to design a home for the archaeological artifacts, including the Parthenon sculptures, culled from this iconic religious site. But he has crafted a building that suits needs exquisitely. The museum, with a glass skin, concrete floors and round metal-clad columns, is a quiet elegant shell that gives itself over to the objects inside. Its foundations pierce ancient excavations, which are visible through glass floors at ground level. Its column grid aligns with street level on lower floors, and then shifts on the fourth and highest floor, where the Parthenon marbles are housed, to the grid of that building itself, which is visible beyond. The columns here are spaced exactly as those of the ancient structure. What parts the museum possesses of the original metopes, friezes and pediments are displayed in their original configuration, only lowered so that they can be viewed more easily. Missing panels and figures – lost, destroyed, or looted – are replaced with white plaster casts of the originals, which are conspicuously bright and blemishless, or simply left blank. It’s thrilling to walk through the fourth floor, measuring one’s steps against the rhythm of the columns, and understanding the stories and visual accents in the sculptures, which are designed to be appraised together, like this, and not as single pieces on pedestals. When one reaches the low triangular pediments at each end of the floor, another story begins. They are illegible, as only about 5% of the original marbles are present, with all the missing spots left empty. The majority of the Parthenon sculptures, about 60%, remain housed at the British Museum. For decades that Museum argued that the pieces, claimed by Lord Elgin in the nineteenth century, were being held for safekeeping. Now that argument no longer holds. The Acropolis Museum makes clear that the marbles belong here. And it makes the argument, a political one, simply and convincingly. Photograph copyright Christian Richters, Peter Mauss/Esto . https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/parthenon-athens-architecture-restoration monthly 0.5 2018-08-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515004956-RD8CX0D88LVCSHFGPLNF/tumblr_pct69kFZ0b1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY THE GREEK WAY The Parthenon is the world’s most iconic building, so it’s sad to see its current condition. Its stonework has suffered from centuries of war, weather, pillaging, and neglect; it’s a relic. What one sees of the current restoration work doesn’t inspire much confidence. The temple’s front facade is embedded in a web of fine steel scaffolding, as if undergoing  acupuncture. At the inner sanctum, where the gilded statue of Athena once presided, there is a construction crane whose massive boom could topple the remaining structure with one false move. Workmen, without boots or hardhats, crawl over the podium like ants. Behind the building loose masonry pieces, unmarked and presumably uncatalogued, lie in open piles. The grounds are unpaved and uregulated; there are no walkways and signage, with only thin cords to hold back visitors from construction zones. When visiting Olympia, an ancient site with similar conditions, a visitor asked our guide, a native Athenian, why the Greeks didn’t rebuild the Temple of Zeus there, where only one original column stands but scores of stone blocks lay scattered around it. Our guide swept her hand over the scene and explained, “You don’t understand the Greeks; we’re OK with all of this.” But at other sites in the country there has been strong, sensible reconstruction and preservation work. At Delphi there are paved paths and steps, wayfinding signage, and explanatory texts. The buildings have been discretely fortified; no rubble remains. And the new Acropolis Museum, a state-of-the-art facility, just below the ancient site, was built while preserving the archaeological ruins below its foundations. Now the Parthenon’s marbles have a fine home, while the building itself seems especially vulnerable. Photograph © Nalina Moses. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/corinth-greece-planning monthly 0.5 2018-08-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515007559-Q7RO3G14I4BBPR946LQ6/tumblr_pdcxukKlkc1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SITE STUDIES I visited Corinth, Greece on a summer morning after stinging rains. The ground was wet, and clouds shrouded the top of Mount Corinth, which rose majestically beyond. I viewed remnants of the ancient city – walls of shops in the market, cisterns of public baths, the three standing columns at the Temple of Apollo – against turbulent skies. The place seemed to be governed by moody, impulsive gods, The mountain presides over the city. It seems both far away – impossible to reach – and inevitable – impossible to escape. It’s a figment from a dream and a fact of geography. I understood why the ancients built their city here, at its foot. There is a fundamental human impulse, perhaps more clearly expressed long ago, when development was so precious, to build in a place that is auspicious. There was a humility in the face of nature, a fundamental respect for the landscape. It’s something, centuries later, we no longer possess. Photograph © Nalina Moses. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/marlene-dumas-painting-zwirner monthly 0.5 2018-08-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515006225-4CG9W726Z5KI6425QO6B/tumblr_pamd3lDFgy1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY IS ANYBODY REALLY THERE? Marlene Dumas’ summer show at David Zwirner gives great pleasure. These are paintings, scenes  that would be impossible to execute, and even imagine, in any other medium. Although some are rendered in oil, some in acrylic and some in ink wash, all have the lyrical rush of watercolors, with loose brushstroke and color that seeps into the field. Dumas paints commandingly. Different pieces, at different moments, recall Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon and Francesco Clemente. They vary in quality. Some are inescapable, monumental; others feel like sketches completed on deadline for the show’s opening. Most of the paintings are portraits. About a dozen are full-size canvases showing figures head-to-toe, and dozens more are on small sheets of paper showing faces and other body parts. Many of them feel as if they capture a real person. There are flashes of particularity and eccentricity in individual faces (a gasp, a sneer, an awkward smile) and figures (arms crossed, lips parted, legs akimbo). And yet the softened brushwork lends them all a fleeting immateriality. Dumas seems to render her subjects after observation but gets at something else. These people feel bodiless, weightless, effectless, like figments from personal memory or poorly-remembered dreams. Like the paintings themselves, it’s the spiritual rather than the physical in them that allures. Marlene Dumas, Omega’s eyes, 2018, Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 x 19 ¾ inches (60 x 50 cm). Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery.                                         https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/vacuum-cleaner-dyson-design monthly 0.5 2018-05-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515006313-83A41ZGC4GVHIVGN0E6V/tumblr_p8ujjnJ3NX1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY JUST TOO MUCH So many everyday products are conceived without a drop of design intelligence (e.g. paper cups, hair clips, printers, windows) that it seems rude to complain about objects that are over-designed. But as consumers become more design-savvy, brands are putting extra efforts into product design that don’t always add up. A few years ago, when Apple launched their smart watches, the company had reached a point of design fatigue. After a string of inventive, innovative devices (i.e. the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad) the Apple Watch felt unnecessary, as if had been developed in response to market research rather than genuine need. It looked less like a technological instrument than an expensive amulet strapped to the wrist. Like Apple, Dyson uses product design to elevate their products to the level of luxury goods, but their design ethos takes the opposite approach. While Apple uses a restrained palette and flush joinery to create an aura of opulent, intelligent minimalism, Dyson exaggerates the joining of disparate materials and parts to create an image of advanced mechanical functionality. That sensibility is now approaching caricature. The brand’s Small Ball Multi Floor upright vacuum cleaner is cartoonish, with parts in unharmonious colors and awkward proportions. The design calls the user to marvel at the suction mechanism with an enormous clear canister, and the swiveling brush with an enormous purple ball joint. The brand would like to present the vacuum cleaner as an iconic machine, like a small car. What does this repositioning accomplish, if the object is so ungainly that one keeps it hidden in the closet? Dyson Small Ball Multi Floor upright vacuum cleaner. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/a-gentle-disarray monthly 0.5 2018-05-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515006128-0RF01ZL8Z96M8TCBCR7E/tumblr_p8uixseAin1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A PORTRAIT OF THE MAN The David Bowie retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum has been organized as a long rambling walk, with artifacts from his extraordinary career displayed within half-hidden nooks and narrow passages. There are amazing things to see: the space-age Pierot costume from the Ashes to Ashes video, the lyric sheet from The Jean Jenie, diaries from the Berlin days. Visitors receive headsets that are synced to micro-zones within the galleries, cueing clips from relevant songs. As a monument to the artist, the show is unpolished. The spaces are dark and uncomfortable, and the exhibit design is inconsistent. Objects that fans are familiar with, like CD and album covers, are hung up front, at eye level. And objects that fans would want to examine more closely, like Aladdin Sane costumes, are mounted on platforms, behind glass, or twelve feet above the floor. As a testimony to the person, however, the show is true and moving. What grips one are videos from Bowie’s television and stage appearances. These are shown untouched, in their original format, in low resolution, grainy, shadowy, or pixellated, some on CRT monitors. The outdated formats speak powerfully, and poignantly, to the eras in which Bowie was working, before Instagram, gay marriage, and everyday cross-dressing. Throughout his career Bowie was clear-eyed, gentlemanly, and sincere. In a television clip from the 1960′s he pleads tolerance for men who wear their hair long. In an MTV interview from the 1980′s he asks a reporter, politely, why the channel doesn’t feature black artists. And in the exhibit’s final gallery, in vintage film footage, he performs as Ziggy Stardust. Despite the studied outrageousness of his costume, makeup and hair, the beauty of the songs, and his connection to them, shine through. There are no false notes. Bowie wrote beautiful songs and performed them, meaning every word he sang. Still from video from David Bowies’ song “Life on Mars?”, directed by Mick Rock, 1972. Suit by Freddie Burretti. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/computer-world-walking-into-the-small-skylit monthly 0.5 2018-05-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515006020-1XTTO2V6ME4Z5CDLWUNL/tumblr_p8uivvT7jd1qdm8ato1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY COMPUTER WORLD Walking into the small skylit gallery at the Gagosian uptown where Urs Fischer’s new serial painting  Sōtatsu is hung, I could only think, A computer has been here. The work consists of nine door-sized aluminum panels that have been printed digitally and rendered manually with epoxy paint. The initial panel shows a warm interior scene, with a sofa, bookshelf and a black cat, that’s gradually abstracted in the panels that follow and then, in the final panel, interpreted as a pretty cloudscape with two small black birds. The panels have a remarkable soft, super-flat, burnished finish, like that on a gentleman’s metal watchband; they feel expensive. They make magnificent decorator art, and would look fantastic on the living room walls of a bare white postmodern beach house in Malibu or Southampton, where there is a very real possibility they will end up. But these aren’t paintings. The structure of each image is digital, fundamentally two-dimensional, and that shows right through the skillful color renderings. These pictures offer no depth, imaginative or dimensional. They aren’t windows into new worlds; they’re fields of color on a printout. Urs Fischer, Sōtatsu, 2018 (detail), aluminum, epoxy resin, double sided tape, and screen printing ink, 9 panels, each: 94 ½ × 71 inches (240 × 180.3 cm) © Urs Fischer. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/270park-som-historicpreservation monthly 0.5 2018-03-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515006516-3Y7WIBY9070MSAP6DQJN/tumblr_p5g6llkJRI1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BUT HEY YOU’RE ALRIGHT There’s been a wave of resistance to the demolition of 270 Park, the Union Carbide Building, a 52-floor office tower from 1960 by SOM. Its current owner J P Morgan Chase plan to replace it with another tower 20 floors higher.  Architectural critics believe that 270 is one of the city’s finest mid-century works. They also note, irrelevantly, that it was designed by associate partner Nathalie de Blois, an accomplished and undersung woman. They accuse the building’s current owner of profiteering, as they maximize the value of their midtown lot. And they call out Union Carbide, the building‘s original owner, for grossly negligent operations. It all makes for melodramatic press.  There’s no question that 270 Park is a handsome building. As with Lever House, another SOM tower completed eight years earlier, it’s broken into two different-sized volumes, with a dramatic street-level setback. Its facade has striking ornamental vertical mullions, echoing those at the Seagrams Tower, that stretch from the bottom of its “parlor” floor to its parapet.  And its lustrous curtain wall panels – mirror black at the transoms and night blue at the windows – give it an unusual sense of gravity. But 270 Park pales when compared to these two other iconic towers, just a few blocks north, that preside over Park Avenue like gods. The massing at 270 is sedate compared to the still-astounding floating slab at Lever House.  And its mullions are clumsily overscaled compared to the slender stems at Seagrams.  720 Park can’t even compete favorably with 740 Park, its northern neighbor, a 1961 tower by Emery Roth, with a syncopated facade of cast concrete frames. Why has the discussion about 720 focused on morals rather than pragmatics? Razing a structure this large is a colossal waste of materials. There’s talk of reusing pieces of its steel frame, but coordinating this will slow demolition and might not be cost-effective. If the building’s floor plates don’t suit the bank’s needs, why don’t they remake them, opening them vertically and adding ramps and mezzanines? And if the building’s footprint is too small, why not secure other adjacent buildings to make a midtown campus? Or find another lot on which to build a colossus? I hope 270 Park remains.  Not because it’s beautiful, but because it might make sense. Photography by Ezra Stoller, Esto.  Courtesy of SOM. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/michelangelo-architecture-drawings monthly 0.5 2018-02-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515006424-2K662CHB58JQMVBCXMZF/tumblr_p3nhjhFakk1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SCRATCHINGS To see Michelangelo’s drawings, on display now at The Met, is to see mastery.  Even the tiniest, earliest studies for paintings and architecture projects – his scratchings – have an awesome sense of certainty.  Michelangelo draws a lot, at different scales, and to different levels of finish, but he never draws incorrectly or unnecessarily.  All his work, even his painting, is sculptural, about the expression of three-dimensional form.  He seems to be continually pulling forms out of the air and pinning them down on the page.  Some drawings have a quick, off-the-cuff quality, as if noting an idea that might or might not be pursued.  On a facade study for the Church of San Lorenzo, the left half is expressed with light ink strokes in shadow and ornament, while the right half remains in outline, as was the convention when presenting symmetrical designs.  Simple shadows pop columns and frames forward dramatically.  Figural sculptures along the roofline, depicted in rough streaks of ink, spring to life.  They are recognizably human, and look as if they might jostle with one another or jump off the ledge.  Even a drawing this diagrammatically conceived, non finito, has a rich physical and emotional presence. Among many gifts, Michelangelo has a gift to see the reality of a thing in its smaller parts.  Many drawings on display are fragments, sometimes surreal, depicting a single arm, thumb, claw, doorway, or base molding.  Though most are studies for larger realized works, each is rendered with such sculptural richness so that it is, in itself, fully realized.  The paper these fragments are drawn on, small squares of faded parchment, act as a film between this and the next world, upon which the figures leave a swift, bold impression. Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564), with additions and restorations. Demonstration Drawing for the “First Design” of the Facade of San Lorenzo. Pen and brown ink, brush and two hues of brown wash, over underdrawing in leadpoint, compass work, ruling in leadpoint and stylus, black chalk, on six sheets of paper. Casa Buonarroti, Florence. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/architecture-drawing-drafting-cad monthly 0.5 2018-02-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515006866-X6Z7VOO7SSBYWY2QI563/tumblr_p38oapSN1T1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PAPERWEIGHT A small, fine exhibit at AnySpace, Drawings’ Conclusions, showcases architectural drawings from the 1990′s and 2000′s, when production was migrating, uneasily, from the drafting board to the computer screen.  It was a tumultuous time.  As an architecture graduate just entering the profession, I witnessed the drama firsthand.  Seasoned architects set down their pencils and handed production responsibilities to computer-literate novices.  Young architects who had mastered drafting software, and not much else, began taking the lead in office work.  Architecture became further detached from any deep understanding of construction, and design became a game played on computers, an image-making unmoored from physical realities.  We see the results of this shift in our cities now, where major new civic and commercial buildings have the hollow aspect of projections. The drawings on display in the show are skillful and touching.  Skillful technically, in their angelic pencil and ink linework, and also intellectually, in their clear expression of architectural ideas.  There are no fantasies here.   However surprising any drawing’s forms and geometries, it offers strong propositions about a building.  Best of show goes to to Greg Lynn‘s computer-drafted line diagrams for the Slavin House.  This small structure was conceived around a coiled frame that resembles a knit strand of yarn come undone.  It’s drawings call out radii and lengths systematically, rationally, conventionally, exactly as required for fabrication. The distended coil is just the kind of form can be generated easily, randomly, scalelessly, in seconds, in a drafting program like AutoCAD.  But Lynn’s drawings remain stubbornly orthogonal.  They were imagined in section and elevation, on the page, with pragmatic spatial thinking.  They aren’t about the image of the building but about its geometries and profiles.  Though these drawings generated by a computer, they have a stodgy solidity, a physical logic.  It’s a logic that would disappear soon enough, as new architects began designing with no memory of pencil or paper, of steel frames, and of the cartesian grid. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/matta-clark-bronx-museum monthly 0.5 2018-01-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515007916-8PFJ0RR17MVTR1VEWE81/tumblr_p31g6nUqKF1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DEMOLITIONS A retrospective at The Bronx Museum of the Arts (BMA) honors Gordon Matta-Clark, whose work falls, alluringly, somewhere between theater, sculpture, land art, performance art, and political protest.  (The exhibit’s subtitle is Anarchitect.)  It might be best understood, loosely, as architectural intervention.  Though I’m enamored of his work, the exhibition didn’t hold my interest. The show has been thoughtfully curated and handsomely mounted.  But the physical artifacts from Matta-Clark’s projects are inert.  A patch of floor cut with a machine saw from a wood frame house looks, simply, like a chunk of building debris.  It doesn’t have the mythic aura or syntactic richness of one of Rachel Whiteread’s architectural casts.  Even photos  (like the ones from Conical Intersect in 1975, offering views through a giant cone carved through a Parisian house) and video (like the one from Day’s End in 1975, showing the artist on a harness, with a blow torch, cutting a three-quarters-moon shape through a warehouse wall) have little effect. What’s most remarkable about Matta-Clark’s work is its sense of the prehistoric.  In Day’s End, by simply removing a chunk of wall, the artist connects us – simply, powerfully, mysteriously, unsentimentally – with the cosmos.  Light falls through the opening onto the rough concrete floor of the building like a blessing; the sky tumbles inside.  Matta-Clark’s work carries memory of a time when we were tethered indelibly to the movements of sun and stars.  It also carries memory of the primal power of architecture.  The structures he operates on are, typically, unoccupied and abandoned.  After his transformation they become shrines, havens, temples.  Matta-Clark’s actions aren’t merely tactical or intellectual; they allow magic again into the everyday world. Gordon Matta-Clark, Day’s End (Pier 52), 1975, choromgenic print, 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm). ©Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York/London. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/modigliani-portrait-painting monthly 0.5 2018-01-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515008128-WPAN5SZN8QKMC68QRWGC/tumblr_p2ke7uFbH61qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PAINTED LADIES Is a painting more than a drawing?  One can say that drawing is about line and painting is about surface, offering richer physical and imaginative depths.  The Jewish Museum’s exhibit Modigliani Unmasked intends to show that early in his career, between 1906 and 1915, the artist used drawing as his primary medium, exploring ideas that would shape, later, his iconic painted portraits. Some artists produce drawings that are as compelling as their paintings and sculpture.  Richard Serra’s oilstick drawings have the same density, gravity, and alchemical potential as his steel sculptures.  Picasso’s drawings capture the inspirations, intellectual and cosmic, that lead to a painting.  Modigliani’s drawings, in contrast, seem merely like tests.  They map, with pencil line on paper, a composition before it’s committed to canvas.  They are as tidy, as free from ambiguity, as a simple architectural plans.  At the Jewish Museum, Modigliani’s drawings are hung beside the paintings that supersede them.  In most cases there’s a direct translation from paper to canvas.  The paintings have a gorgeous jewel-like sheen, but no more spatial or dramatic complexity than the drawings beside it.  In fact Modigliani’s best known paintings retain the same strong graphic quality as the drawings; they’re lovely, stylized, emblems. The first artwork one sees entering the exhibit is a portrait of the painter’s mistress Maude Abrantes called Nude in a Hat, and it is so good that it shames all the works that follow.  The surface is heavy and clouded, build up in fat flat strokes of paint.  Abrantes is glimpsed from above the waist from an odd angle, as if in passing, ready to slip out of the frame.  She doesn’t offer herself easily;  she is haunted, haughty, and willful.  Her figure dissolves into her big black hat at the top, and into bare brushstrokes at the bottom.  The painting is stormy and unsettled, raw and physical.   A drawing might offer the same effects, but not one here does. Amedeo Modigliani, Nude with a Hat, 1908. Oil on canvas. 31⅞ x 21¼ in. (81 × 54 cm). Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, Israel. Courtesy of the Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, Israel.  Image courtesy University of Haifa. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/modernism-performance-american-art monthly 0.5 2018-01-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515008627-5OPVMCGQ2TJ3NTAD4Y06/tumblr_p1wgvcm5091qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A STRANGE CHARISMA The Met Breuer’s survey Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason 1950-1980 offers works that don’t conform to canonical modernism.  Taking in the selection of painting, sculpture and videos installed in the building’s grand fourth floor gallery, against kookily skewed partitions, is like walking through a playground; it gives great pleasure.  The artworks are, for the most part, eccentric, personal, whimsical, political, confusing, ugly, and viscerally powerful.  A wall of Hanne Darboven’s tablet-sized paintings, each crowded with X’s and O’s on a quarter inch grid, evokes both the sterility and infinite possibility of Cartesian space. Eva Hesse’s ottoman-sized cube of metal grate, threaded with hundreds of lengths of dark rubber tubing, is oddly, warmly organic.  Paul Thek’s painted wax models resembling raw chunks of flex, sealed inside cool acrylic vitrines, are both revolting and fascinating; one can’t turn away from them.  These artworks posses a strange charisma; they give a middle finger to modernist cool. Delirious impresses as a group show of outsiders – of stubborn, brilliant postwar artists who followed the visions in their heads rather than intellectual and commercial trends.  In most cases the artist involves himself or herself actually, physically, personally.  Bruce Nauman videotapes himself performing an abstract choreography, raising his leg and turning at fixed angles like a jewelry-box ballerina.  Lee Lozano keeps a personal calendar of upcoming performances with felt-tipped marker, in text, in a spiral notebook.   Ana Mendieta takes self-portraits with her face smashed against a square of glass, distorting her fine features into the mask of a hysteric, producing images as gruesome as Charcot’s nineteenth-century portraits of the insane.  (In addition to everything else, this show is a love song to obsolete technologies, including videotape, xerox, analog photography, CRT television, and handheld calculators.)   One senses that these artist aren’t constructing a parallel modernism, but working in causal disregard to modernism, turning instead towards more intimate narratives of gender, race and brute power that at the time remained unexpressed.  In that sense they were decades ahead of their more convention-bound contemporaries. Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints—Face), 1972. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum and Art Resource.             https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/broad-museum-diller-scofidio monthly 0.5 2017-12-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515009179-2NQ9A65BSZZLKX27IZVT/tumblr_p1h477rKKg1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MIXING MOODS Diller Scofidio + Renfro call the building they concocted for The Broad in downtown Los Angeles The Veil and the Vault.  A better nickname might be The Worm in the Box.  This museum opened in 2015 to house the contemporary art collection of Eli and Edyth Broad. It’s a three-story concrete block with, at the center, a knot of dark, narrow passages enclosing the escalator and stairs.  The building’s functional spaces – offices, archives, restrooms and mechanical rooms – are packed on the second floor.  At the stair landing here there’s a window into the vault, where hundreds of canvases are hung, as if asleep, on metal racks.  The main gallery is on the top floor, where daylight falls through sculpted ceiling coffers.    The veil is the building’s exterior screen of lozenge-shaped concrete panels.  Each one is the size of a car door, with an opening at the center the size of a basketball.  Along the front facade, on Grand Avenue, these panels are suspended, dramatically, six feet off the building’s glazing.  One enters through the corners here, where the panels have been sliced away.  There’s nothing veil-like about this outer shell.  It’s a stark, brutalist element that allows only pinched views of the outside (especially north, looking to Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall) and virtually nothing of the inside. From the sidewalk below or across the street, the building’s inner organization remains a mystery.  The parametric geometry of the concrete panels give The Broad a slick contemporary sheen.  But its interior staircase feels neolithic, a rupture through layers of geological time.  Its low, dark, rounded passages, finished in smooth concrete, have the contours of a cave dug by hand.  The stair folds back on itself at a pinched angle on the second floor, as if its route hadn’t been plotted beforehand.  The contrast between the building’s clotted, intestine-like passages and its hyper-modern shell give it an energy and tension that’s missing from the bloated contemporary artworks inside.  At its heart are two very different tempers. Photograph by Iwan Baan.  Courtesy of The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/hockney-painting-surrealism monthly 0.5 2017-12-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515009076-TJJB7CZTCR800A5J39Y8/tumblr_p01exxCaKI1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY LA GOTHIC I use to think of David Hockney as a decorative painter.  His work has a strong graphic quality – all flat fields of sweet pastel color – that’s poster-ready.  Reproduced in magazines, his paintings look like pretty pictures for pretty people to hang in their pretty houses.  So seeing the current Hockney retrospective at The Met is eye-opening.  His canvases are substantial, over six feet tall and as wide as twelve feet.  And each one commands the space in front of it, luring visitors for closer consideration.  Its surface holds together in tension. Hockney most famous paintings, from the 1960′s and 1970′s, that depict the homes of his well-to-do Los Angeles friends and collectors, make their own cultural anthropology.  Outside there are tiled patios, flat green lawns, whistling sprinklers, and palm trees.  Inside there are overstuffed chairs, low glass-topped tables, shag carpets, and primitivist sculptures.  This glossy, untroubled world is populated by regal white-haired ladies in caftans, and fashionable young men in flared trousers and tube socks.  It’s a place of wealth and repose.  Southern California sunlight – wistful, shimmering, white – washes objects and people evenly, and gives the scenes an awesome quiet. The richest canvases incorporate one of more human figures, nearly life-size.  Hockney renders them with particularity and vitality; we believe that they are real, and that the world they inhabit is too.  In The American Collectors Fred Weisman appears officious and detached, and Marcia Weisman appears direct and critical.  The scene is clear, but rendered without pure perspectival logic.  The lines of the gridded tile floor lead to different points, so that space seems folded right up against the surface of the canvas.  The sky is an even blue fill, the tiles are a dotted pattern, and shadows are puddles of color.  Fred and Marcia seem unfixed, disconnected from their landscape and also each other.  They stand close to one another but stare – unperturbedly, expressionlessly – in different directions.  They are  objects in a strangely elegant still-life, energized by movements that we don’t see.  Image courtesy of David Hockney.  American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), 1968, Acrylic on canvas, 84″x120″. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sarabermanscloset-fashion-minimalism-white monthly 0.5 2017-11-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515009821-L2T1M2Z4VDMA3RKT34IK/tumblr_ozooz6Lssg1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DRESS WHITES An installation at The Met recreates a closet from the Greenwich Village studio apartment of Sara Berman.  Berman was born in 1920 in Belarus, emigrated to Palestine in 1940, and then to New York in 1953.  From 1982 until her death in 2004, she stored her her all-white wardrobe, as well as other loose possessions, in a single walk-in closet, on two hangbars and six rows of narrow wood shelves.  Her wardrobe consisted of: ten or so pairs of trousers, twenty or so shirts, ten or so sweaters, stacks of folded socks and underclothes, two wool scarves, two wool caps, one pair of gloves, a cotton bathrobe, three plastic wristwatches and, on the floor, seven pairs of flats with their toes pointed outwards.  The housewares stored inside include: linens, towels, an iron, a globe, a white wood serving tray, a steel casserole, a set of painted ceramic mugs, a small stack of letters, and about a dozen books. All these things are fine and lovingly cared for, but they are not luxurious, and they are not sentimental.  They are remarkable instead because Berman selected and displayed them with such care.  Stacks of tshirts and underpants are folded precisely, as if for sale, each pile sitting an inch away from the next.  Shirts are ironed and buttoned, facing front, with an inch left between each hanger.  The things contained in this closet, shockingly few in number for a contemporary American, are all of what Sara Berman needs. Berman’s closet isn’t monastic; it offers its own kind of opulence.  With the pieces inside it’s possible to craft a great number of ensembles, spanning seasons and occasions.  Her closet might be as rich in fashion possibilities as Nan Kempner’s famously overstuffed ones.  A small photograph of her on the gallery wall shows her in white coat, shirt and trousers, with a mens striped necktie, looking naturally, elegantly and eccentrically chic.  This closet, filled with her personal effects, could have been understood as a memorial.  Instead it speaks, strongly, to her love for herself and her love for her life. Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/calvin-klein-flagship-minimalism monthly 0.5 2017-11-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515009359-3L8K5F3HKPMNIDRGNAK1/tumblr_oz9t7pZRbi1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY WHEN LESS IS MORE IS NO LONGER ENOUGH I wonder how English architect John Pawson feels about the transformation of his most iconic project, the Calvin Klein flagship on Madison Avenue, at the hands of brand creative director Raf Simons and artist Sterling Ruby.  The city’s most admired minimalist interior has become a riotous retail playhouse. Grids of construction scaffolding and stage lights have been inserted into the wide-open sales floors, beige wall-to-wall carpeting has been laid over the polished concrete floors, and brightly-colored formica blocks and cylinders have replaced the low, altar-like stone and wood plinths.  Most dramatically, the interiors throughout have been painted a screaming canary yellow.  When seen from across Madison Avenue at dusk, the stately limestone building’s windows gleam demonically. It’s an audacious rebranding, an attempt to lure a younger, hipper customer and to bring the store’s architecture in step with Simons’ fevered pop culture imagination.  This season’s clothes, separates with clean silhouettes executed in vernacular fabrics (denim, houndstooth, plastic, lace) with bold graphic details (racing stripes, appliques, feathers), and paired with structured accessories (cowboy boots, boxy clutches, doctors bags), have a fresh, funky feeling, like costumes for space age hippies.  The new stores gives them a suitable stageset. But I can’t help but remember the old store.  It takes a lot of skill, in both design and construction, to execute a convincing minimalist interior, and Pawson’s was thrillingly austere.  The floors seemed endless and seamless, light fittings and hardware were brilliantly concealed, the store’s narrow staircase was tucked between two full-height piers, and daylight washed over everything, highlighting the soft finishes.  This was a Madison Avenue flagship store that didn’t try to entertain an off-the-sidewalk customer; it was a temple to restraint. The cultural pendulum is swinging now from principle to feeling, from monochrome to color, from luxury to vulgarity.  But I wonder if defacing every surface of the old store was the best strategy.  The connecting stair, whose treads have been covered in black enamel, still surprises with its narrow proportions and mysteriously slow reveal of the second floor.  Its slender square steel handrail, painted yellow, remains singularly elegant.  The bright colors and street savvy of the new design catch the eye but don’t hold the imagination for long.  When viewed from the mezzanine, the web of scaffolding, strings of lights, and toy-like props on the ground floor feel like party decorations.  The architecture of the old store – its high walls, open floors and slowly unfolding views – quietly reasserts itself. Image courtesy of Calvin Klein. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/earthbound-a-professor-of-mine-once-said-that-all monthly 0.5 2017-11-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515009416-9B3S1CYHYGWLQ59EY3P3/tumblr_oxw5e5Hyqy1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY EARTHBOUND A professor of mine once described modern architecture as flight, a lifting from the ground.  I’ve always thought of dance this way, as the body’s movement against gravity, to remain aloft.  So the Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s performance of Echo Sense by Crystal Tile, at Fall for Dance, was slightly shocking.  In this piece, performed before a blank black backdrop, eight young dancers in tailored trousers and vests skirmish, shifting back and forth across the stage.  They don’t stand erect, stride, or strut.  They are instead, continually, holding themselves just barely above the ground, crouching, hovering, crawling. The narrative is evocative and, perhaps purposefully, vague.  The pinstriped costumes and the stuttering strobe lighting call to mind Depression Era silent movies.  The dancers’ physical aggression – they way they approach each other, lay hands on each other, tug each other, surround each other – reminded me of a rugby match or a street fight.  At moments all eight coalesce into a single figure, rising up from the ground or cascading towards it, like a series of stop-motion photographs.  They are earthbound, in a slow, perpetual fall.  But the act isn’t passive.  The dancers move quietly, with leopard-like ferocity.  They remain sure-footed in a dark, difficult landscape. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/moma-fashion-museum-modern monthly 0.5 2017-10-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515009656-KCHJGSDR517LFQG7UNWC/tumblr_oxw4kw4XKf1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DISEMBODIED MoMA’s new exhibit Items: Is Fashion Modern? might be the most elegant presentation I’ve seen there.  The 111 items featured,  “clothing and accessories that have had a strong impact on the world in the 20th and 21st centuries,” are mounted with minimal fuss, on headless mannequins on low  platforms, and pinned like dead butterflies on the blank walls of the sixth floor galleries, leaving oceanic expanses in between for wandering and reflection.  There are simple printed text cards and some small video monitors at the displays, but the installation remains blissfully free of gimmickry.  It’s also, sadly, free of drama, glamor and sex appeal.  Is Fashion Modern? takes the fizz out of fashion.  Unlike the small, rich, thoughtfully-curated fashion shows at The Museum at FIT, this show feels thematically vague.  It’s less about the items themselves, and how and why they’re worn, than about their intellectual associations.  Most of the items are types of garments (LEOTARD, BRIEFS, MOTORCYCLE JACKET),  but some aren’t “items” at all.  They are materials (KENTE, GORE-TEX), brands (Y-3, WONDERBRA, SPANKS, FITBIT), and even ideas (SPACE AGE). As they prepared the show – only the second fashion show in MoMA’s history – curators must have imagined the throngs visiting The Met's annual blocksbuster fashion show.  But instead of presenting iconic garments, like Elizabeth Hurley’s Versace safety pin gown or Audrey Hepburn’s Givenchy cocktail dress  (LITTLE BLACK DRESS), there are generic versions from the same designers.  And instead of offering Michael Jordan’s hightops (AIR FORCE 1), there’s a sagging, scuffed pair that look like they were lifted from the sidewalk on garbage day.  So many of the items are commonplace, overly familiar (SUIT, WHITE T SHIRT, TIGHTS), that they have little charge formally, and don’t hold the eye when set in vitrines or hung on the wall.  These 111 items might have been better collected in a time capsule, marked How Everyone Dresses in 2017, and set aside for fifty years. Most strangely, the show misses timely political connections.  We see a replica of Colin Kaepernick’s 49ers shirt (SPORTS JERSEY) but we don’t see a replica of Mickey Mantle’s, though both wear, iconically, number 7.  We see a Yankees hat but we don’t see a Make America Great Again hat.  And a red Champion sweatshirt (HOODIE), displayed against a big black wall with its hood pointed upwards, has an spooky, unsettling presence.  Rather than speaking to trends in athleisure and streetwear, it recalls Tayvon Martin, and the anonymous hooded prisoner in the grainy photographs from Abu Ghraib. This show is so eager to decipher each of the 111 items semiotically that it forgets that that they are also clothing, charged mythologically when worn on a body, by a person, in the world.  These items make our identities and our dreams. Photograph courtesy of MoMA. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/a-mindful-in-1967-after-achieving-professional monthly 0.5 2017-10-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515010730-TQ23C50WH3UO49JLX7T5/tumblr_owi7wu9eXX1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY TRIPPING In 1967, after dropping acid and then dropping out, Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert visited a yogi in India and became Ram Dass.  In 1971 he published an account of that transformation, an illustrated guide to mindfulness called Be Here Now, that became a bestseller in the United States.  The book offers a kind of everyday Zen: move beyond the physical, be your own self, approach everything with love, keep yourself grounded. While the book’s tenets are no longer surprising, its graphics remain transgressive.  Each of its 221 pages reproduces an original large-format cardboard artwork, crafted with rubber stamps, pen and ink by Dass’ commune-dwelling friends.  The paper’s dark texture and rough edges, the wonky text alignment and kerning, the shifting font sizes and styles, and the eclectic sampling of Buddhist, Hindu and Christian iconographies, all shape a mood of happy, hippy unorthodoxy.  It’s this lack of pretentiousness that makes the project difficult to dismiss or satirize; it’s entirely innocent. The text is relaxed, conversational and repetitive, lit with flashes of poetry.  Dass describes the radiance of his guru, Meher Babu, “. . he’s smiling at you/like the other Marx brother.”  But it’s the composition of each page, the dance of text and graphics, that conveys, in a flash, feeling, like a good graphic novel.  The book’s stories, songs and musings bend, shrink and swell around the icons and images: dazzling mandalas, idyllic landscapes, smiling sadhus, and naked ladies with long legs and long hair.  Rather then religiosity, the mood is one of wonderment and gentle self-reflection.  Dass observes, right at the beginning, “We watch the entire drama/That is our lives/ We watch this illusion/with/unbearable compassion.”  And one really can’t disagree. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/wings-of-desire-darwinism-is-an-essentially-cruel monthly 0.5 2017-10-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515011068-IGE6MIV8AKW2KTCBWJK7/tumblr_owx1hn4UfY1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PEACOCKING Darwinism is an essentially cruel mechanism.  The notion that an animal – that is, each one of us – is handed, at the moment of conception, a random genetic assortment that will determine our fitness and, therefore, survival, doesn’t leave much room for those qualities we understand to be essentially human: perseverance, hope, inspiration, fidelity, industry, creativity, and love.  So all the talk surrounding Richard O Prum’s book The Evolution of Beauty, about Darwin’s theory of aesthetic, clears the air. The book proposes that beauty in animals – a perfectly symmetrical face, a strong musculature, an auspicious coloring – which has typically been thought to be an indicator of fitness, might have nothing to do with fitness at all, but with the mutable tastes of the beholder.  And, in nature, as it often is with birds, it is the woman doing the choosing.  Taken to its logical conclusion, then, women’s tastes are driving evolution, and male beauty exists simply so that women can have their fancy. A hopeful corollary, for men, is that male beauty is not always fated genetically, but often performed.  So birds sing, fly, dance, and make colorful and shapely nests, all of which are traits that make them beautiful to females.  It’s a theory of beauty that’s at once dismal and forgiving.  Dismal in that it values appearances (color, profile, proportion, spectacle) above other factors (character, strength), and permits women to choose mates for pleasure.  Forgiving in that any male has the opportunity to give it a try, to put on a show, and to succeed beyond what has been coded for him in his genes.  (It is also a powerful scientific argument for fashion, for both men and women.) I had a kooky hippie-ish Health Education teacher in the seventh grade who, when describing puberty, told us that women became wide at the hips so that they could bear children, and men became wide at the shoulders because that made them more attractive to women.  And that might be exactly right. Photograph courtesy of Alexander McQueen.  Spring 2008, La Dame Bleue. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/rauschenberg-collage-painting-time monthly 0.5 2017-09-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515011413-ENMZL6G1S98VQBDX0UK2/tumblr_ow1b11yMtL1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PAST PERFECT TENSE Sculpture provides most of the crowd-pleasing spectacle at MoMA’s group exhibit Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends.  There’s a stately standing screen that once served as the backdrop for a Merce Cunningham dance.  There’s a framed set of (real) bed linens with a (real) pillow.  And there’s a stuffed goat, smeared with paint, with a car tire hung around its belly.  These pieces are all sly, sophisticated fun. But Rauschenberg’s most affecting works are his paintings, particularly those he completed in the late 1950′s, called Combines, that incorporate things: calendars, signs, textiles, feathers, and, most famously, cuttings from magazines and newspapers.  These canvases have a quiet, luminous charisma.  Though layered with found images and paint marks, they remain spare, uncluttered, with broad areas of primed canvas showing through.  Though they have assertive, expressive brushwork across the top, they maintain a cool temperature.  They are composed judiciously, with just enough elements to weigh themselves down.  Many don’t have a visual center of gravity, organized instead by stringing elements, floating, along a high horizon or a vertical spine.  Although collaged, they present a continuous seamless finish.  Their materiality, their thingness, is subsumed in their pristine organization. These paintings are, like all good paintings, about the surface.  And they are also, more deeply, about time.  There is a haunting elegaic tone to them.  Despite their avant garde form-making and media-mixing, they are, in their composition and coloring, respectfully silent.  Their blank backgrounds and newspaper cuttings have yellowed over the decades, giving each work great grace.  These paintings, from the most robust, revolutionary era of American art, now seem ancient, nostalgic, recalling a pre-machine, premodern age.  More than any other modern art they are testimony to craft, to the cooperation of the hand and the eye. Robert Rauschenberg, Factum II, 1957, Mixed media, The Museum of Modern Art. Photo courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/white-sun-movie-memory monthly 0.5 2017-09-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515011732-BB5224XHS8P3GGGN3NSQ/tumblr_ow1d9we8en1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY THAT OTHER WORLD Are some media, in their very forms, more powerful than others?  I’m not a movie person, but the last few I’ve seen have had an impact on me disproportionate to their artistic merit.  As a child I spent time in India with my grandparents at their homes in Tamilnadu and Kerala.  Lion, with scenes set in Madhya Pradesh and Bengal, and starring an eight-year-old boy, brought back a sense of the county’s landscape and cities.  And White Sun, set in a remote hilltop village in Nepal, and featuring two school-age children, brought back very particular memories of my childhood visits. Though White Sun shows an entirely different country, geography, language, and era, many of its details are familiar to someone who has spent time in rural India.  The movie shows us a line of mens shirts hanging on a rope strung to between two rafters, a woman coaxing a cooking fire by blowing through a mournful-sounding brass tube, the primeval darkness of a street lit only by stars.  More remarkably, the movie brought back memories specific to my childhood.  One sequence recalled the slope of lush, untended forest at the back of my paternal grandparents house, navigated by a run of steep stone steps, through monsoon rains.  And one character, an orphaned boy from a neighboring village, reminded me of how unsettled I felt during those visits, without a deep understanding of the language and the customs.  The film left me immensely sad that my grandparents and their ways of living are gone, and that my own daily life is, in comparison, sterile, less charged with sensuality and meaning. Is there something essential about film that has the power to stir strong feelings?  The form encompasses so many others: painting, speech, story, music, movement.  And the film camera, in addition to its narrative, captures layers of incidental details that build its own convincing world.  That other world, so particular, can catch on violently to a viewer’s.  Is this a testimony to the richness of the medium, or to the viewer’s desires? White Sun, 2016, by Deepak Rauniyar. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sottsass-breuer-postmodernism-pastiche monthly 0.5 2017-09-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515011912-B9D4678PWG9HJRPIDPIW/tumblr_ovofoy4zv01qdm8ato1_r3_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MACHINES FOR LIVING WITH The Ettore Sottsass retrospective at the Met Breuer is subtitled Design Radical, and “radical” is correct for both its ideological and scientific connotations.  Sottsass was a singular spirit who, like an atomic free radical, moved independently and reacted strongly with all the forces he encountered.  Born in 1917 and trained in Viennese-inflected modernism by his architect father, he borrowed tenets and freedoms from every cultural movement afoot in postwar Europe: Bauhaus, Pop, Zen, Minimalism, Neo-Classicism.  While his designs are typically filed under Postmodernism, they’re more personally-felt and eclectic than those of academic practitioners like Michael Graves and Robert Stern, whose references are mostly Classical.  In addition, Sottsass worked in a far broader range of media.  There are at the museum, in addition to Sottsass’ architectural drawings, glassware, jewelry, tableware, furniture, lighting, plastic laminate patterns, and textiles. Sottsass remains best-known for his product design, in particular the portable red plastic typewriter he concocted for Olivetti in 1969.  But it’s probably better to think of him as an interior designer.  Not because he cared about finishing rooms, but because his sphere of influence is primarily the interior.  His strongest works are large-scale furnishings (desks, armoires, etageres, totems) that possess dubious practical value and exceptional sculptural charisma.  They overturn, effortlessly, the modern dictum that form follows function, suggesting instead that form intends to delight.  Rendered with theatrical proportions and unorthodox materials in noisy juxtaposition to one another, these constructions have a playful mechanistic energy, like friendly robots.  A standing cabinet with a glowing yellow stained maple finish has shiny, gold, cupcake-sized pulls.  A wall divider with long canted shelves, its arms akimbo, is finished in a crayon-box assortment of lacquers.  Each piece is strong enough to anchor an otherwise simply furnished loft or bedroom or conference room, charging the entire space.  However eccentric, Sottsass’ designs are fit for living. Ettore Sottsass, Tartar Table, 1985. Reconstituted wood veneer, plastic laminate (HPL print laminate), lacquer, plywood.  Photo courtesy The Met. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/yiadom-boakye-painting-portraiture monthly 0.5 2017-09-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515012019-9G8ZE7GQTOBJ6GVZ3OCA/tumblr_ovocsmC7VT1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FACE TIME What a pleasure it is to step out of the elevator onto the fourth floor of the New Museum and into painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s show.  The ceiling is high, the lights are dim, and the walls have been painted blood red and hung with seventeen of the artist’s large-scale oil portraits.  Each canvas is about eight feet high and depicts, in slightly larger-than-life scale, a single young black man or woman.  They are handsome people, and the gallery shimmers with their physical presence. It’s well-known that Yiadom-Boakye paints from memory, and the practice gives her work a heightened enigma.  Unlike Alice Neel’s portraits, that exaggerate singularities in appearance, Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits endow her sitters with a sublime classical grace.  They are supremely poised, remain absolutely still.  From the finish of the paint one sees that the subjects’ faces, hands and feet, those parts of the body we expect to reveal character, have been worked with extra effort to get them just right, and yet they don’t reveal anything at all.  A ballerina with raised arms closes her eyes.  A man lying in bed stares blankly into the middle distance.  The subjects’ backdrops also remain a mystery.  One man, dressed in black, rests languidly in a flurry of great green brushstrokes.  Is he lying in a field of high wild grasses, a flat lawn, or a steep hill?  Most figures are simply set against a dark, shadowed background, like a department store photographer’s blank scrim. As the wall text notes, in ennobling the black figure Yiadom-Boakye fills an unseemly void in art history and the art museum.  The sensuality of these paintings – their of-the-body scale, gestural brushstrokes, densely colored surfaces – give them extraordinary charisma.  The subjects’ dark skin tones are rendered as if warmed from within.  But these paintings don’t depict real people, who come with warts, veins, blemishes, crooked grins, and darting eyes, and pass their days in mussed apartments, sunlit studios, and neighborhood bars.  Like many other contemporary painters, Yiadom-Boakye is uninterested in portraiture as a tool to reveal personal character.  She holds something back.  But when a museum visitor sees these elegant black men and women, she wants, perhaps naively, to know exactly who they are. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 8am Cadiz, 2017. Oil on linen, 78 ¾ × 98 3/8 in (200 × 250 cm). Courtesy the artist; Corvi-Mora, London; and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/politics-commentary-comedians-maron monthly 0.5 2017-09-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515012530-6CEEPVXWEQ7FP3YYE5SU/tumblr_ovaus5woDk1qdm8ato1_r2_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY STAND UP GUYS Like other Americans I’ve been searching desperately for poetry – concise, vivid, explosively beautiful language – to make sense of the current political climate.  I turned first to the pundits.  Keith Olbermann, who performed eloquently on his nightly MSNBC show during the 2008 election, now publishes a video journal for GQ (The Closer) that takes the form of irrational, deeply-felt tirades. On her MSNBC show Maddow his former colleague Rachel Maddow shares intellectual musings that often don’t add up.  And MSNBC’s smart first couple, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski (Morning Joe), remain frustratingly restrained.  So I’m turning to revisionist history.  And I’m turning to actual poetry.  Yet none of it captures exactly that thing that is simmering right now in America, and in me. Is the best hope our stand-up comedians, with their irreverent, slapdash wisdom?  A month before the 2016 election Bill Maher tweeted “The great sadness is even if Trump doesn’t become president, we live in a country where half the people think he should be.”  Chris Rock, in a Rolling Stone interview, joked simply that the police might once in a while shoot a white man.  And Marc Maron kicks off each WTF podcast with a ten-minute preamble in which he describes what he’s at that very moment doing, eating, listening to, annoyed with, and dreaming about, all of which veers, naturally and more and more frequently, straight into American politics.  He refers to the Charlottesville white supremacists as “the army of unfuckable hate nerds.” In each loosely-structured ten-minute soliloquy Maron conveys, with sense and passion, in an unembellished vernacular, the mood of the time.  He’s a shouter and delivers every part of his show (cheesy on-air commercials, respectful guest introductions, conversation-prodding interjections) with the same level of earnestness.  Maron is self-absorbed, but when he stops and looks outwards he can wrangle unsavory social complexities.  His preamble feels like a form for our time, storytelling laced with rage. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/wright-arhitecture-drawings monthly 0.5 2017-09-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515012765-U4Z1K6FWLBD5O7X0OBKZ/tumblr_ovmd6kmzny1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY HANDIWORK About to embark on a new writing project about architectural drawings, I took in this season’s architecture show at MoMA, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archives. An architectural drawing can do a number number of things: construct a personal vision, instruct a builder, persuade a client, clarify spatial organization, communicate technical specifications…  Most of the drawings in the FLW show are visionary, and what singular visions they are.  Prepared for publication or presentation, these exterior perspectives illustrate, all-at-once, the character of the building: its sculptural presence, its materials, its formal stylings, and its relationship to the landscape.  Many are so brilliantly composed that they are themselves iconic.  A drawing of the David and Gladys Wright House gives a glimpse of its curved inner facade from below, standing at the center of its circular walkway, a small child’s glowing spaceship dream. Other drawings on display are more fundamentally pragmatic, fixing dimensional and construction details.  One poster-sized section drawing of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo slices through its entryway to reveal profiles and details of its customized brickwork and stone panels.  It shows every grout line, every turn of every stone panel, every steel reinforcing bar embedded in the concrete decks.  Marks noting dimensions have been lain right over those noting profiles, right over those noting materials.  The drawing is a cloud of lines, alive with the density, complexity and sensuality of real brick and stone.  Most remarkable are those drawings that convey both the vision and the physicality of a building.  A perspective of the Millard House, in colored pencil, shows us its stern textile-block facade from slightly above, as a bird would see it,  overlooking a gentle ravine, framed by the drooping branches of decades-old eucalyptus trees.  Its yellowing sheet has worn, torn edges, and its surface a rich patina of lead smudges, pencil points, erasings, overlapping lines and small stray marks.  The character of the drawing gives the house itself a dark, ancient feeling.  It’s less like a building than a natural formation, rising from the ground. Frank Lloyd Wright, Millard House (La Miniatura), Pasadena, California (Exterior perspective from the garden) 1923–1924 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/what-beauty-does-i-had-an-art-history-professor monthly 0.5 2017-08-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515012494-S4HK0JLAYAOXFKK99MBM/tumblr_ovath28GN91qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY WHAT BEAUTY DOES I had a remarkable art history professor in college, Sylvia Boone, who began the semester by asking each student to list five things that were beautiful.  After sharing our responses she explained that what each of thought was beautiful revealed a great deal about us, and much less about those things themselves.  The interior of Adolf Loos’ Muller House in Prague might be a litmus test for architects and interior designers, exposing their deeply-held cultural and intellectual leanings.  Some will find it too rich and some too restrained.  I found it poised – remarkable, precisely – between intellectual rigor and sensual abandon. From the outside the house is famously austere, a white concrete cube with  small punched windows. Their Braille-like groupings reveal its compressed inner structure, the way its rooms are impressed upon one another, like organs in the body.  The Muller House is revered by architects as the finest exemplar of the raumplan, Loos’s idea that a building is organized by spatial relationships between rooms rather than a floor plan.  The narrow, turning wood staircase at its center is the origin of the building, from which all of its rooms unfold.  The Living Room, at the back of the ground floor, is its largest and most finely expressed space.  It’s narrow and wide, with a row of tall windows overlooking the backyard, that slopes dramatically down to the main street. The walls are finished with panels of dark stained mahogany and a richly figured green marble, the kind of materials that would be used theatrically in a McMansion.  But here the wood and stone panels – undeniably voluptuous – are fiercely elegant.  Their over-the-top textures and colors are, somehow, quieted by the disciplined symmetries and proportions of the room, and its modest furnishings: three battered oriental rugs, a loveseat, two tables, and half a dozen upholstered chairs.  As preserved and maintained by The City of Prague Museum, the room rests right at the tipping point between Tasteful Bourgeois and Arriviste Splendor.  Standing inside it, a visitor feels excited and also settled.  The room is luxurious but no single feature is too bright or too large; nothing pulls the eye.  This interior brings something close to inner peace. Photo from Muller House. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/architectural-movement-i-wandered-prague-on-a monthly 0.5 2017-08-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515012931-8K3WPL2JHQ1KJA4W2NFO/tumblr_ou9j18Wko41qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ARCHITECTURAL MOVEMENT On my own, on a three-day vacation in Prague, I wandered the streets of the old city without a tour book, following pictographic tourist signs and the movement of the crowds.  I was suitably impressed with the city’s castle, its bridges, and its impeccably maintained art nouveau facades.  But what stopped me in my tracks was a large modern concrete apartment block just outside the Jewish quarter.  It’s facade was made from triangulated concrete planes that tipped gently this  way and that from the perpendicular, catching the light and holding the eye dramatically.  This immense five-story building was charged with kinetic energy, alive with a hard, modern pulse. Its architect, Otakar Novotný, is one of the best-known Czech Cubists.  At the Czech Cubist Museum, a fifteen-minute walk away, there’s a charming permanent display of furniture, glassware, tableware, posters and painting, including works by architects Josef Gočár, Josef Chochol, and Novotný himself.  These galleries are housed in a former office building by Gočár, that’s dressed in faceted panels of rich red sandstone. The overall aesthetic of Czech Cubism is energetic and expressionistic, characterized by hard graphic lines, sloping planes, and attenuated lozenges.  The furniture is kooky and eccentric, as if fabricated to decorate the set of a happy horror movie.  It’s also bulky, with swollen profiles to accommodate the depth of the turning wood and glass planes.  A tall cabinet with shimmering faceted glass doors can’t hold more than a few place settings, so compromised it its interior space. Though only clumsily applied to smaller objects, Czech Cubist stylings suit buildings brilliantly, offering a rich technique to model large surfaces.  I can’t think of another modern building that breaks its large planes as simply, boldly, and effectively as the Novotny apartment block.  Architecture often stands on the sidelines of principle-driven artistic movements, hampered by cost, scale and utility.  So it’s surprising that Czech Cubism finds its finest expression here, in buildings.  It engages light, surface, and optics indelibly. House in Neklanova, Prague, 1913-1914.  By Josef Chochol. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/dancing-house-to-announce-my-arrival-in-prague-on monthly 0.5 2017-08-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515013125-VXT4ERA40E0PBHRBGXLC/tumblr_otzj3hYCO61qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY INNOCENTS ABROAD To announce my arrival in Prague last month I posted a photo of Frank Gehry’s Nationale-Nederlanden Building, more popularly known as the Dancing House or Fred and Ginger, on social media.  As intended, it made a splash.  One friend, a talented architect, commented, “The ugliest building in Prague.”  Another friend, also a designer, asked, “Is this building finished yet?”  Compared to other institutional buildings in central Prague, the NNB certainly stands out.  This seven-story exhibition and event space occupies a prominent corner on Rašínovo nábřeží, the street that runs parallel to the Vlatava River, right across from the Jirasek Bridge.  Cars and pedestrians swarm around it all night and day.  Its outer corner is expressed as two slender volumes – a stiff cylindrical tower and a swooning, glass-enrobed cone that leans passionately into it.  The building looks less like a signature Gehry structure – a heap of swirling metallic shards – than an illustration from Delirious New York rendered in three dimensions. This expression is, within the setting, brazen.  Among the stately early twentieth-century apartment and office blocks along the street, whose staid facades are trimmed with neoclassical and art nouveau ornament, the NNB is cartoonish.  Its scale and attributes are slightly overscaled, slightly exaggerated, and slightly garish. The NNB is constructed from a concrete frame and lifted off the corner with chunky columns, all of which lends it a crude, workmanlike feeling when seen from the sidewalk below it.  It lacks the lightness and the dynamism of Gehry’s more recent monumental work, and of the real Fred and Ginger.  But the building is not a deliberate provocation.  It retains an innocence in spirit, as if imagined by a child.  In its simplicity and expressiveness it’s true to Gehry’s vision, an LA building dropped, with joy, inside the heart of an old European city.  It’s not concerned with following the rules, and not concerned with breaking them either. Photograph by Nalina Moses. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/irving-penn-photography-narrative monthly 0.5 2017-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515014127-K0ZKMERHT87M1ZD1DEZQ/tumblr_oqqfbnCtBY1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY IN EVERY PHOTO A HEARTACHE Everything seen through photographer Irving Penn’s eye possesses a hard, polished gloss: still-lifes (of cuts of meats, cigarette butts, naked women), fashion shots (of Dovima, Carmen, Giselle), and portraits (of Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Ingmar Bergman).  Penn’s restrospective at The Met, Irving Penn: Centennial, is packed with beauty.  At the same time it reveals the kind of beauty these pictures possess - a stilled compositional perfection - leaves something wanting. Penn did most of his work for fashion magazines, whose task it is to produce distilled, telegraphic, fantasies about clothes.  These photos are often remarkably straightforward, showing a single mannequin posing in front of a building, a sleeve ballooning like a melon around a slender arm, a hooded face set against a blank backdrop.   These images don’t require contemplation.  They are not about character, story, or even clothing; they are instantaneously-appraised emblems of elegance. But Penn’s still-lives, also commissioned for fashion magazines, often carry rich, complex narratives.  One, Theatre Accident, New York, shows a gold clutch that’s been dropped at a woman’s feet, its contents spilling out across the carpet: opera glasses, pen, pocket watch, cigarette lighter, hairpin, earring, room key.  Thought we see no more of this woman than her stockinged foot in a patent leather flat, we know all about her: her simple but rigorous toilette, her dark cluttered Manhattan apartment, her stable of gentleman friends.  We also know that, tonight, she’s alone, she’s running late, she forgot to drop her lipstick in her purse, she lost her other earring in the cab.  The composition is suggestive, it beckons; the objects roll off the bottom off the page into the world. There’s only one fashion photograph in the show that supports this kind of narrative, Man Lighting Girl’s Cigarette (Jean Patchett). Here a chicly-attired young woman – seen in profile – sits beside a glass of red wine, holding out her cigarette to a man – seen only as a tuxedoed arm – to light for her.  This scene is witnessed from a distance, through a half-empty wine bottle that’s tilting precariously in the foreground.  The scenario sets off a string of questions:  Has this young woman had too much to drink?  Will she leave the room with this man?   Will the other man, the man who opened the bottle for her, reappear?  It’s these stories, in the end, that sear the image in the heart.  Its formal beauty is, simply, appraised, and forgotten. Man Lighting Girl’s Cigarette (Jean Patchett), New York, 1949.  Image courtesy of The Irving Penn Foundation. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/portraits-india-photography-kenhermann monthly 0.5 2017-05-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515014430-GXE92CM3YTCT6V6RKAE3/tumblr_opwjhk9iJD1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY EXCELLENT EXOTICA Is India becoming fashionable once again?  Fashionistas are drinking turmeric milk and wearing mango-print dresses.  And there are two new prominent photo essays on Indian street fashion.  One, in the Times, by Brooklyn photographer Mark Hartman, called Capturing the Colorful Style of Punjab, India, focuses on residents of that northern state.  Another, in National Geographic, by Danish photographer Ken Hermann, called Flower Men, focuses on Kolkata flower vendors. Hartman’s photos are exactly what the title promises: shots of women in colorfully mismatched salwars, duppattas, bangles, and bindis, and men in candy-hued turbans, cartoon mustaches, and aviator glasses.  The shots are too loosely composed for my taste.  Subjects are most often captured unknowingly, staring benignly into the middle distance, sweetened in honey-colored sunlight.  The shots betray a naive cultural fascination, as if taken during a middle American couple’s first holiday on the subcontinent.  These photographs have less to do with fashion than anthropology.  One could find more bracing Indian style on a street corner in Jackson Heights. Hermann’s photos are precisely the inverse: strident, classically-composed portraits of men at work.  He poses the flower vendors formally, on a walkway along the Hugli River, in strong midday sunlight that bleaches the background and quiets the lush, riotous tones of their skin, fabric and flowers.  Each man stands straight, at the center of the frame, and looks directly into the camera,  handsome, alert, and quietly proud.  A caption below notes his name and the varieties of flowers he sells. Most remarkably, Hermann’s photos go beyond portraiture to capture something of the lunatic grace and excess of India, which only someone who’s spent significant time there understands.  The basket of long, crimpled ashoka leaves Angad Ray balances on his head makes an Ascot-worthy hat, and his lungi is folded around his knees with the studied asymmetries of a Comme des Garcons skirt.  Kulwinder carries thick garlands of marigolds over each shoulder that fan out around him like a medieval priest’s cloak.  These photographs trade in exoticism, for sure, but it’s an artful one. Photograph courtesy of Ken Hermann and National Geographic. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/katrina-ninth-ward-planning monthly 0.5 2017-05-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515014525-UVO0EMX31QE0KHNC9K7L/tumblr_opwpyqnfxh1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BLOCK PARTI On a recent visit to New Orleans I drove through parts of neighborhoods that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, including the Lower Ninth Ward.  Twelve years after the flooding, its residential suburban blocks have a surreal character.  About one third of the lots hold old houses, mostly wood “shotguns,” that have been restored, raised above grade on stilt-ilke footings, with water lines and stains on their facades.  About one third of the lots hold new houses, bright mini-mansions in newfangled styles and finishes.  And about one third of the lots are empty, grown over with a lush, flat lawn. The texture of these blocks is remarkable.  Together they make for a more open, irregular, picturesque kind of suburb.  The houses are seen from all angles, like individual objects, chess pieces, rather than chunks of a monotonous suburban fabric.  While residents are still struggling for amenities – including jobs and affordable housing – recent growth hints at a new kind of development.  Could what has already happened be a viable model, allowing random lots to be developed organically, accommodating natural population shifts, until the Lower Ninth achieves its old density?  Or, should planners intervene strategically, focusing new construction in fixed areas that can be strengthened with new amenities, giving rise to denser micro-communities?  Or, should planners freeze development as it is, and turn the lawns into pocket gardens and parks, carving an immense, irregular green space through the whole neighborhood?  Each possibility offers great hope. Photo courtesy of PBS. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/kawakubo-met-commedesgarcons-fahion monthly 0.5 2017-05-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515014933-B20Y4NM3HLGM5HTC9W95/tumblr_opwn82Lf9l1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BODYWORKS The Met’s Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons  retrospective is subtitiled Art of the In-Between, which is incorrect.  This designer’s work is full-on, more uncompromised than that of any other contemporary fashion designer.  There are other brands that subvert (Hood by Air, Namilia), but none with the clarity, assuredness, and innocence (toward media and market) of Kawakubo.  More than navigating between polarities of gender, technique and identity, she operates outside these classifications.  And her aim is not to to shock, but to make clothes that remain close to her vision. These clothes are often costume-like, exaggerated versions of everyday pieces: a biker jacket with plum-sized grommets and thick leather laces, a ballet tutu fashioned from s sloping pile of crushed black tulle, a nun’s habit that covers the face completely, a kilt that crushes together four different tartans.  And they are playful syntactially, accepting conventions of tailoring and taking them to exponential extremes.  There is an A-line dress with the profile of another dress appliqued on top of it, a grey checked suit with an additional set of arms growing from its armpits, and a pleated white gown whose front panel has pleats printed on it. However inventive these garments are in construction and image, it’s their relationship to the body that’s their boldest achievement.  They have a crustacean quality, making an exoskeleton – another body – around the body to give it new form.  They are less sewn than constructed, incorporating boning, wire, padding, and industrial materials like vinyl and plastic, to give them an powerful independent structure.  They obscure the body and all its powerful identities: race, gender, age, stature, health, beauty, mobility, power. It’s a tall order wearing the clothes, which require surrendering one’s figure along with one’s social status.  At the Met Gala celebrating the show only a handful of celebrities, including Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Caroline Kennedy, wore Comme Des Garcons on the red carpet.  They didn’t look merely pretty; they looked like warrior princesses from some other, altogether more sophisticated, planet. Photograph by Nalina Moses. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/you-do-you-while-wrestling-with-a-recalcitrant monthly 0.5 2017-05-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515015025-QUMYTAFQUF4MQGGPXXV6/tumblr_opk5s16PON1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY YOU DO YOU After wrestling with a recalcitrant employee at a meeting last week, my boss told him, with a shrug of the shoulders, “You do you.”  This could be the motto of the newest generation of product designers, whose work is represented handsomely at this year’s Collective Design Fair.  The overall mood is sophisticated and twee.  I’ve thought before that our current moment in design is a throwback to the 80′s but, after walking through CDF I realize there’s something essentially different.  Today’s design work isn’t principled formally; it’s casual and idiosyncratic.  Each object is about realizing one small idea – about narrative, material, proportion – in hallucinogenic detail, but without an overarching set of beliefs.  This is form-making without rules, personal design.  Which isn’t to say it isn’t substantial or complex.  All the objects and artwork here are immaculately crafted, curated and installed. The mood is, almost always, playful, and the objects are like toys – whose only function is to amuse and delight.  Even the most practical pieces (chairs, tables, drinking glasses) are overwhelmed by their idiosyncratic form, so that their everyday functions seem secondary.  The most spectacular installation is the R + Company booth, which contains a balloon-shaped couch welded together from nickels, a six-foot-tall bead-encrusted mushroom, a hanging chair shaped like a wasp’s next, and spiked ceramic vases that look like exotic fruit envisioned by Dr. Seuss.  Each object feels immediate, as it has been fabricated directly, without refinement or engineering, from a child’s crayon drawing. Modernists defied formal conventions to challenge staid bourgeois notions about what a table was, what a window was, and what a house was.  Now, perhaps because there is no authoritative dogma to rub up against, designers are defying convention simply because they have the freedom to, and because they’re bored doing ordinary stuff.  The results are lovely to look at, and emotionally slight. R + Company installation, Collective Design Fair, 2017.  Photograph by Nalina Moses. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/dance-wheeldon-pasdedeux monthly 0.5 2017-05-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515015430-VNNAFP6ORSPE4W37HIZD/tumblr_op6q7qJMDo1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY TWO BY TWO Like designers, choreographers each work most brilliantly at one particular scale.  For Christopher Wheeldon that scale is certainly the pas de deux.  A current program at NYC Ballet’s Here/Now festival showcases four of his well-known dances, and the one that stands out is Polyphonia, a work for eight dancers set to ten short piano pieces by Gyorgi Ligeti.  Here the dancers remain in pairs, and their pulsating, cyclical coming together and breaking apart is thrilling. Each piece has its own distinct mood: wild, elegaic, jittery, ecstatic, melodramatic.  Yet the movements are all of a piece, and each one stays in the mind.  The couples, all male-female, are not romantic – they aren’t burdened with any narrative.  Instead their bodies approach one another, become entangled with one another, and move apart from one another like objects governed by physical force.  When the man and woman join they become one instrument, one organism, one blossom, one many-limbed beast.  They move in unison, slowly, cutting surreal figures in profile, which are held for precious seconds with syntactical clarity.  They spin together rapturously and then, entropically, split apart. There is, as each piece concludes, a separation, and with it, an eery cessation.  It’s as if staying still is a kind of death. Everything about Polyphonia feels  exactly right: the blank shadowed backdrop the dancers move against, the ripe plum color of their costumes, the troupe of eight, and the cerebral, investigatory quality of the music.  The two dances that open and close the evening’s program, Mercurial Manouevres (set to Shostakovich) and American Rhapsody (set to Gershwin) each employ larger numbers of dancers, many of them paired, with principals performing in front of an undulating backdrop of supporting performers.  Compared to the ravishing precision and strangeness of the pairs in Polyphonia, these spectacles fall flat. Photograph by Alice Pennefather, courtesy of NYC Ballet. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/dali-museum-hok monthly 0.5 2017-05-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515016026-ZGEUTX6I8QHE4JWJAIEN/tumblr_oo3qwkgBIZ1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY CONCRETE DREAMS Wandering aimlessly through a museum, with breaks as needed for food and drink, is my idea of heaven.  But I couldn’t exit the The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, quickly enough.  The facility, designed by HOK, opened in 2011 to house the largest private collection of Dali works outside of the artist’s own, which are housed in their own museum in Figureras, Spain. The St. Petersburg museum is strange without being arresting.  It’s a four-story concrete block with blue-green geodesic bubble windows.  This metaphor – the subconscious erupting from the conscious, the biological from the mechanical, the fantastic from the banal – is a facile one, and entirely fitting for Dali.  But it’s an extremely difficult one to render skillfully in architecture.  The forms’ proportions and expression are clumsy.  The concrete shell has the feeling of a generic utility building, housing switching machines or parked cars.  And the window’s triangular panes are mounted on a steel frame that feels unnecessarily heavy. The building’s greatest flaw is its small, pinched scale.  I visited on a Sunday afternoon, when there were long lines at the ticket booth, the gift store, the restroom, the courtyard cafe, and the elevators.  The central atrium was noisy, warm, and smelled of stale food.  The galleries were oppressively crowded, so that a visitor had to wait several minutes to find a clear view to each painting.  The niches where Dali’s monumental paintings are hung, including The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, don’t give them enough breathing room, and can’t contain the crowds waiting to look at them, who spill into adjacent galleries.  Spending more than a minute with each work, in contemplation, is simply not possible.  The grand, squiggling, spiral stair at the center of the atrium is too small to allow visitors moving up and down to pass each other easily, and too large to allow visitors on the ground floor to move around it easily.  Dali’s large paintings, like The Discovery, are orchestrated magnificently, with overlapping perspectives that offer imaginative depth, dreamy, erotically-charged forms, and obsessive, classical craftsmanship.  There’s none of any of this to be found in the building. Photograph courtesy of HOK. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/fashion-dress-fitnyc monthly 0.5 2017-04-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515015815-GLHPXT3HXPYJRC3GXQSU/tumblr_oni4kzYX2F1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DRESSINGS A show of dresses at FIT, Paris Refashioned: 1957-1968, illustrates the shift in that city from couture craftmanship to mass market trends.  It also, powerfully, illustrates the lasting iconic power of the shift dress.  Virtually all of the garments on display are a variation of this simple profile: beaded with pearls at the yoke, draped with ostrich features at the skirt, assembled with princess seams, edged with ruffles, layered over a poorboy sweater, paired under a matching bolero, crafted in boucle, cut from vinyl, covered in a sea of shimmering plastic palettes. The exhibit, mounted handsomely in the large basement gallery, allows about fifty dresses to be appraised all at once, like a crowd of savvy young women setting out for a party, or a protest.  Yet each garments is entirely different from the next, its own species, with its own texture, ornaments, and piecing.  While the dresses here are all small sizes, they offer a silhouette that’s flattering for women of all ages, sizes and shapes.  Their tailoring is relatively simple, making it easy for home sewers and high street brands to mimic high fashion looks  And, because they aren’t customarily worn by men, they make an indelibly feminine garment.  (Though this dress’ use as the international symbol for women on restroom doors is, right now, becoming obsolete.) Like the pitched roof of a single family house or the egg-swell of the Edison lightbulb, the profile of the A-line dress seems resistant to technological and sartorial change.  Trends in athleisure and high-performance fabrics hint at a future of uni-gender (or nongendered) head-to-toe  bodystockings.  But the shift dress remains vital.  The west has no signature female costume – no caftan, kimono, or sari – and this garment, more than any other, fits the bill. Pierre Cardin, “Cosmos” dress, 1967, gift of Lauren Bacall.  Photo courtesy of FIT. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/heyduk-cooper-palach-memorial monthly 0.5 2017-04-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515015742-AH51G5OT5FO3SON3F5JK/tumblr_oo3uomdPJB1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FIERY The architecture students at The Cooper Union have constructed John Heyduk’s Jan Palach Memorial on the ground right outside their classrooms.  The work, conceived in 1971, is a pair of ten-foot cubes capped with forests of ten-foot spikes.  The House of the Suicide has a dull grey finish and spikes that tilt outwards, as if in flames.  The House of the Mother of the Suicide has a black finish and spikes that stand up straight, as if in alarm.  Both are hollow, shed-like structures, framed with wood 2X4’s, and have small doors at ground level so that crouching adults can enter and exit.  The Houses stand about twelve feet apart on the paved plaza, slightly askew, just like the Twin Towers. Heyduk designed the Memorial in response to the 1968 death of Jan Palach, a Czech student who lit himself on fire in front of the National Museum in Prague to protest the Soviet occupation.  In a letter written beforehand, Palach explained that he wanted his action to draw attention to the struggles for free speech and against Soviet propaganda.  Today, in a culture with protected free speech, Heyduk’s work has special relevance.  Government misinformation is used to bolster policy, and marginal voices are continually discredited. But can architecture carry political protest?  For someone who doesn’t understand Heyduk’s intentions, or Eastern Europe politics, the Houses are still powerful icons.  Their architecture communicates political anxiety in an almost telegraphic way.  These are shelters without visible entrances and windows.  They stand isolated from one another.  And their profiles are charged with emotion: fear, shock, horror. Memorial is an exemplary modest urban intervention.  With footprints no larger than newsstands, the Houses have a strong sculptural presence; no one walking through Cooper Square can miss them.  These unassuming structures don’t posses the gravitas of important public sculpture or proper architecture.  They have a fresh unfussy finish, with pronounced plywood seams and steel bolts.  They sit directly on the paving, without a pedestal or foundation, and feel as if they could be blown away by a storm.  Some people walk between them without stopping, some step back to photograph them, and others approach them slowly to investigate further.   The Houses are vivid public characters, crafted from nothing more than plywood and paint, and a powerful idea. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/alice-neel-portrait-representation monthly 0.5 2017-03-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515016122-EJ55IS2Z1UYHRYF0011M/tumblr_ombdarjqCi1qdm8ato1_1280.png DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MARVELOUS Cultural critic Hilton Als has curated a show at David Zwirner called Uptown, that collects portraits Alice Neel made of her neighbors in Spanish Harlem during the 60′s and 70′s.  It’s possible to stroll through, take it in, and reach the simple, uncomplicated conclusion, “Marvelous.”  The exhibit offers all the pleasures of painting without troubling intellectual or aesthetic subject matter.  The canvases are handsome, vibrantly colored, and simple to appraise.  Here is a streetwise but troubled young man.  Here is an older woman who must have been a knockout in her youth.  Here is a distinguished gentleman, a pillar of the community.  But there are richer, more uncommon currents just below the surface. Neel’s manner of depicting her subjects, in small vertical canvases, in a simple frontal view as they gaze straight back at the painter, fuses portraiture with self-presentation — with performance.  As a white woman artist living in an enclave of working class blacks, Latinos and immigrants, Neel was an outsider, and remained keenly aware of of her status.  Some of the paintings’ titles wrankle: Arab, Black Spanish Family, Two Puerto Rican Boys, Cyrus the Gentle Iranian.  Yet her portraits don’t have the sting of anthropology, or offer an empty celebration of diversity.  Her approach is clear-eyed and painterly.  These canvases document the world she moves in, just as it is, without adornment, and without drama. Neel depicts her subjects truly, soberly noting asymmetries and blemishes in face and figure.  The sitters offer themselves easily for view but not for judgment.  They are preternaturally relaxed, without a need to put on airs, sitting patiently as their portraits are crafted.  Neel, in return, grants them a distance and mystery that confer dignity.   Alice Neel, Anselmo, 1962.  Image courtesy of Alice Neel and David Zwirner. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/hair-baseball-dock-ellis-mets monthly 0.5 2017-03-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515017225-9P8NO0U86Q99AHOQ0B1M/tumblr_omvva07Q3p1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY HAIR-RAISING Last week Yankees outfielder Clint Frazier made the front page of the New York Times, on account of his unruly mop of red hair.  Since George Steinbrenner’s leadership, the team has forbidden voluptuous hairstyles and facial hair, and fined players, including former captain Don Mattingly, who defied the rules.  In vivid contrast, Mets star pitchers Noah Syndegaard, Robert Gsellman and Jacob de Grom are all now, without controversy, sporting ungroomed, free-flowing locks, for a look that’s both hippie and hipster. Unlike basketball, a game with awesome street credibility, baseball’s appeal remains stubbornly entwined with tradition, and its leaders have been uneasy to embrace the counterculture.  Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton’s 1969 memoir, Ball Four, shows how difficult it was for an honest, feeling young player of that time to honor both the traditions of the game and the feelings in the air.  Attitudes haven’t shifted all that much, at least within the Yankees organization.  Frazier cut his hair just days after the Times article.  In  many ways baseball culture seems more laced-up now than it was four decades ago. Let us now remember Dock Ellis, the storied Pirates pitcher who threw a no-hitter in 1971 under the influence of LSD.  He sometimes wore his hair, on gameday, in curlers.   The documentary No No: A Dockumentary gives an engaging account of Ellis’ personal journey and clubhouse antics.  The Pirates teams of the late 1960′s and early 1970′s, where he made his mark, were deeply integrated, more black than white.  And, in 1971, the franchise became the first in Major League history to start a game with an entirely non-white lineup.  That team management embraced both Ellis – with his abrasive, wildman, showmanship – and teammate  Roberto Clemente – with his righteous, elegant, calm – speaks volumes.  Why can’t the Yankees foster the same diversity – in culture and in character – on their team?  And, if not, why can’t they just let their players grow their hair? #DockEllis #NoNoDocumentary #Pirates #Mets #Yankees #hairstyles https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/science-fiction-arrival-imagery monthly 0.5 2017-03-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515017118-FLE99LS7BUZ787623Y9R/tumblr_ombfxrYiPk1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FAR OUT In the movie The Arrival aliens land on earth in vessels shaped like giant Brazil nuts, that hover on one end just above the ground.  Humans enter them from below, in genie lifts, and struggle to understand their language and their intentions.  The aliens look like octopi with seven legs and a hairy, wrinkled trunk.  They float around the top of the vessels in clouds of steam, behind windows that look like giant iPOD screens.  And they communicate in inky, circular squirts that look like the stains coffee cups leave on magazine covers. The  premise of the movie (based on a short story by Ted Chiang) is intriguing, but the special effects don’t serve it well.  While watching, I could only think back wistfully to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Though that movie used mechanical effects that are far cruder than the digital ones employed in The Arrival, they were conceived simply and poetically, and strengthened belief in the story, and in the aliens themselves.  In Close Encounters the spacecraft looks like an aluminum toy – a child’s vision of a spaceship.  Its insides glow like the sun, and the short, big-headed aliens descend from it on stumpy, uncertain legs like infants.  These designs have an elemental, archetypical feeling – they tap our emotional connection to well-known earthly things.  In The Arrival the designs are at once too strange, and too banal, to believe. Photograph courtesy of The Arrival. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ren-ri-beeswax-sculpture monthly 0.5 2017-03-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515017423-W28CLHMGXYF5WGTGX368/tumblr_ollgcuCIs11qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY WAX FIGURES Artist Ren Ri’s beeswax sculptures sit at the intersection of biology and technology, nature and artifice, animal and apparatus.  For this series the Chinese artist constructed clear acrylic boxes, large enough to hold bowling balls, and filled them with swarms of bees.  Every so often, as the hives were growing, he rotated the boxes and repositioned the queens.  Afterwards he flushed the insects and honey from the cages, leaving the empty rippled, folded beeswax forms inside.  These look, from up close, like abandoned post-nuclear landscapes and, from across the room, look like the desicated organs of a prehistoric beast. There’s a strange tension between the tidy hexagonal structure of the hives and their bulging, swollen contours.  The cells gives these works a pixellated look, as if they’ve been modeled with a computer program.  They don’t seem to recognize gravity, as the beeswax congeals equivalently to all interior faces of the cube.  And they don’t seem to recognize Cartesian geometry, their soft, tissue-like clumps evoking a shambolic, bodily logic.  Though they offer rich compositions, the wax formations don’t lend themselves to contemplation.  Stuffed within the antiseptic plastic boxes, they’re charged with physical potential, as if they’re about to come to life, to change, to grown. Photo courtesy of Ren Ri and Pearl Lam Galleries. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/simone-rocha-fashion-fantasy monthly 0.5 2017-03-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515017524-AC3L6XZB4LDFAHGICFV6/tumblr_ollhxvusan1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DREAM WEAVINGS Simone Rocha makes clothes from silk, wool and tulle that feel as if they could evaporate at any moment in a small puff of smoke.  They are girlish confections, constructed from layers of ruffles, fringes, bows and sashes.  Like Rei Kawakubo, Rocha can transform conventional garments (trenchcoat, party dress, pantaloons) with unorthodox tailoring, while leaving traces of those original forms intact.  Her garments are exquisitely imagined; every collar, cuff and hem carries an elemental proposition about what a collar, cuff and hem can be.  A khaki trenchcoat has rouched sleeves with cuffs that morph in bows.   A party dress in heavy white eyelet hangs across the collarbone as if it has been put on sideways.   A ball gown is constructed from a soft voile sack embellished with yellow silk flowers.  The clothing’s strong asymmetrical profiles, mismatched fabrics, and elaborate piecing give them a structural audacity that makes their fairytale prettiness all the more remarkable.     While Kawakubo’s garments are charged with aggressive avant garde energy, Rocha’s are tender, sylvan, and sentimental.  The young women staffing her New York City shop, who wear the dresses as their uniform, seem less like fashion warriors than artsy teens who read Jane Austen and comic books.  Rocha’s clothes don’t need accessories, makeup or jewelry to built a strong look.  Each piece carries its own strong image, and shapes its own character.  Here is a princess who fell asleep beneath a blanket of wildflowers.  Here is a schoolgirl who packs her satchel and runs away from home.  Here is a witch who disguises herself in a magnificent gown to attend the ball. These clothes are like dreams translated directly  into fabric.  Photograph courtesy of Simone Rocha. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/postmodern-narratives-the-kerry-james-marshall monthly 0.5 2017-02-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515017908-PKQZNNYC4YLKCJIMTINM/tumblr_okkkmlaWIJ1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY POSTMODERN DREAMS The Kerry James Marshall retrospective at the Met Breuer, Mastry, attracted the most energetic and eclectic museum crowd I’ve ever seen.  Marshall is African American, and publicity surrounding the show was pointedly political.  An explanatory wall text notes that his work “synthesizes a wide range of pictorial traditions to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society and reassert the place of the black figure within the canon of Western painting.“  Marshall’s richly-colored, mural-sized canvases are strongly graphic, with characters often rendered in profile, and fields in flat, bold colors. They have the kinetic energy of posters, quilts and graffiti.  Some capture everyday scenes from black American life: a beauty salon, a barber shop, two lovers in bed.  Others capture moments from black history: the failure to seize a rogue slave ship, the colonization of South Africa by the Dutch. Despite political interpretations, the paintings are most remarkable for their skillful postmodern storytelling, employing fractured imagery to upend conventional narratives.  Scenes are constructed within a conventional perspectival background, and their integrity is questioned by a web of seemingly random graphic marks laid right on top of them: letters, numbers, banners, logos, and puddles and streaks of paint.  The complex, layered image-making recalls the work of David Salle, and the sensual handling recalls the work of Eric Fischl.  But Marshall’s work is more ambitious formally and more troubling emotionally than that of either of his contemporaries. In the most powerful paintings, the dissonant overlapping and accumulation of images exposes the distance between American life and the American dream.  A series of paintings completed in the 1980′s (including Better Homes and Better Gardens, above) shows  black men, women and children emerging from handsome apartment blocks, playing on tidy suburban yards, sunning themselves at the beach, and resting inside homes.  They’re surrounded by all the acoutrements of good bourgeois living: flags and banners, sprawling green lawns, flowering trees, gently winding streets, sunny skies.  But the stray texts, strokes and smears floating on the surface above them expose the scene as a fiction, and the canvas as an unreliable, illusory surface.  The very structure of the paintings suggests that, for black Americans, undisturbed good living might remain a fiction. Kerry James Marshall, Better Homes Better Gardens, 1994.  Kerry James Marshall / Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery #MetBreuer #KerryJamesMarshall #PAINTING #POSTMODERNISM https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/construction-basics-the-completion-of-the-first monthly 0.5 2017-01-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515018515-92D893JLAG1RMP2VO5I3/tumblr_oj6lgxwyk81qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY STATIONARY For Upper East Side residents, the opening of the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway line this month is nothing short of a miracle.  Decades in the works, it’s an improvement that East Siders have dreamt about, to alleviate crowding and delays on the 4, 5 and 6 platforms during rush hour. What can one say about the design of the three new stations that were unveiled on New Years Day, at 72nd Street, 86th Street and 96th Street?  All have a similar parti: entrances with escalators from street level, generous mezzanine levels that run the entire length of the platform, and platforms that are far wider and brighter (and, right now, cleaner) than existing stations.  These stations were planned pragmatically, with more waiting room, improved circulation spaces, a greater number of entrances.  And they seem to have been designed empirically, after studying new transit stations in Asia and Europe.  All three have the same bland, vaguely futurist, late modern palette of soft grey granite, polished concrete and brushed metal.  Their mezzanines have vaulted ceilings, expressed with curved concrete ribs and accented with linear LED light coves.   There are surprising moments of boldness.  For example, at the mezzanine of the 86th Street station, the ceiling has been constructed with a triangulated grid of deep, dramatically-lit concrete coffers.  But the stations, while intelligently planned, have no deep architectural character.  They’ve been built in Inoffensive Public Works Modern. And where is the subway tile?  This simple, iconic white 3x6 ceramic tile, which would have tied the new stations indelibly to the older lines to which they’re connected, is nowhere to be seen.  Instead, interior passages at all three stations have been finished in a 1′x2′ white porcelain tile with a dull, mottled finish that seems to absorb natural light.  Rather then grout, these tiles have been installed with with plastic filler strips, about 1/8″ wide.  And these strips have been installed so carelessly, out of plumb with the tiles and out of alignment with tile edges, that they feel as if they are going to pop out.  This tile might have been a cost- and time- saving measure.  But it’s a sloppy, dispiriting finish, that covers acres of the interiors at these three new stations.  One can’t help feeling that, instead, for each one, constructing a simple, brightly-lit shed, finished in neatly-laid  subway tile, and graced with original artwork, would have worked just fine. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/underpopulated monthly 0.5 2017-01-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515018632-RMAVTA6PS580R6OM5MXP/tumblr_oj62o3EWE31qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A LOST WORLD MoMA has mounted a 40th anniversary exhibit of photographer Nan Goldin’s 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, that captured her bohemian Lower East Side community with anthropological clarity, and also love.  The framed shots, about 8″x10″, seem loosely composed, like snapshots, but carry a stunning physical and emotional immediacy.  The most famous one, a self-portrait, shows Goldin in full makeup, a month after she’s been beaten so severely by a boyfriend that she can barely open her eyes.  Thirty years afterwards, in a culture numbed by internet porn, reality TV and Tinder, these images do not shock.  Instead they stir up nostalgia for a time in New York City, the early 1980′s, when rents were cheap, downtown was different from uptown, and young people moved to the city to become artists and writers rather than venture capitalists and fashion bloggers.  New York City served as a vital refuge those who didn’t have the freedom to act out their lives in other places. Today, the most powerful photographs in The Ballad are those that pull back from the faces and figures to show that world itself: kitchens with battered white metal appliances, bedrooms with bare walls and windows, hotel rooms with flocked wallpaper and mismatched lamps, basement bars with neon lighting and sticky floors.  The handful of still lifes on display are surprisingly moving.  They capture a mood by giving a glimpse of the corner of a room, a tabletop arrangement, or the wall of an apartment hallway.  The manner in which people decorate their homes reveals their values bitingly, innocently, and eloquently.  For Goldin’s friends expressiveness, color, corrosiveness and humor matter far more than order. Goldin’s most unique gift is, surely, her ability to capture the heightened emotional drama between two people – that moment that promises a vital connection or tearing apart.  But when she pulls her gaze back further, to reveal these people within their habitat, her photos are even more powerful.  One shows two young men sitting behind a small round table at a bar, a cluster of half-empty cocktail glasses obscuring their faces.  The view is gently out-of-plumb and softly cropped, so that the entire world seems to be slowly tipping, unable to right itself.  These men might be falling for one another or having a lover’s quarrel.  And this might be precisely what it felt like to be a young person, in New York City, in the early 1980′s. Nan Goldin. The Parents’ Wedding Photo, Swampscott, Mass, 1985.  © 2016 Nan Goldin. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/saarinen-eero-american-masters monthly 0.5 2017-01-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515018815-NFOZQR4F88XBC75WIO73/tumblr_ojaeqgxdnN1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ROGUE ARCHITECT The American Masters documentary Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future is really two different films spliced together.  It’s a hagiography of the modern architect, with photographs and footage of his best-know works.  And it’s a conflicted My Architect-type portrait of the man by his eldest son, Eric Saarinen, who narrates the film.  Like Louis Kahn, the subject of My Architect, Eero Saarinen left his eldest son and first wife for another woman and started another family.  And, like Kahn, he’s ulitmately pardoned by his abandoned son because he’s a genius. The accomplished cinematorgraphy, that includes dazzling aerial sequences, takes us through the General Motors and John Deere campuses, the Miller House, Ingalls Rink, Kresge Auditorium, Dulles Airport, and the TWA Terminal.  These lyrical passages go beyond the iconic, expressionistic, black-and-white Ezra Stoller photographs of the same projects.  In addition to seductive views, they give a sense of the buildings’ rich physicality, spatial complexity, and peculiar asymmetries. Eric Saarinen’s personal account of his father is touching, but holds the film back from exploring more deeply the development and detail of the buildings.  Instead of landmark modern structures, each one is framed as an artifact from the architect’s biography.  We learn in considerable detail how the architect falls in love, gets married, has children, meets another woman, leaves his first family, marries again, has another child, and dies at the age of 51.  An off-screen narrator even reads to us, pointlessly, from the love letters he wrote to his mistress.  In between, we learn about his buildings. It’s confusing but not terribly surprising that accomplished men behave less-than-heroically in their domestic lives.  Eero Saarinen’s personal life was eventful but had no impact on his work.  (The only major architect I can think of whose personal life is inseparable from his work is Frank Lloyd Wright.)  My favorite image from the film is a black and white photo of the architect lying flat on his stomach inside an enlarged cardboard study model of the TWA Terminal, his legs hanging off the edge of the table.  It illustrates clearly his passion for architecture, one that’s both ennobling and humanizing. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/refugee-housing-moma-shelter monthly 0.5 2017-01-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515019034-17R54SPSV7X7LKFMVEFT/tumblr_oj62hvRvEc1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY HOME FURNISHINGS The vital MoMA exhibit Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter examines refugee housing.  At a moment when millions globally have been displaced, and more are displaced each day, the question of how to house them is vital.  This exhibit is (disappointingly) small and gives only a glimpse into the challenges and horrors.  In the end it might be most affecting for leaving a visitor with so many questions. What minimal quality of shelter is required?  How can individual shelters make a community?  Is it correct to build temporary shelters?  What is the image of a refugee shelter?  And, most importantly, What is the difference between a shelter and a home? The most powerful artifact on display, standing at the center of the gallery, is a Better Shelter, a structure designed, fabricated and funded by the IKEA Foundation in collaboration with UNHCR.  So far 30,000 Better Shelters have been deployed to refugee camps in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.  The Shelter exploits IKEA’s expertise in economies of manufacturing, shipping and assembly.  It’s a small hip-roofed structure, about the size of a detached suburban two-car garage, built from plastic panels that are shipped flat and assembled on the ground in two hours by a team of four adults.  The Shelter is spacious enough for five adults, affords more privacy and protection than a tent, and can be personalized very simply by finishing the interior with posters or wall coverings.  It’s profile gives it the image of a (suburban, American) house, while its materials give it the feeling (flimsy, airless, beige) of a FEMA trailer. In an essay accompanying the exhibit photographer Henk Wildschut, whose lyrical shots of informal settlements in Calais might be the emotional highlight of the exhibit, explains, refugees “carry on being human in an inhuman situation.”  People who have been displaced will likely make the most of minimal resources.  But the challenge remains. Can we design a refugee shelter that maximizes value, transportability and constructibility, while it also supports human dignity?  IKEA revolutionized the industry by mass-producing handsome, inexpensive furniture that shapes an environment of modern comfort.  Will their foundation aim even higher, and make homes rather than shelters? Image courtesy of MoMA. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/countess-greffulhe-proust-fit monthly 0.5 2017-01-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515019518-PM16JMUBJQHVRWSRCS8Z/tumblr_oiz8n4nOeB1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DRESSED TO IMPRESS A small exhibit at FIT, Proust’s Muse, The Countess Greffulhe, celebrates the wardrobe of this famous turn-of-the-century Parisian socialite.  She captivated the most accomplished artists, writers and musicians of the day, including Proust, with her natural beauty and audacious style.  There isn’t a single garment here that, in its extravagant construction and execution, doesn’t feel like a costume.  These are clothes that serve personal drama, that heighten that moment when a woman rises from her chair, exits a carriage, or collapses onto a settee. There are shimmering, floor-skimming Oriental-themed robes, inspired by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, that the Countess wore to receive visitors at her home on Rue d’Astorg.  There is an an ankle-length Russian cape embroidered in gold and trimmed with ermine, papal in splendor, that she wore to her daughter’s wedding.  There is a Worth ballgown in a brilliant, bracingly modern, emerald green.  And there is an off-the-shoulder 1937 Lanvin evening gown of liquid black silk whose enormous ruffles seem to be floating out in front of it. One senses, beyond the high level of museum curatorship, a strong personal voice.  The Countess was discriminating about what she wore, and must have driven her tailors, milliner and jeweler to distraction with modifications and customizations.  She fought hard to be fabulous.  For women of her time there were few avenues to exercise creativity and forge a unique social identity.  Here, with her wardrobe, the Countess did. House of Worth, tea gown, blue cut velvet on a green satin ground, Valenciennes lace, circa 1897. © Stéphane Piera/Galliera/Roger-Viollet.                     https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/nycmta-vik-muniz-second-avenue monthly 0.5 2017-01-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515020160-JG3WTJCWMMDS3V5WGWWK/tumblr_oj6f6hPdVQ1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY UNDERGROUND THEATER To much fanfare, and some surprise, the northernmost tail of the Second Avenue Subway line opened, as scheduled, on New Years Day.  Initial publicity focused on the artworks gracing the new stations at 72nd Street, 86th Street, and 96th Street.  These were coordinated by the NYCMTA’s Arts for Transit committee and funded by its Percent for Art Program, that allocates 1% of total construction costs for all major projects to new site-specific artworks.  For these stations the MTA chose, wisely, three well-known artists: Sarah Sze, Chuck Close and Vik Muniz.  But it gave them blank stretches of 1′x2′ tile to decorate, rather than soliciting works that were deeply integrated with the architecture of the stations, or that might even have inspired the design of the stations. At the 72nd Street station Sze created scenes of whirling debris in blue and white that are rendered in custom porcelain tiles. The motifs brighten station walls along the escalators and mezzanine.  But the tiles remains flat, ornamental rather than imagistic; they never really open into a fictional space.  At the 86th Street station Close recreated twelve of his signature pixellated headshot portraits in nine-foot-high mosaic panels along the entrances and mezzanine.  The renderings and tilework are skillful, but the celebrity painters he depicts, including himself, evoke the streets of SoHo and Chelsea, not the Upper East Side. At the 96th Street station Muniz also rendered figures in mosaic tiles.  But he’s based these life-size, head-to-toe figures on informal photographs of random contemporary New Yorkers.  They represent a broad, comically accurate swathe of the population, including a married gay couple, a mother, a man in a turban, a woman in a sari, a gaggle of high school boys, a cop with a cherry popsicle, an actor in a tiger costume, on old man with a ukelele, and two uptight middle-aged hipsters.  These figures create a strong rhythm as one walks the mezzanine, and hold the eye.  On opening weekend visitors slowed to examine these characters closely, and stopped to photograph their favorites and to be photographed alongside them.  Like the improptu post-election sticky note message wall at Union Square Station, Muniz’ mosaics at 96th Street make powerful street theater. Photograph courtesy of NYCMTA and Vik Muniz. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/eric-gaskins-black-fashion-designers-fit monthly 0.5 2016-12-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515021423-95IB2LR3IMHC9CA6T8XO/tumblr_oiz3xgMGDt1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PARALLEL TRACKS There’s an exhibit at FIT called Black Fashion Designers that is, simply, a collection of clothes designed by men and women of African descent.  The show includes designers like Anne Lowe, who worked in the 50′s and 60′s in relative anonymity, pioneers like Stephen Burrows, Willi Smith and Patrick Kelly, icons like Azzedine Alaïa, and contemporary tastemakers like Duro Olowu and Public School NYC. The garments on display are, almost without exception, finely proportioned, stunningly crafted, and smartly conceived.  But they do not embody ideas or trends that are earth-shattering, or that would suggest that Black Fashion is anything contrary to, or out-of-step with, Regular (which is to say, White) Fashion.  While walking through the gallery, it becomes clear that the fashion world has been, for decades, almost entirely segregated, with talented black designers working on a parallel track, separate to their contemporary white counterparts, addressing the same trends, technologies and movements. There’s an Eric Gaskins evening gown here that’s a swathe of liquid ivory silk with bands of shimmering black bugle beads running around it like monumental brushstrokes, in the manner of a Robert Motherwell canvas.  It might be the most elegant gown I’ve ever seen.  (I can’t look at photos of this dress without fantasizing about what it would feel like to wear it while walking into a ballroom, approaching a podium, climbing into a black car…)  It’s a functional evening gown so meticulously conceived and executed that it rises to the level of fantasy, abstract expressionism stitched into a dress.  That Gaskins, a contemporary of Michael Kors and Isaac Mizrahi, remains relatively unknown, suggests that there’s a way to go until the industry becomes entirely open, and exhibits like this serve no purpose. Image courtesy of FIT.  Eric Gaskins, Dress, 2014, USA.  Gift of Eric Gaskins. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/pierre-chareau-maison-de-verre monthly 0.5 2016-12-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515020770-6KXH9ZCOT0KVDBQPROKF/tumblr_oi1zla7GPE1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MOVING PARTS Every architect works best at a particular scale: that of the detail, piece of furniture, interior space, exterior shell, site plan, or city plan.  French architect Pierre Chareau excelled at the peculiar in-between scale of the device, an element larger than furniture and smaller than a room: the staircase, the sliding door, the screen, the storage cabinet.  As a handsome retrospective at The Jewish Museum makes clear, it’s these devices, with precise mechanical functions, that animate his designs. Chareau’s masterwork, the Maison de Verre in Paris, remains a favorite for architecture students who are seduced by its tricked-out fittings and ultra-modern feeling.  It’s a house that doesn’t feel domestic, a kind of architecture that exceeds construction to produce effects that are eery – both bodily and emotionally.  Its richest rooms are its secondary or “servant” spaces, where the shower stalls, closets, stairs, entryways and shafts are.  In these parts the building engages its inhabitants like an organism, a living thing. The exhibit includes illustrative video clips, in which a straight, plainly-dressed, 30-something couple enact daily life in the house, silently, and to unintentionally comic (or maybe just French?) effect.  She climbs up a folding staircase, and He closes the hatch behind her.  He enters through a revolving door, and She locks the door behind him.  She leaves a coffee cup in a chamber in the kitchen cupboard, and He retrieves it from behind.  They interact with the building in a proscribed, ritualized way. The exhibit is exquisitely designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.  Other shows they’ve designed, like the Charles James retrospective at The Met, have been overly cerebral, obscuring the raw power of the objects on display.  Here their strategy is lighter and more agile, and the high technologies they employ (i.e. a monitor “scanning” a virtual model of the Maison de Verre like an MRI machine, and VR headsets showing views from inside the house and garden) are put to good use.  The Maison de Verre defies easy description through photographs and orthogonal drawings.  Only by visiting it, seeing it in film, or through VR, can one see it quickly and clearly as a whole.  Rather than a single structure, it’s best understood as a web of smaller movements.  It’s a building that’s like a dance. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/kienholz-five-car-stud-art-race monthly 0.5 2016-12-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515021093-TDOPF521NC1RUS0JL1H4/tumblr_ohqqliugvN1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY UGLY So much contemporary art, particularly installation, has a purposefully unattractive aesthetic: rough, unbalanced, distended, and downright ugly.  The works of contemporary American sculptor Ed Kienholz certainly do.  These diorama-like set pieces are assembled from found objects (old furniture, carpets, appliances, and automobiles) and life-size cast figures, and tell stories of domestic violence, tawdry sex, and male aggression.  When seen in photographs they can appear exploitative, engineered for titillation.  Women often appear naked and dismembered, and men often appear masked and armed.  Kienholz’ best known work, Five Car Stud, first shown at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, has been reinstalled at his current retrospective at the Fondazione Prada in Milan.  One approaches it dramatically, after passing through a string of brightly-lit galleries, through a floor-length black curtain, into a room piled with dirt, so dark that one can only step forward guided by the guard’s flashlight. The sculpture depicts five rural, working class, masked white men castrating a black man, lit only by the headlights of their trucks, which are parked in a circle around them.  It might be the most viscerally affecting artwork I’ve ever seen, a deep, direct critique of American life.  The other gallery-goers, older, well-to-do, Milanese couples, didn’t seem to find anything amiss.  They stepped gingerly to the center – careful not to get sand in their drivings shoes – and inspected details of the grotesque, cartoonish figures closely, laughing.  One woman, in an ankle-length mink coat, posed for a photo standing right above the black man’s head. Though this piece was made over forty years ago, it might have been been made in the summer of 2016. The five  rednecks with their trucks could have rendered just as powerfully as five uniformed city cops in patrol cars.  The racial and sexual violence lying just below the niceties of American life remain relevant, as does the disregard for black life.  The ugliness in Kienholz’ sculptural expression – the bloated figures, the melting-wax faces, the horror movie lighting – equals the subject matter.  It captures the terror correctly. Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1969–72. Photo: courtesy of Delfino Sisto Legnani Studio. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/fondazione-prada-oma-architecture monthly 0.5 2016-12-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515020927-FHSURF1IJIJA68DZZSTX/tumblr_ohqp71F7ic1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY OTHERWORLDLY The Fondazione Prada in Milan is a former distillery that’s been remade by the luxury brand as an art center.  It was opened in 2015, after OMA Europe refurbished the existing structures and added three new ones.  The ten-building campus lies along the city’s southern edge, in a precinct of warehouses, factories, and abandoned lots, and is secured with a masonry wall and uniformed guards.  Stepping inside from the sidewalk is like falling into another world, one that’s radically interior, like a convent, a prison, or an asylum.  The artworks are sealed away in a series of strange, seemingly unrelated structures, that set a tone of unsettling quiet. It would be a sterile experience if not for the dazzling quality of the architecture.  The buildings are cerebral in their planning, restrained in their geometries, and luxurious in their finishes.  The Cinema is framed in brushed aluminum and clad with mirrored stainless steel panels.  The Hall floor is a richly figured travertine.  Staircases in all of the buildings are lined with perforated brushed stainless steel panels.  Pragmatic elements like vents, access panels and stair handrails are gorgeously concealed. Circulation, both through the campus and through each building, is obtuse.  There are lots of ramps and staircases, and no door handles.   Most of the buildings are entered through immense, unmarked automatic sliding doors.  Signage is minimal, and no artwork is visible from outside. Young guards, dressed in unisex blue nylon Prada topcoats and Doc Martens, are required to give detailed directions to visitors.   The restrooms are particularly difficult to navigate.  All surfaces in these underground facilities, including the ceiling and the stall partitions, are constructed from a heavy steel grate.  Dark and disorienting, the space is also slightly maddening.  A sensible adult wonders,  Where is the door?  Where are the stalls?  Where are the paper towels?  And where, again, is the door?  Recent OMA projects have had a disappointingly commercial aspect, but this one bears the sly, witty signature of Rem Koolhas.  The Fondazione has no center, no front face, and no real image.  Its most iconic element (until the high-rise Torre under construction is completed) is the “Haunted House,” an existing four-story concrete building that’s been finished in a flat, softly-glowing 24-karat gold leaf, and that houses the permanent collection.  It’s nestled at the end of a drive inside the campus, so that it remains invisible from the outside, and from most other points on the campus.  Its small bare chambers offer sculptures by Robert Gober and Louise Bourgeois and, more alluringly, opulent views into the city. Yet one isn’t permitted to step onto the balconies or take photos; one remains caught inside. Photograph courtesy of Fondazione Prada, Milano. By Bas Princen, 2015.                                                           https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/kai-althoff-painting-installatin monthly 0.5 2016-11-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515021455-79PXPHMZMX69R56XLSVB/tumblr_oeqtorXJFs1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY HOUSEBOUND There’s no photography allowed at Kai Althoff’s show at MoMA, which might be for the best.  This sprawling multi-media installation, that fills a large gallery on the sixth floor, is something of a mess.   It obscures the artist’s signature works – lyrical, exotically-colored watercolors and acrylics.  Instead of highlighting these small panels, it drops them within a distracting, disorderly stage-set.   The exhibition resembles a family home that’s been imploded, with the contents of its closets and attics spilling out.  There are low white painted partitions, scuffed wood floor boards, and scrims hanging from the ceiling, that all outline a ghostly house with a peaked roof.  Within it, household objects (appliances, cutlery, magazines, furniture, dolls, suitcases, clothes) are piled on platforms, packed inside vitrines, pooled on the floor, and pinned on the walls.  Because these things are old and worn the place seems highly personal.  It’s as if the artist is trying to capture a life – his own – by collecting all the things that passed through it.  Althoff is my contemporary, and some of the objects brought back all-but-forgotten sense-memories from the mid-seventies: hand-thrown pottery in speckled glazes, dolls with stiff faces and thick synthetic hair, poorly composed black and white family photographs. But Althoff’s paintings pack a much mightier punch.  These small canvases, no larger than album covers, have a pungent, unpretty realism.  They depict characters that seem to be based on real people, observed from up close, capturing particularities in face and figure that only a loved one would note.  The scenes are rendered in secondary colors, in opaque fields and patterns, in claustrophobic, aspatial vignettes.  Althoff’s brushwork is delicate, his palette feverish, his tone straightforward, and his effects quite moving.  But here, at MoMA, rather than showing us his work, Althoff shows us his life.  The world captured in his paintings – of the people around him – would have given much more. Untitled, 2007, Cloth, acrylic, lacquer and dispersion on cloth, 38 7/8 x 50 x 2 inches (98.7 x 127 x 5.1 cm). Image courtesy of Barbara Gladstone Gallery and Kai Althoff. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/from-the-mixed-up-files-a-visit-last-weekend-to monthly 0.5 2016-11-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515021614-BGTWUC5EE5G61DU6AFX7/tumblr_oftnd8SBaM1qdm8ato1_r3_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY THE THINGS THEY CARED ABOUT The Main Street Museum doesn’t resemble a museum so much as an eccentric rural artist’s basement laboratory, a bit Ed Wood and a bit Silence of the Lambs.  It’s a three-story wood-frame house on a postcard-pretty bridge in White River Junction, Vermont.  The dark, low, interconnected galleries are encrusted with paintings, sculpture, taxidermy, and everyday objects, in an endless, airless clutter.  The exhibits include: a glass candy jar stuffed with broken My Little Ponies, a vitrine that collects black plastic doll heads, a wall case showcasing “Round Objects” (like jar lids, drain caps, washers), and the desktop diorama of a plastic robot ravaging a naked Barbie doll. The museum, led by young artist David Fairbanks Ford, is also a vibrant community center, with a small reading library and a stage for public lectures and performances.  Its website explains: “ We are an ongoing, alternative experiment in material culture studies.”  This experiment conveys deep anti-materialism and aesthetic abandon.  The museum is only lightly curated; none of the displays have titles or labels.  And there’s no indication that these artworks are precious.  In fact, on the Sunday morning we visited, the building was unlocked and unmanned, with a wood box for visitors to deposit the $5 entrance fee. The Museum is far too substantial, and effecting, to be kitsch, or some kind of hipster joke.  One senses, amid the chaos, a genuine love for the objects, for the things themselves.  Although the museum’s tone is Thrift Store Crazy, it’s no different than any other museum: an assortment of things that someone thinks is important. Barbies Nightmare, Mixed-media assembly, Main Street Museum.  Photo courtesy of Main Street Museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/free-to-be-the-first-woman-to-become-president monthly 0.5 2016-10-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515021907-DK34PGL57ZIY896CYNXI/tumblr_oftj6vFuyf1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FREE TO BE The first-woman-to-become-president narrative that Hilary Clinton is riding doesn’t interest me. What does interest me, deeply, is the way she’s continually attacked for those attributes that confirm and confuse her womanhood: her hair, her ankles, her neck, her pantsuits, her laugh, her ambition, her emotional restraint.  It all seems irrelevant. But when I look back at photos of Clinton from the late 1970′s, during her husband’s first term as governor, I want to cry.  There are, here, glimpses of a young woman who is intelligent, willful, wild, expressive, and free.  She is wearing her hair in its natural shade (dirty blonde) and texture (big waves), pinned behind her ears with plastic barrettes.  She is sporting oversized, hopelessly utilitarian glasses that cover half her face.  And she’s draped in hippy-ish Gunne Sax-style dresses with peasant skirts, leg of mutton sleeves and mandarin collars, in loopy floral prints.  She’s a vibrant young woman, effortlessly attractive, serious, passionate, alert to the world and the people around her.  Where is this Hilary now? Part of the problem is my own nostalgia, as these pictures show Clinton at an age when she’s far younger than I am now.  We change as we get older, and our personalities congeal around those traits that we’re rewarded for.  But Hilary’s manicured public image – linked to an extreme makeover after her husband’s 1980 loss in the gubernatorial race – is different, slightly sinister and slightly sad.  At that moment she voluntarily remade herself, surrendering her name and her appearance.  She has, since, become a fierce political warrior.  But was it necessary for her to lose her sass, and herself, along the way? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/gucci-lallo-fashion monthly 0.5 2016-10-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515022714-6HJO7LJ6NEXYZV4CC34O/tumblr_oeqtqmSXEF1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY HODGE PODGE Gucci Creative Director Alessandro “Lallo” Michele, who’s been leading the brand for almost two years, has brought it new life.  His ensembles suspend the brand’s established image (ultra-chic body-conscious Euro-centric separates) for a layered hodge-podge styling that piles eccentric accessories over richly-colored, -textured, and -embellished garments.  The runway shows and ads project artsy, nerdy, thrift store bohemia, animated with a sleepy, muted sexuality.  Lallo’s Instagram feed reveals an imagination focused on rapture and texture – a patch of wallpaper, a stormy sky, a tabletop tableaux, an eighteenth century cornice – rather than trend, form, and fashion.  Among the riot of plaids, prints, patchwork and paisleys in the clothes, he incorporates, skillfully and quietly, iconic brand identifiers: the double-G hardware, the signature canvas, the horsebits, and the tri-color stripe.  No luxury house could ask for keener leadership. The clothes Gucci showed for Spring Summer 2017 are just what was expected.  The dense, cluttered new Gucci look is instantly recognizable; these clothes can’t be mistaken for those from any other brand.  Prada and Miu Miu are offering similar crazily mismatched separates, adorned with patches and ornaments, but those garments have an avant garde feel.  Michele’s clothes aren’t intellectual, and they aren’t self-consciously freakish either, intending only to draw attention to themselves.  Instead they have a strange innocence.  A woman seems to be wearing this argyle sweater, these giant jewelled glasses, this quilted bag, and these elephant leg trousers, because she feels that each piece is beautiful, a thing well-known and well-loved.  This is the way that children often dress, without concern for identity and conformity.  In the world of high fashion, it’s an act of subversion. Photo courtesy of Gucci. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/grace-farms-sanaa-folly-architecture monthly 0.5 2016-10-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515022506-9ILL9SXDQ1GT4Q1IXI39/tumblr_oeqtkdTi561qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SHAKY FOUNDATIONS Before they were awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2010, the Japanese architecture office SANAA accepted a commission from the non-profit organization Grace Farms in Greenwich, Connecticut to build their new facility.  That structure consists of five pod-like glass chambers, spread across a gently rising meadow, strung together with a low, snaking, metal canopy.  The form, which seems ludicrously naive in drawings and models – cartoon futurism – makes a building that’s both audaciously contemporary and entirely tranquil.  The curved glass walls, turning canopy, and flat gravel path are detailed and constructed simply, without calling attention to their assembly, and achieve a radical transparency.  So that when one steps inside a chamber it’s as if the structure, and oneself, are suspended in union with the landscape.  What’s not quite clear is what the program of these building are.  Grace Farms is not, as many believe, an artistinal farm, and it’s not a church.  Its website is deliberately vague, stating only that the facility serves five purposes: nature, arts, justice, community and faith.  What’s known publicly is that Grace Farms is a non-profit foundation, with a board made of of local hedge-fund managers and their spouses, that raised about 35 million dollars to buy this land and about another 50 million dollars to build this facility. The glass pods are used rather loosely.  Inside the Pavilion a young woman brews teas from blossoms collected on the site.  Inside the Court teenagers play basketball.  Inside the Sanctuary locals gather for religious services every Sunday morning.  Inside the Library activists meet to discuss human trafficking and visitors browse the bookstore.  These spaces and the grounds can also be rented out for events. Grace Farms is an inventive and uncompromised piece of architecture by a major talent.  And it gives gorgeous counterpoint to Philip Johnson’s Glass House, which is just miles away.  But it’s not strongly shaped by program and has no sense of utility.  During the design of a building, pragmatic concerns (e.g. square footage, building codes, storage, circulation) typically upset a conceptual design but, almost always, also enrich it, give it texture and complexity.  It’s this process of irritation – worldly realities rubbing up against platonic form – that distinguishes architecture from other arts.  Here, at Grace Farms, there don’t seem to be pressing concerns other than diversion.  It’s a lot of architecture for not much use, a delirious, dreamy folly. Photograph © Iwan Baan.  Courtesy of Iwan Baan and Grace Farms Foundation. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/shayne-oliver-hoodbyair monthly 0.5 2016-10-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515024222-LINTISAVA7UJHS4YWWAD/tumblr_oeqttcecrn1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY LIKE NOTHING BEFORE Is there anything left in fashion that is truly transgressive, any taboo that’s been left untouched?  Last month, for his Spring 2017 ready-to-wear collection, Hood by Air (HBA) designer Shayne Oliver delivered powerfully disruptive designs that overturned conventions of gender, class, race and taste.  HBA makes sophisticated separates (sweatshirts, track pants, hooker heels, hightops) for knowing young creatives.  At a time when many designers (Rick Owens, Kanye West) present high fashion with street inflections, HBA brings street-wise clothes into the world of high fashion. HBA garments make a bigger impression on the runway than they do in ads and on real people.  At first glance the ensembles look like outrageous feats of styling.  Models in the recent show wore minimal makeup, with hair that was slicked back with Vaseline or capped with a clear, waxy film.  They looked as if they’d just awoken after a late, rough night.  Men wore long, brilliantly-colored quilted satin robes, the kind boxers wear entering the ring, wide open, over black briefs, with fireman boots.  Women wore parachute jumpsuits, in slithering nylon, pulled and belted around the waist like skirts.  Both men and women wore cleanly tailored white dress shirts, folded, with black ties, looped around the neck like aprons.       Oliver’s aim is not to shock, but to assert something new and true.  He’s a poet, and the garments, in addition to disrupting ideas about gender and grooming, disrupt the fundamental syntax of tailoring.  Suit jackets are constructed like garment bags, from clear plastic with rounded shoulders.  A pair of fluid silver pants falls straight at the right leg and balloons around the left leg.  A womens miniskirt is assembled from three trouser waistbands, with pockets, stacked on top of one another.  The most photographed piece of the show – and of all New York Fashion Week – was a pair of cowboy boots, itself a loaded iconography, with backward-facing boots attached at the heel.  It’s simple, bold and brilliant.  And it’s something we haven’t seen before. Photo courtesy of Hood by Air. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/grotesque-ornament-architecture monthly 0.5 2016-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515023920-BKP62SS6A7IHAJ3GBCA0/tumblr_odpax7TTo01qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY CURLICUED A small exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Fragile Beasts, collects prints with motifs in the spirit of the grotesque.  This style has highly specific origins; it was born when ceiling frescoes from the Domus Aurea were uncovered in Rome in the sixteenth century.  These elegant, ancient panels are decorated with sepia-colored angels, wrestlers, garlands, centaurs, leopards, and flowering trees, all depicted in profile against a light-filled sky.  Grotesque is a baroque style, characterized by curving, curlicued forms that incorporate, very literally, the figures of plants and animals, including humans, so that they seem to be morphing into each other.  Grotesque forms have a bizarre half-object half-thing quality; they spring strangely to life, with a tenuous, slithering identity. The exhibit itself, of small prints displayed behind glass, didn’t hold me.  But as I moved through adjoining galleries, with displays of Tiffany glass and Victorian birdcages, and through the museum itself, the old Carnegie Mansion, lined in carved wood panels and lit with decorative iron chandeliers, I felt as if I were submerged in the grotesque.  The rich, thick ornament in the objects and the architecture feels animate, as if the place is a living thing.  This whirling, stirring quality might not be unique to the grotesque, but characteristic of all premodern art.  Before God was in the details, life was in the ornament. Print, Plate from a Series of Designs for Ewers and Vessels, 1548; Cornelis Floris II (Flemish, ca. 1513–-1575); Published by Hieronymus Cock (Netherlandish, ca. 1510–-1570); Engravings on paper; Museum purchase through gift of Mrs. John Innes Kane; 1946-3-3.  Courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/shaker-design-met-pragmatism monthly 0.5 2016-09-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515023720-OO5NCZ5HHP9FVBBQN36S/tumblr_od5yf8mGya1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY NO SO SIMPLE In lieu of church, I walked to the Met on Sunday morning to see a show of Shaker objects culled from the collection called Simple Gifts.  There is an immense maple dining table held together by pin-sized wood dowels.  There is a handwoven bolt of wool, just wide enough for a dress, with softly jagged edges, dyed darker than midnight.  There is a chair made with such minimal material, and fuss, that it looks like a line drawing of a chair.  All these objects are handsome but none has the revelatory, purifying effect I was searching for.  They are sort of beautiful and also sort of unremarkable.   What is remarkable is their purposefulness, their unapologetic pragmatism.  There are no tchotchkes or decorative pieces here, like those that fill the ceramics, metalworks and furniture halls surrounding the gallery.  Each is, instead, made to meet a particular need, and each of its attributes responds to an aspect of that need.  A cabinet has drawers just wide enough to store bolts of fabric laid flat.   A sewing table has inches marked off along its front lip to reference when cutting patterns.   A knit glove has open fingertips so one can sit inside, near the window, on a cold day, and turn the pages of a book. This pragmatism is strikingly apparent when one steps into the Shaker Retiring Room, just footsteps away.  The room is furnished with a constellation of everyday objects, and without any decoration.  The atmosphere is sensually spare and dramatically rich, as each object speaks powerfully to its use.  There is a desk and chair for writing in a journal and keeping accounts, a rocking chair with a footrest for knitting and mending, a small iron fireplace for heat in winter winter, a bed for sleeping (it’s too narrow for much else) and small high windows to let in light.  Each thing is simple in form and rich in life. Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/governors-island-hills-west8 monthly 0.5 2016-09-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515023824-SKBWWGYZX39PIOKK2TFT/tumblr_ocmqrcmbHh1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DREAMSCAPING I made the trek to Governors Island this summer, for the first time, with high hopes for the recent redevelopment.  I had entered the original design ideas competition over a decade ago, followed news of the final competition, and applauded the National Parks Service for selecting and implementing a master plan by the audacious Dutch firm West8.  The heart of their scheme is a park called The Hills, a verdant, rolling landscape that teases and refines views across New York Harbor to the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and Manhattan.  Their intitial competition renderings didn’t look like renderings for a city park.  They had a kooky golden glow, and showed idiotically smiling New Yorkers roaming through green fields and valleys, carpeted with grass, flowers and shady trees. So I was surprised to find, instead, a flat field, cut through with a network of bizarrely curving walkways, and punctuated by four scrubby piles of dirt.  Lookout Hill, the tallest at 70-feet, has a pile of artfully piled stone blocks along its steep north slope, that leads visitors to a sloping peak from where, behind one, the lower Manhattan skyline is beautifully revealed.  From this point one can also see the nineteenth century barracks and forts at the north of the island, maintenance buildings to the east, and the three other hills.  Slide Hill features four long metal slides, Grassy Hill features gently sloping fields, and Discovery Hill features richly varied plantings and, at its peak, a Rachel Whiteread sculpture. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge the park only a month after it’s opened, before its plantings have taken hold and filled the ground.  Even my less critical, more botanically-literate companions had trouble imagining what the final groves and fields will feel like.  But the design of the park seems severely cerebral, without any of the warmth and weirdness of the renderings, which promised a lush, enveloping ground.  It was blisteringly hot during our visit and there were, throughout The Hills, no shaded ground, no permanent water fountains, no permanent restrooms, and only a handful of seats.  The Hills doesn’t yet have the grace of the city’s loveliest parks, or the amenities of its roughest. Image courtesy of West 8. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/cooper-hewitt-playground-adult monthly 0.5 2016-08-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515024123-VF0NWV7ECRMMIHQQ3WLF/tumblr_ocfxsdt7HB1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY CHILD-PROOF The Cooper-Hewitt Museum is like a mullet, with a staid canopied visitor entrance in front, on East 91st Street, and a dreamy garden in back, on East 90th Street.  That garden is half a block deep, with low trees and shrubs, an open lawn, meandering walkways, and flowering vines tumbling down the back of the building.  It had been for paying visitors only until 2015, when the museum completed its renovations and it was opened to the public.  The garden offers an intimate alternate to Central Park, which is just across Fifth Avenue.  There’s a row of smart orange cafe tables under umbrellas, where one can meet a friend for coffee or wine, and wood benches under trees, where one can slip away with a book. I stepped inside this Tuesday, after a difficult morning, to unwind before heading home.  And I was surprised to find that the place was overrun with small children.  Their strollers were lined up along the west fence and their blankets were laid out on the grass. These children weren’t visiting the museum, but had been brought by distracted parents and nannies so that they could run, scream, and snack on the lawn, under the wary gaze of a museum guard, while they themselves stood to one side checking their phones and, in general, checking out. The garden was designed by a team of heavy-hitters including Walter Hood, Diller Scofidio +Renfro and RAFT.  Furnishings are by Yves Behar and Heatherwick Studio.  Right now there’s an installation of black and white benches designed by Hood, inspired by Roberto Burle Marx’s iconic curving paving tiles at Rio, that the children were climbing on and jumping off of.  A great chunk of our popular culture (television, movies, musical theater) has been given over to children, engineered so that it’s appealing and inoffensive to their eyes and ears.  Must this little space – a pocket of high design – be given over too? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/golden-record-sagan-voyager monthly 0.5 2016-08-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515024610-REO3VVJMCVUA4JCNIUKG/tumblr_objfslFfPT1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ONE LIFE ON EARTH For the launch of Voyager in 1976, NASA commissioned pop-scientist Carl Sagan to create a document that could be carried on board to explain human life on earth.  That phonograph, The Golden Record, contains Scenes From Earth (139 scientific diagrams and photographs), Sounds from Earth (21 audio clips), Songs from Earth (27 compositions), and Greetings from Earth (55 audio hellos, including one in whalesong).  A copy of the record was left, along with a player, on both the Voyager I and II capsules.  They remain aloft, where they might encounter, as Sagan had hoped, “advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space.” While the idea is terribly moving – that there are beings on other planets that will find our record and become our friends – the documents themselves are not.  The scientific diagrams have been simplified graphically, without text and shade, stripped of their musicality and complexity.  The photographs are radically inclusive, showing men and women of different ages, cultures and races, but they’re grainy and loosely composed, with a cloying Family of Man sweetness.   The songs are an instant controversy.  The playlist includes, correctly, three compositions by Bach and, incorrectly, no Beatles song.  (EMI didn’t allow Sagan to use “Here Comes the Sun.”)  The sounds are mundane but poignant, perhaps because they’ve been curated and recorded so painstakingly.  Their listing alone goes a way to capture the Whitmanesque texture of life on earth (…”Chimpanzee/Wild Dog/Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter”) There’s a famous scene at the end of Manhattan when Woody Allen lists those things that make life worth living, and while it’s solipsistic and culturally specific, it’s true.  For each one of us there are certain things (a shade of blue, a flavor of hard candy, a pop song, a rainstorm) that rupture the texture of everyday life and, for whatever reason, carry great meaning.  When compiling The Golden Record Sagan was striving for a universal comprehensibility and comprehensiveness.  What if, instead, he had reached for personal power: astronomical problems, a favorite poem, a town he dreamed of visiting, his childhood home.  That record would not have given us life on earth, but one life on earth, and that would have been enough. Image courtesy of NASA. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/thom-browne-uniformity-fit-fashion-conformity monthly 0.5 2016-08-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515024909-EFJX4CS8HP4C5U534CIO/tumblr_oagl1yWbub1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ONE FOR ALL A new exhibit at FIT, Uniformity, assembles notable work, athletic, and military uniforms, and the high fashions they’ve inspired.  There are beautiful uniforms here: a 1942 US Womens naval reserve skirtsuit by Mainbocher, an embellished nineteenth-century British mess jacket, and a dark 1920′s Marymount school dress with a sky blue collar and bow.  And there are beautiful couture garments, including a twisting, one-shouldered, princess-seamed corset dress by John Galliano for Dior, in silk camouflage.  The most joyful garments on display are TWA flight attendant outfits from 1975 designed by Stan Herman, polyester separates in cherry red, mustard yellow, cobalt blue, and flecked oatmeal, that can be mixed, crazily, at will.  They hardly seem like uniforms. But when happens when uniforms are intended to, and do, foster conformity? Thom Browne’s 2009 Mens show gets at the potentially sinister underpinnings. Browne dresses 41 models in identical grey flannel suits, raincoats, brogues and briefcases, and sends 40 of them to sit in neat rows of desks.  They enter in file, hang their coats on stands, pull on sweaters, sit down, and type.  Their leader, seated in front, facing them, at an identical desk, remains half a step ahead, dictating their rhythms.  The set piece is hypnotic, and not without charm.  As the leader rings a bell to mark the lunch break, each man opens his attache and pulls out a sandwich and an apple from a brown paper bag. Browne’s suits are a skillful reinvention, and caricature, of the prep school uniform and the white collar suit.  The trousers are famously short, and the jackets fit tight around the torso and under the arms, giving the men who wear them an innocent, adolescent appeal.  But all the men in the 2009 show are young, tall, slender, and, except for one, white.  Their striped white sweater armbands, brylecreemed hair, vacant stares, and unchallenged submission call to mind Nazi youth.  A uniform, without freedom, quickly becomes hegemony. Photo courtesy of Thom Browne.  https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/cao-fei-ps1-la-town monthly 0.5 2016-07-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515025013-PW5BMVCW3PHKESME2X05/tumblr_o9sp7ifZH71qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DYSTOPIA NOW For young artists in China, the explosive physical and economic growth of their country is an inevitable subject.  Cao Fei grew up in a “new” city, Guangzhou, and tackles it head on, in diverse media (video, games, sculpture, photography, diorama), masterfully.  As depicted in her show at PS1, the new cities of China are dystopias, conceived in eccentric styles and scales, and populated by young men and women who silence their inner lives, and find more meaningful expression in cosplay, video games, and fantasy. Fei’s most eloquent works are a series of dioramas she constructed as backdrops for the 2014 video La Town.  They’re made from model kits whose flat plastic parts are used to build scaled replicas of vehicles, buildings and  monuments.  The models parts here are blasted and refinished to give them a patina, assembled partially, and combined with elements from other model kits.  Because the pieces are at different scales, and from different kits (a German town square, a McDonalds drive-through, an office tower, a beach scene, a zoo scene), the dioramas offer strange new fractured narratives.  They’re displayed in sealed glass cases and lit with small hanging bulbs that throw horror-movie shadows. The buildings are wrecked, with missing walls and floors, and look as if they’ve survived an earthquake.  The lawns are an unnaturally hyper-green.  The scenes are bristling with life, crowded with scale figures (all Caucasian) who gather in small mobs, run into the street, jump off of buildings, and copulate publicly.  In one diorama a bullet train is derailed after hitting Santa and his reindeer.  In another a one-legged woman swims in a pond below the site of an airplane crash.  In another a trio of pole-dancers perform in an old movie theater while a construction crew works in the mezzanine above.  The dioramas are gorgeously choreographed and crafted – Bosch for our age.  And they serve up, quietly, a bold critique of the new culture and architecture in China. La Town, White Street.  2014.  C-print, 120 x 80cm. Image courtesy Cao Fei.  https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/perez-museum-miami-herzogdemeuron monthly 0.5 2016-07-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515025215-6JPFXUK64G9S2LDVNXIM/tumblr_o9go3hyMXE1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY EATEN AWAY On the inside, Miami’s Perez Art Museum is everything one expects from a Herzog & De Meuron building: smart, spare, ingeniously composed, and finely detailed.  Its galleries are perfectly scaled for modern and contemporary art: large enough for full-blown installations, and small enough to foster intimacy.  These rooms, smooth-skinned concrete boxes, are stacked in a loose pinwheel pattern with broad halls in between to wander. What’s most surprising is the way the building is eroded at its edges.  Its core, the cluster of galleries, is wrapped with a broad concrete patio and covered with wood slats, and its open courtyards are decorated with hanging column-like gardens.  From the outside the building has no clear form – no straightforward profile, and no iconic image.  (The richest, most descriptive photographs of it available online are those taken during construction, before the building was covered and the landscape around it had grown in.)  It’s as if the tropical air and sun are eating away at the museum’s rough, handsome brutalist structure.  I visited on a wet, windy day, and rain splattered through the roof slats, rose in a mist from the deck, and dripped from the swaying planters.  Yet the patio, though exposed, was comfortable; one felt sheltered there by the building. It’s a shame that the galleries themselves are isolated, visually and spatially, from the outside.  Many have full-height windows, but when I visited the blinds were pulled down and one couldn’t see out to the patio below, the ocean beyond, and the sky above.  Why didn’t the architects offer fixed views to the outside from galleries, and into the galleries from the outside?  The building’s expressive, porous outer shell offers a primal experience of the elements, but its interiors remain closed off. Photo © Iwan Baan. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/degas-etching-modernism monthly 0.5 2016-07-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515025411-4K4POWTFOXNGON4V0FXL/tumblr_o9pnaykCI81qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SHADOWY ORIGINS A friend, a painter, was eager to see the Degas show at MoMA, A Strange New Beauty, because she finds him “incredibly modern.”  The monotypes on display certainly are.  In this printing method ink is smeared across and then removed from a metal plate, a way of image-making less belabored and more spontaneous than oil painting, where layers of slow-drying colors are built over a canvas.  Perhaps Degas took to the monotype because he had a loose hand.  If one looks closely, at both his prints and paintings, one sees that the human figures are modeled bluntly.  Arms and legs have awkward, rubbery proportions, and sometimes end in stumps.  The artist gives women faces that are unspecific, often turned, and not very pretty.  Some of the prints are shockingly abstract in the uncertain boundaries between figure and ground, object and space.  Degas was a nineteenth-century painter looking a century or more ahead. Where Degas finds form precisely is in light, and it is light, not ballerinas, that is his primary subject.  The women he renders in the monotypes (dancers, prostitutes, showgirls) all feel as if they’re emerging from shadow.  In some instances the atmosphere is so dense, and the figures so obscured, that they look like sea creatures rising from a storm.  In the monotype process, in shaping images from a spill of ink, by wiping and scraping away parts, Degas was finding form in darkness.  (There’s one of Degas’ photographs on display at MoMA too, showing his interest in a technique that relies explicitly on the form-giving properties of light.)  That the artist can depict the body with such specificity and charm without describing it literally speaks to his skill in modeling light.  The scenes here – of theaters, cafes, bordellos, bedrooms, studios – aren’t, like the work of other Impressionists, flickering pleasurably between the figural and the abstract.  They stand firmly with the abstract. Edgar Degas. Bedtime (Le Coucher), c. 1880 85. Monotype on paper. Plate: 14 7/8 × 10 7/8″ (37.8 × 27.7 cm). Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/japanese-architecture-soufujimoto-housena monthly 0.5 2016-07-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515027215-0EYR1GTNM2I20EVE9JVW/tumblr_o9pmyvy2dK1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY CONCRETE DREAMS How does one exhibit architecture in a museum?  Drawings and models engage, but they cannot take the place of the thing itself, the building.  The architecture show at MoMA, A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond, falls into this trap.  It’s a supremely elegant installation.  Each one of six small second floor galleries is given over to one of the six brilliant architects celebrated here: Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, and Junya Ishigami.  Models and prototypes are set out on small white stands, and drawings and quotes are pinned to pale grey walls.  Photos and renderings, about the size of 11x8 sheets, are projected onto floor-length white linen scrims.  The overall effect is low-fi and dreamy, as much of the work here is. The exhibit designers might have decided to project photographs to avoid visible monitors, to emphasize the handicraft in the work.  But the images are small and the linen blurs them so much that they’re practically illegible.  We never see what these buildings are meant to look like or what they actually look like, and this is a tremendous disservice, because almost all of them have been built.  The ideas and geometries given expression in the drawings are models are astounding: at once simple, obtuse, lucid, startling and lyrical.  But having ideas about a building is dreaming, not architecture.  Since visitors don’t see the renderings and photos clearly, the work remains paper architecture. Fujimoto conceived a small house in Tokyo, House NA, by splitting each of its rooms, halls, closets, and stair runs into a separate volume, building each one from glass, and stacking them in a shifting, ramshackle pile.  The wood and board model of the building at MoMA is lovely, like a spirited doll house, but photographs of the house itself – that show clearly its modest scale, its precarious foothold along the sidewalk, its bamboo-thin metal frame, its unapologetic transparency – are surreal.   As astonishing as the concept of the house is, it’s more astounding that it’s been executed skillfully, with each of its quietly radical propositions (about space, about structure, about domesticity) intact.  That might be true for all the projects included in this show.  We understand the ideas, now show us the buildings. House NA, Tokyo, 2011, by Sou Fujimoto.  Photo by Iwan Baan. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/rickowens-cyclops-fashion-show monthly 0.5 2016-07-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515026525-U3DE12V620OLIOHYNNPP/tumblr_o9pn59xRiH1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY STRAPPING YOUNG LASSES Rick Owens’ SS16 Womens show Cyclops was performed in a Parisian bunker, with rough concrete floors and bare columns, and was presided over by three soul singers in long black gowns, who solemnly delivered This Land is Mine, the theme from the movie Exodus.  The looks were built from layered sheaths that wrapped the body like space-age saris, pulling taut across the backside and bunching up in front like broken fenders, in shades of black, putty, pale saffron and stale mint.  The whole affair was what one expects of Owens: bold, arty, gothic, tribal and street. What elevated the show to theater was its procession.  Every third model carried around her another model: strapped to her back like a knapsack, cradled to her stomach like a infant, or hooked around her neck by the knees like a stethoscope.  The spectacle of each of these women (slender, straight-faced, serene) carrying another live, full-blooded woman through the show, strapped in place with a harness, was effecting.  Their poses were awkward, athletic, and strangely asexual.  The pairs looked less like lovers than like conjoined sisters, grappling enemies, twin demons.  Their positions recalled the famous Annie Leibowitz photograph of Leigh Bowery hauling his wife Nicola Bateman over his belly like a fetus.  But Owens’ show wasn’t a statement about birth and maternal power.  It was about finding grace in extremes, a punk ballet. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/doris-salcedo-furniture-perez-museum monthly 0.5 2016-06-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515026825-WWG1VNMDOQKGXJKJOCZ0/tumblr_o9c7ngXpS81qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY THESE CHAIRS CAN TALK Doris Salcedo’s retrospective at the Perez Art Museum shows her sculpture to great advantage.  The large, bare, squarish concrete galleries it fills flow seamlessly into one another.  Her sculptures, assemblages of found objects (furniture, clothing, hardware), are set out within them loosely and purposefully, pulling a visitor this way and that, in a state of semi-distraction, as she moves through. Salcedo’s most powerful works, made from 1989 to 2008, take, slice, turn, reassemble, and seal shut with concrete traditional wood tables, chairs, bureaus, bed frames, and almirahs.  This is the kind of furniture that filled our grandparents homes, and that can be found in thrift stores today.  By recombining them and filling their voids with concrete the artist renders them useless, helpless, mute. The pieces are immaculately crafted; the wood frames are precisely cut and fastened, the concrete is poured to a soft sheen.  Their careful syntactical play (a chair turned to face a wall, a table stacked upside-down within the frame of a dresser) engenders a sense of unease and confusion.  Ominous questions arise:  Whose bureau is this, and where is she now?  Things are deeply and quietly out of order. These are gorgeous sculptures.  They recall Eva Hesse’s ability to infuse common materials with talismanic power, and Rachel Whiteread’s quiet disruption of conventional architectural scale and language.  But what’s most remarkable is the power of each piece to speak – clearly and seriously – about silence, history, political oppression and personal dignity, themes Salcedo has spoken about throughout her career.  With works like this, she doesn’t need to say a word. Installation View, Perez Art Museum Miami, 2016.  Furniture by Doris Salcedo, 1989.  Photo by World Red Eye, courtesy of Perez Art Museum and Doris Salcedo. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/capricious-all-of-artist-prankster-martin-creed monthly 0.5 2016-06-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515026726-6J7XK5P2MJT7G1JDKOFM/tumblr_o95m6aNxcL1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FOLLIES Artist-prankster Martin Creed‘s work has the slickness of television advertising; it’s bright, spare, and sprightly.  And its content, even when overtly political (like videos of refugees) or scatalogical (like films of people relieving themselves) is rendered practically irrelevant by its good cheer. For his retrospective at the Armory, The Back Door, Creed has been given the run of the place.  He fills smaller ground level rooms with quirky paintings, sculptures and installations.  One room has neat pyramidal stacks of chairs and tables, and another is packed with white melon-sized latex balloons.  He fills the low brick vaults along the Drill Hall with video-viewing booths.  One shows two dogs running across a blank white screen, and another shows hipsters vomiting against a blank white screen.  And he leaves the Drill Hall empty except for a giant screen hanging in the middle, which shows films of women eating yogurt in slow motion.  This is a show best approached breezily, with a light heart and few expectations.  One might stop and wonder Is this art? but one knows this is art, a type of art that doesn’t touch the soul and doesn’t aim too. My favorite part of the exhibit is a band of five young musicians (including drums, trumpet, cymbals, and singer) who roam the floor performing pop songs written by Creed.  They step into rooms unexpectedly, weave in between visitors without meeting their embarrassed glances, then pass out into another room.  They’re dressed in ragtag street clothes, like escapees from a juvenile prison, and have a po-faced determination that’s old-fashioned and slightly mad.  In the large, wood-lined halls of the Armory, their simple tunes hang in the air like hymns.  Their performance ties the show together, highlights the cavernous architecture of the building, and, quite simply, spreads joy. Still from ‘Work No. 732: Kicking Flowers’ by Martin Creed, 2007.  Courtesy of Martin Creed. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/menil-collection-art-gallery-houston monthly 0.5 2016-06-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515027322-SNMR4GFGRZK239PR7T6N/tumblr_o8o1ugHMqX1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ILLUMINATED The Menil Collection in Houston might be the most finely-executed building I’ve visited.  Its designer Renzo Piano is now a starchitect, the go-to guy for museum projects internationally, but when he completed the Menil in 1986 he was relatively unknown, and the building glows with a beginner’s passion and, very literally, sunlight. Its design succeeds at every basic level: landscaping, circulation, scale, materiality, and detail.  It’s  an intimate structure, modeled after the house that Philip Johnson designed for John and Dominique de Menil, and where their art collection had been originally displayed.  The one-story museum sits at the center of flat, grassy lot in a gracious residential neighborhood with manicured bungalows and century-old trees.  It’s planned simply, with a string of galleries along one long side, a string of support spaces along the other, and a tall corridor along the spine.  Outside, its horizontal wood siding is broken with slender steel columns.  Inside, its high white walls are set off by dark wood floors.  Some of its larger galleries are interrupted with small interior courtyards crammed with lush, jungle-like plantings.  The building’s signature elements are its long ceiling baffles, that curve gently in profile like razor clam shells, and that cover the hallways, galleries and exterior walkways.  They seem to scoop light inside, giving each space a dreamy glow.  The baffles are both complex and naive, mechanistic and natural.  At first glance they seem heavy, as if they’ve been sculpted from plaster or bone, and then, at the next turn, immaterial, like tissue.  On the afternoon I visited there were intermittent rains and, from one minute to the next, the rooms dimmed and brightened, until the clouds passed and they were bathed with sunshine.  In drawings and photographs the baffles seem heavy-handed, calculated, as if Piano were more interested in angles (which he studied) and hardware (which he also studied) than light.  But as installed at the museum the baffles are natural: entirely exposed and inconspicuous.  Through their effects, the building achieves a state of grace. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/but-that-voice-the-new-radiohead-album-is-music-to monthly 0.5 2016-06-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515027429-P0IKOPIL7Z5MOVP0G33J/tumblr_o8nzjdOokb1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BUT THAT VOICE The new Radiohead album A Moon Shaped Pool is music to soothe wounded adult souls.  Each of its eleven songs is a spacey, porous confection.  Instrumental lines swirl gently around one another, and the vocals float across the top. The effort would be easy to dismiss but for singer Thom Yorke’s voice, which is celestially beautiful.  It’s inspired much bad prose, and might again right now.  It doesn’t appeal directly, the way that Joni Mitchell’s and John Lennon’s voices do.  When I hear those artists I feel that I’m hearing them themselves, speaking to me.  Yorke’s voice, instead, impresses with its elusiveness, its quicksilver agility,  the way it slides across and then cuts through a song, descends into a wail and then emerges in a shout.  It can feel like an instrument that’s more than human, operating at unexplored registers and stirring up dormant emotions, like birdsong or violin. The beauty of Yorke’s voice is the unmaking of this album.  These songs aren’t complex dramatically – they don’t take anything as their subject – so his singing is reduced to gorgeous ornament.  Yorke is an accomplished songwriter and, when left to his own devices, without the band and with minimal accompaniment, can deliver pop songs with astonishing immediacy.  But on this album that voice serves no end. Artwork courtesy of Stanley Donwood and Radiohead. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/cindy-sherman-portraits-selfies monthly 0.5 2016-06-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515027815-LROMVKGQQ08Z6A89PT1I/tumblr_o7k0q4aABS1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PORTRAITS OF A LADY Cindy Sherman’s art flickers between theater and autobiography.  Over three decades she’s photographed herself while posing as movie starlets, sex show performers, circus freaks, great ladies from history, and pop culture icons.  In each instance, as she imagines herself in these roles, she challenges  female archetypes and, along with them, presumptions about gender, power, and representation. In the self-portraits on display at her current show at Metro Pictures she channels grand dames from the 30′s, wearing marcelled wigs, bias-cut gowns, and boa-trimmed shawls.  But the scenes are surprisingly placid, emptied of melodrama.  These are ladies in repose, assured in their social status. Earlier Sherman heroines possessed a jarring physical and psychic vulnerability.  Their stilted postures and expressions (perched on a ladder, peering in a bathroom mirror, sprawled on a hotel bed) embodied fear, anxiety, and sadness.  Those pictures had theatrically lit and composed backdrops that charged them dramatically, as if events – potentially tragic – were about to unfold. In her new portraits the images Sherman takes as backdrops (a leafless tree, a hillside Mediterranean town, a modern waterfront) are strangely static.  They are like the blandly pretty backdrops department store photographers use, and seem entirely unrelated to the women resting in front of them.  Here Sherman isn’t depicting female archetypes but a notion of herself, potent, as a contemporary art star.  She’s easily identifiable in each of the photographs, and in the gallery we stand looking at her, not the characters.  It would be false to claim that these pictures feel like product, but they don’t feel like art either.  They feel like opulent, gorgeously-crafted selfies. Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2016.  Courtesy of Metro Pictures. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/wearing-white-pop-songs-send-one-back-happily-or monthly 0.5 2016-06-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515027916-FHQDO86ZPPGSXMWTYAU1/tumblr_o80d06DGfO1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY WEARING WHITE A pop song sends one back, happily or not, to the time one first heard it, and to the feelings it first delivered.  It was like that, for me, seeing the collection of Robert Ryman paintings on long-term view at Dia Beacon.  When I first saw Ryman, at MoMA, as a college student, I was thunderstruck by the elegance of his square white-on-white canvases, and the drama they extracted from such slender means.  To say it simply, Ryman applies white paint to canvas and then attaches the canvas to a wall.  Seeing his paintings at Beacon brought me back to that moment of discovery, after which all other painting began to seem, somehow, rather obvious. The friend I visited Beacon with, a designer, found the paintings monotonous, and I suppose they are.  If one searches in painting for figure, narrative, composition, or message, one won’t find it in Ryman.  Like a lot of conceptual art, his works seem more like questions than things.  And if the primary question is What is a painting?  Ryman’s response is, A surface covered with paint. The canvases here, painted from 1958 to 2003, vary in size and medium.  Some are as small as memo pads and some are as large as garage doors.  Some are aluminum panels screwed to the walls with clips, some are sheets of paper stapled to the walls, and some are stretched canvases hung on wire.  The canvases, from the early 1960′s, are the richest.  They are small, about twelve inches by twelve inches, which draws one close.  From this vantage one sees clearly the warp and weft of the fabric, the chemical tint of the paint, and the field of squirming, whirling brushstrokes.  The yellowing canvases and rusting hardware give spatial depth and cultural authority.  These works, which once seemed to me bracingly contemporary, are now historic.  Robert Ryman, “Untitled,” ca. 1960. Artwork courtesy 2016 Robert Ryman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.  Photo courtesy Chang W. Lee/The New York Times. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/isaac-mizrahi-fashion-exhibit monthly 0.5 2016-05-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515028319-FFFF0ZX73UKKD59C9JZ6/tumblr_o7k0rwAELC1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PITCH-PERFECT The small, elegantly staged Isaac Mizrahi retrospective at The Jewish Museum is called An Unruly History.  While the designer’s personal and business affairs might be summed up this way, his designs cannot, for they are consistently impeccable.  As a dressmaker Mizrahi has the gift of making even the most extravagant garments (a skirt folded from twelve yards of taffeta, a minidress covered with dime-sized palettes stamped from Coca-Cola cans, an ankle-length sheath embroidered to resemble a totem pole) seem straightforward and utterly uncomplicated.  He can deliver opulence with perfect pitch.  In that sense he’s an ideal society designer. He’s also a distinctly American designer.  The clean lines and immaculate craftsmanship of his garments give them remarkable clarity.  These are fancy but unfussy clothes.  As styled for the runway, and on the mannequins here, the gowns and suits comprise complete looks in themselves, and don’t require jewelry, hats, shoes or bags to complete them.  Each piece is like the platonic ideal of a staple that a fashionable, well-to-do American woman would find hanging in her closet: an A-line dress, a houndstooth suit, a black bodysuit, a camel-colored wool coat. Taken together, Mizrahi’s pieces make up one fantastic wardrobe.   https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/brain-scan-eeg-graphics monthly 0.5 2016-05-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515028514-GBA2GNGQP1JOO183KJAL/tumblr_o442ppuZut1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.png DROWN ME IN BEAUTY INNER LIFE A friend of mine is recovering from a serious illness and was, through the most critical passage of it, connected to an EEG machine.  The device linked electrodes on his skull to a large LED monitor with a built-in camera that washed his bed in cool blue light.   On the screen twenty black lines ran right-to-left across a blank white field.  A grainy stamp-sized live image of his face floated on the left side.  And a list of clinical terms doctors could select from to classify his condition ran down the right: Eyes Open, Head Movement, Awake, Talking, Drowsy, Coughing, Crying, Lethargic. Each line on an EEG maps a brain “wave,” and together they measure neurological climate.  The lines are rational and intricate, relentless, peaking and crashing, and, sometimes, criss-crossing.   When there’s a disruption in normal function, as in a seizure, the lines spike wildly, making a dark cloud.  Yet there is no trace left of even the most dramatic event; within thirty seconds one record is gone, swept away by new data emerging from the right side. The EEG is the most lyrical graphic notation I know, full of mystery.  Its lines recall, in their detail and complexity: topography, music, calligraphy, embroidery, choreography.   At any moment my friend’s EEG seemed to reveal more deeply who he was than his face and body, stilled as they were by illness.  I thought I found, within the machine’s continual stream, his memories, his breath, his dreams, his tender broken spirit.  Looking at the EEG monitor was like peering into his soul.  https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/met-museum-logo-graphic-design monthly 0.5 2016-05-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515029427-G30ZC9HP0GBPI02QWPTF/tumblr_o7jz3jpBDb1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BELLES LETTRES I knew there would be trouble when, in 2013, The Metropolitan Museum of Art hired a Chief Digital Officer and abandoned its metal admission pins.  Then, in February 2016, to coincide with the opening of the The Met Breuer, the museum unveiled a new brand identity, adopting “The Met,” spelled out in squat cherry red letters, as its official logo.  Designed by Wolff Olins, the company that guided the Tate through its phenomenal expansion, the intent was to bring the museum into the twenty-first century. The new logo, bright and informal, leaves me longing for the DaVinci-style M that served as the museum’s logo, perfectly, for 45 years.  That single letter, based on a Renaissance woodcut in the collection by Fra Luca Pacioli, looked as if it had been hand-drafted, with regulating lines and circles sketched finely around it.  It was instantly recognizable, and carried rich connotations: history, geometry, mathematics, proportion, rigor, rhythm, beauty. The new swollen run-on letters are, by comparison, garish.  They’re shaped messily and meet messily, like lumps of Play-Doh.  What suffers the most are the E’s, whose center strokes tilt upward like trumpets.  The lower E even gives over its top left corner to the soft shoulder of the preceding M.  And the two T’s are entirely different: the first kicks its little leg to the left, the second to the right.  These no longer letters, they’re cartoons.  The Met, one of our country’s most storied cultural institution, has reshaped its logo for illiterates. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sight-unseen-offsite-contemporary-design monthly 0.5 2016-05-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515029860-2ORMN77QWB0CLDHPOZ96/tumblr_o7aw2rxspc1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SLY DESIGN I declined to attend ICFF this week, picturing endless stalls of hyper-crafted wood furniture, twisted LED light sculptures, and hand-blocked wallpaper.  A last-minute invitation drew me instead to Sight Unseen Offsite (SUO), a small market curated by the design website.  It was the perfect antidote to the theatricality, commercialism, and insistent luxury of ICFF.  The sun-drenched 15th floor of the Grace Building, where SUO unfolded, was stripped to a bare concrete slab and white walls, and filled with young designers – makers of things – showing their wares on plywood tables. Despite the number of Pratt graduates and Brooklyn-based industries, the sensiblity was less Outer-Borough Artisanal than Understated Postmodern.  The designs (furniture, tableware, linens, carpets) shared a stripped-down 80′s formalism that tempered Memphis eccentricity with Real Simple minimalism.  The entire spectacle was sweetly ahistorical, because the designers are too young to have any memory of that era.  Products were crafted with basic geometries (thrown pillows shaped like pyramids, pipes shaped like cones, chairs shaped like cubes), bold graphics (checkerboard rugs, quilts with fields of squiggles), chalky pastels (hand-thrown dinnerware, shift dresses) and crayon-bright primaries (throw cushions, childrens toys).  There was a smartness to the products.  On the surface they seemed natural, simply put together.  But achieving this kind of grace actually requires a great deal of sophistication. Photo courtesy of Crosby Studios. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/met-breuer-architecture-brutalism monthly 0.5 2016-04-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515030032-BOEW0BZ82B6ISGHMVTA0/tumblr_o3n6uzmd0j1qdm8ato1_r1_250.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY UNFINISHED BUSINESS The old Whitney Museum uptown has, finally, been refinished, rechristened and reopened as the Met Breuer.  The inaugural exhibition, Unfinished: Thoughts Made Visible, collects Western artworks from the sixteenth century through the present that either were left unfinished or that embody an unfinished aesthetic.  This second category is highly dubious, and leaves the show open to paintings that are entirely finished, but that include bits of exposed canvas, patches of freewheeling brushstroke, or blank backgrounds.  There are major works by Titian, Velazquez, El Greco, Goya, and Picasso here, and almost all of the Impressionists, particularly Monet and Cezanne.  At the heart of the show, in a small interior gallery on the third floor, there are five majestic Turners, each not much larger than a tea tray, that render Atlantic views in a miasma of paint.  These canvases are awesomely complete.  They scream with life, and blow apart the weak thesis of this show. And then there is the museum itself, which has been lightly refurbished by Beyer Blinder and Belle, with its original brutalist sensibility left intact.  The thick coats of varnish have been scraped off the granite floor, the concrete ceiling coffers have been cleaned, and the partitions have been painted a flat dove grey.  The effect, when walking through at midday, is like wandering through a huge, luminous shell.  The refinishing highlights details of the architecture I had never noticed before: the rhyme of the square ceiling coffers with the floor tiles, the explosion in volume as one passes from the second floor to the high-ceilinged third floor, the pinched street views through the slanted cyclops windows, and the jagged, ignaceous-like concrete of the bearing walls.  This building is a gentle giant.  It’s raw sensuality and restrained proportions demonstrate, more so than any painting in the show, that the most thoughtful, accomplished work can feel, in the end, unfinished. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/city-pride-can-a-church-stand-for-an-entire-city monthly 0.5 2016-03-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515030186-35RR8GGOAH65I4WDKFNF/tumblr_o2xau1Tzdl1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY UNGODLY No modern city is as strongly identified with a single structure as Barcelona.  Basílica de la Sagrada Família is its unofficial emblem, and its architect, Antoni Gaudí, its unofficial patron saint.  Images of the famously unfinished church are splashed across every kind of merchandise, from artisinal t-shirts and silk scarves to cell phone batteries and one-Euro chocolate bars.  A visit is the central experience on the tourist route, like a visit to Ground Zero is in New York.  Tickets to the tower observatory cost 29 Euro, the equivalent of 29 city subway rides.  Yet the city’s mission to complete construction of the building, whose foundations were laid over a century ago, doesn’t seem crassly commercial.  It seems daft, and slightly heroic. When we visited, on a weekday morning, the church’s front facade was draped with nets and scaffolding, and its interior rang with the whine of drills and saws.  The front and side facades of the building, which were built first, under Gaudí’s direct supervision, have weathered majestically.  Their stone is darkened and roughened, and the richness and detail of the statuary feels Medieval.  But those parts of the facade more recently constructed, although to Gaudí’s design, look more like computer renderings.  The blocks here are smooth and taut, with little fine-grained embellishment.  No doubt Gaudí, when alive, worked closely with masons so that each block was carved to his specifications before it was raised.  There’s no way to know, or match, his vision. The church was consecrated in 2010, and there are rows of folding chairs cordoned off in the nave for parishioners.  It’s hard to imagine a less serene, private, or spiritual space than the church on a weekday morning.  There are throngs of tourists, guides and church employees roaming about, and an orgy of selfie-taking.  Sunlight streams through the stained glass windows, splashing the floor with cartoon-bright patches of red, green and yellow.  The columns and capitals, newly finished, have a kooky kinetic energy, but little authority or mystery.  This place simply doesn’t feel like a church; it feels like a playground. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/gaudi-casa-batllo-mila-modernisme monthly 0.5 2016-03-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515030313-VWC0ZXKITIUOH15G1Z5C/tumblr_o2x9qvu2vN1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY HOUSING WORKS Was Antoni Gaudí a sculptor or an architect, and does it really matter?  After seeing the insides of his two most famous residential works, Casa Batlló and Casa Milla, I say sculptor.  This master was trained as an architect and worked as an architect, with all the corresponding woes, battling the city over permits and clients over payments.  And he invented form as an architect, through drawings and models.  But there is a serious disjunction in his work, and in these two buildings especially, between their outsides and insides – between their expressive, convulsive, Modernisme exteriors, and their deeply conventional interiors. At both Milla and Batlló, staid nineteenth-century-style apartments are fitted behind radical twentieth-century facades.  The facades are undulating, pulsating, encrusted with twisting railings and psychedelic tilework, and topped with menacing, monstrous chimneys.  At Milla the stone blocks facing each story have been carved to resemble waves, with black metal balcony grilles floating in front like sheets of sea weed.  At Batlló the parlor floor balconies are framed with femur-like columns and braces, and the windows glazed with puddles of plasma-colored glass.  The life of both building lies on their facades, which look out from opposite sides onto Paysage de Gracia, the city’s most elegant street, just two blocks apart.  They show bold faces to the public. Inside both buildings, within their apartments, the plaster walls and ceilings are gracefully rounded and carved.  But the layouts are constrained by rectangular lots, and by the needs of bourgeois clients.  I’m not sure what Gaudí, or anyone else, could have done to transform a turn-of-the-century master bedroom, bathroom or maid’s room.  He designed signature tiles and furniture for the owners’ apartments.  But in vintage photographs these rooms are overstuffed with upholstered furniture and knickknacks, and have the dry, fussy feeling of Victorian homes.  They remain, on the inside, pre-modern.  How extraordinary that Gaudí’s patrons were willing to risk appearances like this.  They presented a revolutionary facade to Barcelona high society, while carrying on, inside, in the most predictable way. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/mies-barcelona-pavilion-less-more monthly 0.5 2016-03-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515031039-340FKEB4PYVYU2SN0N3O/tumblr_o2x59rpT6W1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY LESS IS LESS For anyone with any interest in architecture, visiting Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, when in the city, is an obligation.  One finds there, in a faithful reproduction of the original 1929 structure, what one expects: the travertine slab floor, the serene reflecting pools, the dramatically cantilevering roof, the floor-to ceiling window panes, the floating marble partition, the precious cruciform columns, and, presiding over it all, the life-size female statue in the back corner, who, with twisted torso and outstretched arms, seems to be practicing an arty minimalist dance. But the experience of the building is thin.  The first time I visited, two summers ago, the sun blasted the interior, giving the space a dreamy organic glow.  I wandered through, dazzled, and walked away, satisfied that I had encountered a building I’d known before, for decades, only through textbooks.  The second time I visited, this winter, the clouds hung low and gave the interior a cool blue cast.  The travertine floor, I saw, was streaked with years of grime.  The leather chair cushions were dull.  The richly veined sepia marble and bright red velvet curtains seemed, in combination, gauche.  And the chrome column covers, with a fattened profile and exposed flathead screws along each side, were clumsily executed. My friend, an architect, remarked, “This is a building that travels best in black and white photographs.”  Photography draws out the long perspectival lines of the walls and the roof, flattening them into elegant lines, wiry starburst compositions that Mies studied meticulously in collages before construction.  Photographs take the weight out of the materials, softening the figuring in the stone, dematerializing the low plaster ceiling, and rendering the glass invisible.  It brushes away the dull physicality of the building, and also the heavy-handedness of the design. The Pavilion was designed as a space to receive the King and Queen of Spain during the 1929 Exposition.  It’s less a proper building than a dressed-up shed, and its main spaces have no lights, electricity, security, plumbing and weatherproofing.  This program frees the design, so the plan can resolve itself with mathematical precision, like a difficult proof solved by a very clever student.  The Pavilion’s open plan falls easily into abstraction.  And the building itself is pretty in an immediate, uncomplicated way.  It’s forms are reduced, purged of historical references, which is how it became an icon of High Modernism.  But for someone deeply interested in design and construction, the Pavilion remains just that, a magnificent symbol.  All of its less leaves one wanting more of what one finds in buildings one loves: ornament and grit, tension and complexity. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/picasso-sculpture-moma monthly 0.5 2016-02-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515030615-YYLP8VUP803F58NX4SCK/tumblr_o27061Rs6S1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY JOY IN WOOD AND STEEL The year’s first art blockbuster, Picasso Sculpture at MoMA, sets out, simply, on plain white pedestals, 140 works, inside the fourth floor galleries.  The pieces aren’t captioned but numbered, so that visitors wander through with the show’s little white guide book open in their hands before them, dodging others engrossed with their own guide books, frozen, statue-like, throughout. The sculptures are, each one of them, crazily energetic, animated by unorthodox compositions and a sense of perpetual discovery.  Each era of work brings distinct pleasures.  The artist’s abstract Cubist sculptures have the same pictorial complexity and ambiguity as his contemporary paintings.  The artist’s straightforward figural sculptures are surprisingly tender.  The startling, life-size Man With Goat has the naturalistic proportions and unchallenged authority of a classical figure, and an emotional presence that rivals that of a real live human. The most exciting pieces are those from the 1950′s and 60′s, that straddle the abstract and the figural.  Each depicts one thing very clearly (a girl jumping rope, a woman holding a child, a jug filled with flowers) while also showing at the same time exactly what it is made from (screws, tin cans, colanders, baskets, canvas stretchers, a bicycle seat).  Picasso was a master form-maker and also a master bricoleur, collecting and combining found objects so skillfully that the assemblies, even the large metal ones, seem to have flown together spontaneously, driven by magnetic force.  These artworks have the simple, joyful charisma of children’s toys. Photo by Pablo Enriquez, © 2015 The Museum of Modern Art. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/fairytale-fashion-thom-browne monthly 0.5 2016-02-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515030815-8T8Q43S3OKDKURW2GQ4W/tumblr_o26wsv7eRf1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY STORIES FOR GIRLS A small exhibit at FIT takes on the magnificent subject Fairy Tale Fashion but falls flat.  It makes literal, and often unconvincing, connections between clothing described in well-known western fairy tales and runway fashions.  So there are, in the basement gallery, rows of mannequins dressed in Little Red Riding Hood capes, Cinderella ballgowns, Wicked Witch dresses, and Snow Queen suits.  What could have been a vivid exploration of ages-old cultural archetypes (Witch, Slave, Princess, Mermaid) is simply an excuse to pull, and display, outfits from the Museum’s permanent collection. The most powerful pieces weave fairy tale figures into fashionable, wearable clothing.  There’s a Dolce and Gabbana hooded gold dress, smothered with jewels, that evokes Medieval Princess and Joan of Arc, without being historically pedantic.  And there’s a white fur jacket and dress by J Mendel that evokes Sweet Russian Princess and Wicked Witch of the Tundra, simultaneously.  Less interesting are pieces so high-concept they end up looking like costumes from an off-Broadway show: an outrageously overscaled red vinyl hood by Commes des Garcons, and a motorcycle jacket worn over a Swan Lake tutu by Undercover. Two designers straddle the worlds of fairy tale and fashion with exceptional grace: Thierry Mugler and Thom Browne.  A shimmering, fitted silver leather fishtail sheath by Mugler feels as if it were crafted for a brassy Jazz-Age Mermaid.  And two stunning Thom Browne ensembles subvert their originary fairytale.  A womens red wool skirt suite with elaborate floral piecework dresses Little Red Riding Hood with punk splendor.  And a mens grey tweed suit with fraying hems is worn with a Big Bad Bear mask, exposing the animal appetites lurking within the perfect gentleman. The bear suit is the only male clothing on display, which brings up an aspect of fairy tales left unexamined here.  Where are all the boys: the Wizards, Wolves and Prince Charmings?  Which is to wonder, whom do our fairy tales speak to, and what do they teach, about clothing and everything else?  The most intriguing outfits on display here give the women who wear them a sexual and cultural authority that, most often, fairy tales deny. Photograph courtesy of Getty images. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/chanel-architecture-couture-2016 monthly 0.5 2016-02-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515031217-L0UOLO6YPMBH8PSA90SM/tumblr_o1ujdlevoI1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ALL DOLLED UP The Chanel Spring 2016 couture show was formally rigorous: a parade of 120 suits and gowns executed in muted gold tones with jewel-like embellishments.  The outfits were unified in their quiet opulence, and in their allegiance to the classic Chanel silhouette: a slim bottom with a top cut away at the neck and the waist.  The models sported identical low rolled buns, high curved-heel wedges, and Cleopatra eyeliner, a look that was part Dovima and part Princess Leia.   But the fashion was upstaged by the scenery.  The show’s stated theme was ecology and it was presented inside the Gran Palais on a set with lawns, trees, a three-story wood cabana, and blank blue backdrops standing for cloudless sky.  The cabana’s unadorned wood slat construction felt vaguely “ecological” and very, very modern.  Its tidy construction sat in perfect contrast to the majestic arching steel ribs of the building above. Models emerged from the cabana one by one and circled the lawn in a stoned robotic shuffle.  The fringes, beading and brooches on their dresses bobbed like wings and antennae.  Mica Arganaraz paraded solo, at the end, in a fitted bridal gown and hoodie encrusted with white beads.  She skimmed the walkways, slowed by the the heavy train of the dress, like a swan. For the finale all sixty models gathered inside the cabana as its front panels folded and flipped open, simultaneously, slowly, like so many suburban garage doors.  The spectacular doll-house view revealed all the young women in their evening clothes, at once.  As they searched the crowd blankly and accepted the applause they looked less like dolls, or like young women, than like the most exquisite, exotic animals. Photo: Courtesy of Fashion to Max https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/who-are-you-in-the-week-since-david-bowie-died monthly 0.5 2016-01-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515031922-DP2OD71ZM5B13AIESJCZ/tumblr_o14uaqIqkf1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FREE TO BE YOU In the days after David Bowie died, some recalled his accomplishments as a singer-songwriter, and many recalled his bold sense of style, his facile gender-fluidity, and his position as a heroic outsider.  He’s a music icon but what captivates is his identity. Bowie was fine-boned and fragile-looking, and possessed, in addition, an uncanny photographic intelligence.  He knew fashion and makeup, but even more he knew his angles, and how to project a potent image for the camera.  As a schoolboy it was his movement instructor who first identified his star quality, not his music teacher or choir master.  As a performer he adopted a series of fictional identities, all convincing and also, somehow, deeply felt.  Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke are remembered as real people, more so than any of Madonna’s fashion-savvy reincarnations or Lady Gaga’s self-obscuring personae. Bowie himself remained, to the public, mostly unknown.  As a follow up to his obituary the New York Times ran a pleasing, gossipy piece about how the pop star built an anonymous, bourgeois, (mostly) paparazzi-free life for himself and his family in an apartment building on a busy shopping street in SoHo.  For formal events he put on a tuxedo and fixed his hair.  At other times he walked his neighborhood alone, unshaven, wearing jeans, sneakers and baseball caps, (mostly) undetected.  He bough fruit at the deli and magazines at the newsstand. Years ago, on a summer afternoon, I saw Bruce Springsteen walking through Union Square.  He was wearing an ankle-length black leather trenchcoat and motorcycle boots, and had his wife beside him and a scrum of bodyguards trailing six steps behind.  He was a blue collar rock star playing Blue Collar Rock Star.  Maybe this is why Bowie was so remarkable.  He crafted a series of images for himself that were so indelible, so intoxicating, that they allowed his own self, unmoored, to move freely behind. David Bowie, 1975, photograph by Steve Schapiro. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/jacqueline-de-ribes-met monthly 0.5 2016-01-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515032421-1YBUYXX062LGBZGTQ599/tumblr_o0rfeaZtyt1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SUITING ONESELF A small show at the Met’s Costume Institute highlights the wardrobe of designer Jacqueline de Ribes.  De Ribes is a French Countess and socialite whose natural beauty and  elevated taste endeared her to the couturiers she has patronized over the decades, including Valentino, Yves St. Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld.  In the 1980′s she went on to form a couture house of her own. The clothes she commissioned and the clothes she created are all of a piece: refined in proportion and structure, bold in color and detail.  She tinkered with couture garments to suit her needs and her figure.  She asked Yves St. Laurent to remake a shimmering fishscale-sequined sheath dress as a dinner gown.  She asked Valentino to raise the waistline of a red silk blouson dress.  And she asked Marc Bohan to remove a bow from the waist of a bodice and enlarge the one at its shoulder.  In each case the designers followed directions and the garments, on display here, look entirely natural.  The show is a testimony to the methods of these old-school couturiers, who sustained delicate relationships with wealthy, well-positioned women like de Ribes, their main clients.  Today couture houses, led by contracted designers and managed by global conglomerates, seem focused on devising attention-grabbing outfits for starlets to borrow for red carpet events.  For de Ribes couture dressing wasn’t media spectacle; it was a way of life. The show is also an testimony to 80′s event dressing and its concomitant excesses.  The fashions on display – dressy ankle-length gowns and pantsuits – brought back a nostalgia for that era, when it was socially acceptable to display personal wealth.  The gowns are embellished with lace panels, ostrich feathers, metal palettes, cultured pearls, and cut crystals.  The silhouettes are rouched, draped, pieced and ballooned.  But the garments, as displayed, feel dramatic rather than excessive, luxurious rather than vulgar.  Like her American contemporary, Jacqueline Kennedy, de Ribes’ rich personal style was tempered by a sense of the appropriate.  She dressed to suit her life, and her life was lavish. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/antonio-martorell-drawing monthly 0.5 2016-01-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515032825-BHZJZI7A6SVRD2X7PKV5/tumblr_o0cmfx3k2k1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY THE PEN IS MIGHTIER There’s an exhibit, Imalabra, at the Museo de las Americas in San Juan devoted to artist Antonio Martorell and his “amigos.”  It’s really a tribute to the stamina and imagination of Martorell himself, whose ouevre spans five decades and a dazzling, almost comical, array of media: installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, illustration, printmaking, film, and set and costume design.  Martorell’s work calls to mind that of his contemporary Lucas Samaras, whose lifelong project also seems less concerned with the expression of formal ideas than the act of producing things. Both men do so with such ferocity and velocity that these things, taken as a whole, furnish a kind of autobiography. Almost all of Martorell’s works in the show, which is organized around large-scale installations, rely on his brilliance as a draftsman.  His hand is energetic, authoritative, and playful, and his sensibility is dense, so that his drawings (ink on plastic, charcoal on paper, pen on board) have a powerful emotional charge.  Compositionally, figures often collect on one side of the page, as if they are about to burst out of it.   Characters are rendered taut with kinetic energy, in tension with one other and their settings. Martell integrates words with images particularly skillfully.  Text, rendered in a large langorous script, is often laid over figures, which are often drawn across pages torn from a book, adding pictorial depth.  In other works drawings are rendered on lengths of fabric and draped across frames and furniture, complicating their legibility.  The show includes life-size silhouettes of hip street characters stamped on canvas, framed portraits of political figures crafted with shards from aluminum cans, vinyl floor coverings printed with newspaper collages, and, towards the end, a series of simple (and stunning) charcoal drawings of a bookshelf.  All of these pieces can be understood as drawings, as surfaces inscribed with story.  If the show asks, broadly, How far can drawing take you?, the answer is, Very far indeed. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/taliesin-west-lloyd-wright monthly 0.5 2016-01-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515032738-FM7SUKMV5I9VDMGGZGVD/tumblr_o0cihxAoZi1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY THE WRIGHT STUFF In addition to being a master architect, Frank Lloyd Wright was a master storyteller and a master showman, skills he put to excellent use constructing his own outsized persona.  Many of his buildings (particularly the houses) can be understood independently of the man, but Taliesin West, his Arizona home and school, cannot.  It’s a vivid, eccentric work forged from the disparate influences that shaped his personality.  It’s name is Celtic, derived from a Welsh word meaning “shining brow.”  Its materials, plantings and colorings reference, gently, Native American traditions.  And its geometries and planning exploit, magnificently, modernist principles of free space. The buildings that make up the complex possess a monstrous sculptural charisma, real-world presence, that owes less to good planning and composition than to inventive, unorthodox construction.  They have few of the traits we associate with canonical modernism (insistent grids, reduced facades, restrained materiality).  Instead they are crafted from a rich, varied palette of materials, including stones culled from the site, rough concrete pours, stained hardwood, and painted steel, all combined with dazzling elan (if not always good sense).  The buildings seem less “constructed” than “assembled,” with elements conventional architects might shy away from: bare canvas roofing, mitered glass corner windows, steeply sloping masonry retaining walls, and exposed wood frames tipped dramatically from the horizontal. In fact the buildings at Taliesin were built by hand, by Wright’s apprentices (i.e. paying students).  Though their designs were likely drawn and studied painstakingly, the buildings feel loosely-structured, concocted.  In their formal ambition, willful eccentricity, happy syncretism and irreducible physicality, Taliesin is the most Wrightian of Wright’s projects that I’ve seen.  The campus embodies a vision so peculiar, so evocative, so expressive, that it seems to have sprung directly from his head onto the land. Photograph © Pedro E. Guerrero. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/lloyd-wright-david-gladys-house monthly 0.5 2016-01-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515033248-13AXJ89NT5WBC09YDXNS/tumblr_nza0v4szfG1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DOMESTIC ARTS In 1952, in Phoenix, about half an hour from his perch at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright built a house for his son David and daughter-in-law Gladys.  That house has recently been opened to the public, and what a marvel it is. It’s a small structure, closer in spirit and in scale to a Usonian House than to the expansive, majestic Prairie Style houses Wright is most famous for.  Its enclosure is only about sixteen feet wide, and its doorways are barely 5′-6″ high.  Like all Wright creations, the house has a vivid sculptural character.  Its kooky, spinning, circular geometries prefigure the Guggenheim, and remain true to the space-age stylings the architect favored at mid-century.  Entering is dramatic: one approaches on a gravel path below a broad curving ramp, walks up that ramp, and then passes through a low threshold into a living room that seems to hover above ground.  The house’s sloped copper roof juts out savagely at the far end, like the prow of a spaceship. Yet the feeling isn’t avant-garde; it’s intimate.  Wright seems to have designed the house to serve real people rather than the visions in his head.  And it’s being shown in an informal way that honors this.  When I visited, during the holidays, there were doormats at each entrance, LED lanterns lining the walkways, and a Christmas tree in the living room.  A circular coffee table, displaced by the tree, was stored upside down on the bed in the second bedroom.  Wright-designed chairs and lamps, not original to the design, had been purchased and set in empty nooks.  These additions all give the place a warm, lived-in kind of clutter. (In fact the house really is a home; right now one of the architect’s great-granddaughters is in residence.)   True to Wright’s reputation for being a less-than-pragmatic builder, the house needs improvements.  Some wood coffers on the living room ceiling are water-damaged.  The concrete lining at the bottom of the entrance ramp is spalling, and the steel reinforcing inside rusting.  The ramp’s guard wall has crumbled, leaving holes along the bottom where one’s foot can slide through.  The plain, rough masonry blocks at the facade have been regrouted in a shade that doesn’t match the original. At the end of our tour our guide asked us for overall impressions.  Several visitors remarked that the house still feels “modern.”  One, a former home builder, admired its uncanny domesticity: “You walk right in and it feels like a house.”  This is true, and, for an architect with Wright’s titanic ambitions and abilities, also remarkable. Photograph © Pedro E. Guerrero. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/clash-punk-fashion-music monthly 0.5 2015-11-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515034713-I3ZOU52EMIJY88LRSNB6/tumblr_nxvwgtOslW1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PUNK SOIGNEE Hearing In the Hammersmith Palais on the radio last week sent me sifting through old photographs of The Clash online, which made me understand how terrifically glamorous they were.  Punk valued the damaged, the distorted,and the broken-down, and The Clash, at first glance, fit the bill.  Their sound was aggressive, their posture trenchant.  They dressed in zippered jackets and combat boots, and had bad teeth and madman haircuts.  But, even in the early days, they were always put-together, brilliantly dressed and coiffed.  They achieved a kind of punk soignée. Paul Simonon, the band’s bassist, was a painter working at Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Sex when guitarist Mick Jones recruited him, largely because of his style.  Simonon played a key role in outfitting the band, and guiding photo and stage set designs.  At first the musicians sported skinny jackets and ties, and shirts with hand-stenciled slogans and Pollock-style paint splatters.  Later they wore police and military uniforms, zoot suits, ranger hats, gasoline attendant shirts, neckerchiefs, and string ties.  Much of the boldness and detail in their dress is lost in photographs and video, which are shot mostly in grainy black and white, and in shadowy tour buses, dressing rooms, and concert halls. The band hit a sartorial peak when they opened for The Who at Shea Stadium in 1982.  Simonon wore camouflage pants, a camel topcoat, and a Mets cap, with walnut-sized silver rings across his knuckles.  Jones wore a cherry red parachute jumpsuit with a green Che Guevara beret.  Frontman Joe Strummer wore contrasting camouflage prints and a coonskin cap.  All of them sported shining eight-hole Doc Martens and, in some photographs, carried baseball bats like walking sticks.  They don’t look like a punk band, and they don’t look like newly-minted rock stars either.  They look like art students dressed for Halloween. Photograph by Neal Preston.  The Clash backstage at Shea Stadium, October 13, 1982. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/placeless-i-was-excited-to-see-the-show-of-early monthly 0.5 2015-11-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515033335-7PZ8FYZYQP3JBH7SJOZY/tumblr_nxgr990z5e1qdm8ato2_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY NO ONE’S HOME There’s a show of Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi at Scandinavia House called, misleadingly, Painting Tranquility.  Hammershøi is famous for the mute, enigmatic tone of his domestic interiors.  These are composed like Vermeer’s, with views into small rooms, often populated by a lone young woman.  The spaces are uncluttered and shadowed, their surfaces revealed by daylight that spills inside through half-open doors and windows. It’s a disservice to compare Hammershøi to Vermeer, whose masterful handling of light and volume give them a ravishing optical lyricism.  And it’s a disservice to see Hammershøi’s interiors, as they’re displayed here, alongside his portraits, landscapes and street scenes, which are less skillfully rendered.  The Danish painter doesn’t handle the human figure, the landscape, or architecture with ease.  And his handling of light and color, in all genres, remains muddled, something that’s hard to understand in reproductions.  One wall caption explains that he liked to paint through drizzle.  This is apparent in the grey cast of the canvases, that feel as if they need to be wiped clean. Hammershøi is often considered the Scandinavian Edward Hopper, whose views capture a cultural spirit, specifically, that of bourgeois nineteenth-century Copenhagen. The wall texts describe the canvases as “melancholic,” “contemplative and claustrophobic,” with “evacuated narrative.”  They’re unsettling because they’re empty, not just of people and activity, but of emotional content.  As one approaches a painting, to enter it fully, it dissolves back into paint.  One searches these stills scenes for flashes of loneliness, fear and despair, and finds nothing.  If anything, one comes away with a new appreciation for Hopper (and Nolde and Munch too), whose paintings are throbbing, haunted, devastating.  By comparison those by Hammershøi aren’t tranquil; they’re banal. Vilhelm Hammershøi, View of Jægersborg Allé. Gentofte, Interior with the Artist’s Easel, 1910. Oil on canvas, Statens Museum for Kunst. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/wolfgang-tillmans-exhibition-photography monthly 0.5 2015-10-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515037014-5H9LIVLU9MQMYSDEM2VV/tumblr_nviprjvc7P1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY STILLED LIFE Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’s current show at Zwirner scatters digital prints, in various sizes and formats, throughout the rooms of the gallery.  There are posters hung on the walls with clips, 3x5 prints set flat on plywood tables, and artwork-sized images in frames.  Though eccentric, the installation is elegant and sincere.  At a time when anyone with a smartphone and an Instagram account uses photographs to craft a personal identity, Tillmans’ speak richly, and simply, about his life. These photographs don’t fall into a narrative with predictable crescendos, but, taken together, give a complex, vivid account.  There are tender snapshots of lovers and friends.  There are archly-composed still-lifes of teeming ashtrays and plates of rotting vegetables.  There are views of messy studio spaces and the laundry room in an apartment.  There are proofs with random printing errors and misaligned text.  There are street photos of a political protest in Osaka.  And there are foggy cellphone shots of nightclub goings-on. Some of these are images of jaw-dropping beauty.  One glossy color poster shows weeds rising from the cracks between mossy paving stones.  Another shows a field of clouds at daybreak through an airplane window. These views are elegaic.  They speak to photography’s ability to still time to one second and also to capture one’s life – one’s fragile, flickering emotional state – at that second.  The show’s presentation, that enlarges certain moments and shrinks others, is true to the way memory works – the way significant events (weddings, deaths, fights) can be nearly forgotten, while mundane events (a walk home from a party, a conversation with a stranger on the train, a fragmented dream) can be recalled, forever, indelibly.  It’s these moments that matter, and photography contains them. Wolfgang Tillmans, “Weed,” 2014, Inkjet print on paper, clips, 161 3/4″ x 108 1/8".  Courtesy Wolfgang Tillmans and David Zwirner. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/129115268401 monthly 0.5 2015-09-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515034007-3CRX4NKG9VV6QRKEQMP6/tumblr_nsa5ejrPnZ1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MIXED MEDIA Kolumba, the art gallery of the archdiocese of Koln, was designed by architect Peter Zumthor on a site rich with archaeological remains.  And while it shows the ruins with abject theatricality, it shows artworks with tremendous grace.  The three-story building is planned simply: it has a large, L-shaped footprint, with small box-like galleries dropped inside the corners of each floor.  The plan is so simple that it looks foolish in the visitor’s brochure, like a student exercise in space planning.  The large central spaces receive daylight from full-height windows, draped in shivering silver silk curtains.  And the smaller galleries receive daylight through clerestories of clouded glass.  The spaces have generous, cube-like proportions.  The concrete on the floors, walls and ceilings has a smooth, cool grey finish.  The walls are entirely blank.  Daylight rolls through like mist, softening the purposefully reduced interiors.  One of my friends, a painter, said, simply, “This is a great place to show art.” The museum houses changing exhibits, and when we visited there was a show that paired contemporary German artworks with religious artifacts from the diocesan archives.  So a vitrine showing a funky necklace of plastic beads sat beside one showing a centuries-old gold cross.  A tender Madonna-and-child figurine sat on a pedestal in front of a huge, cartoonish painting of woodpeckers.  This arrangement didn’t serve the old or new art well.  It diminished the raw, atavistic power of the religious objects, and made the contemporary art seem flaky. The building’s interiors, in their platonic proportions and astounding luminosity, captured something close to the spiritual.  It’s unfortunate that the religious artifacts on display – a tabernacle trimmed with colored stones, a crucifixion carved from ivory, immense gold chalices – didn’t have the chance. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sargent-portrait-psychology monthly 0.5 2015-09-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515034412-T68K8DZHEOZUCJW4TR36/tumblr_nubpa75Wp91qdm8ato1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY THE MODEL IS PRESENT Is a portrait, in the end, about the subject, the artist, or the fragile connection between the two?  Walking through the Met’s expansive exhibit Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, I saw works supporting every point of view.  But my favorite portraits were those in the first gallery, of the men and women Sargent befriended when he was a student in Paris in the early 1880′s.  These portraits are all about the subject. They’re composed simply.  In each one a handsomely-dressed man or woman sits at the center of the canvas, against a simple backdrop, and addresses the viewer directly.  Sargent renders each of their faces with an extraordinary emotional acuity, showing just what the subject looks like, and also, right through this, who he or she really is.  (The psychological depth does nothing to diminish the richness of the surface.  Sargent’s brushstroke is virtuostic in capturing physical detail: a shadowed corner, a splash of sunlight, the finish of pink velvet, the glint of diamonds.) From looking at these portraits we understand that the writer and translator Madame Allouard-Jouan is demanding, world-weary, and refined.  We understand that playwright Edouard Pailleron is pragmatic, honest, and impatient.  We understand, in Sargent’s most famous painting, that Madame X, (Amélie Gautreau) is self-conscious, petty and proud. And we understand, in the most magnificent painting in the exhibit, that Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran, Sargent’s teacher, is intense, intelligent, and unorthodox. Though they follow formal conventions of Victorian portraiture, these works aren’t mannered.  In their blunt expression of character, they are wild. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/zumthor-kolumba-minimalism-architecture monthly 0.5 2015-09-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515035113-7D8ZSIL3TINL0DLLKI6G/tumblr_nstlethbTp1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY RUINATION Architect Peter Zumthor is best known for his understatement, and best appreciated by other architects, who understand how difficult it is to execute spaces with a reduced, minimalist look.  Visiting Kolumba, the art gallery he designed for the archdiocese of Koln, I was, predictably, impressed by details: the inch-high brick coursing, the flush metal plate door frames, the black plaster finish on the restroom walls, the fastidiously book-marked wood paneling in the library, the bent metal pins supporting the stair handrails.  The gallery spaces themselves are finished in a luminous, ash-colored concrete.  The floors, ceilings and walls meet simply, without trims or reveals, so that the concrete folds seamlessly from surface to surface.  It creates an atmosphere of quiet and sobriety. Kolumba was built on the site of a centuries-old church and, during excavation, layers of remains from older churches were found, some dating to the eleventh century, all piled upon one another.  The ruins were dutifully preserved and are housed in a pavilion, also designed by Zumthor, attached to the new gallery building.  One reaches the ruins by walking from the gallery lobby through huge steel doors and a heavy leather curtain.  Inside the pavilion there’s a zigzagging wood walkway, raised a foot off the ground, that gives views to the ruins below, all around.  The space is dramatically dark, lit only by daylight filtered down through open brickwork at clerestory level, and a handful of cone-shaped pendant lamps. This pavilion is charged with a theatricality that’s at odds with the quietness of the adjoining galleries.  The walkway is clumsy; its handrails are heavy, its wood is stained a garish red, and its jagged course has no apparent logic.  Perhaps the departure from Zumthor’s typical restrained vocabulary is meant to emphasize that this is a contemporary structure that’s been inserted into an old, sacred space.  Instead it feels like a poor addition, as if it had been authored by a different, less gifted architect. Photo © Jose Fernando Vazquez-Perez https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/street-corner-saints-traveling-through-western monthly 0.5 2015-09-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515035613-GXUDT8I40AAIXHZW1DRJ/tumblr_nstkv4f9O01qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY STREET CORNER SAINTS Traveling in western Germany, through Koln, Mainz and the small medieval wine-making towns nearby, we saw old buildings with corner saints.  These religious statues –of  Christ, the Virgin Mary, St. Francis, and others – sit inside niches carved into the front facade of small buildings, usually at the second floor.  Some are carefully maintained and have the pretty sheen of Hummel figurines.  Some are sealed in glass to keep out the elements, and wire mesh to keep out birds.  Some have been left in place over decades to weather naturally, romantically. One of my German friends explained that the west of the country is considered German rather than Prussian, Catholic rather than Protestant.  He had grown up in the region, in a Catholic family, and visiting brought back rich childhood memories.  The musty smell of a restaurant, and then a crowd of well-dressed church-goers, both reminded him of summers spent with his grandmother.  He eventually left the confines of family and church, after the wall fell, to study in Barcelona and work as an artist in Berlin. Each time I heard bells or passed a corner saint I sensed the presence of the church, not as history or institution, but as a vital imaginative force.  Like movie billboards in Los Angeles and office towers in Manhattan, they speak to the spirit of the place, the energies that drive it.  The corner saints are meant to bless this or that house, and all that transpires inside.  But they are also alert and outward-looking, presiding over  the streets below.  For a boy living here this authority might rankle, but for a visitor it’s full of grace. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/storybook-cities monthly 0.5 2015-09-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515035913-7ZAZF59S95JVLJUS6IWW/tumblr_nstkylElbt1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY HAPPILY EVER AFTER In Germany, in Rheinland, in the summer, the sun sets after 10 o’clock, behind a gauzy blue night sky.  So it became ritualistic to take quiet, after-dinner strolls through the small, medieval wine-making towns we visited: Bacharach, Eltville,  Oestrich-Winkel.  The town centers have narrow, twisting streets lined with two-story half-timber frame houses.  Most are still residences, and others have been converted to small businesses.  The small streets, designed for foot traffic and horse carts, are crowded on one another, and the land slopes steeply toward the Rhine.  When turning a corner one might suddenly find a church tower, rows of grape vines, a skateboard park, or the river itself.  The houses are maintained lovingly, many with slate tile roofs, and painted in bright constrasting colors: yellow-blue, burgundy-saffron, white-red.  Some have small flower gardens in front, clouded with bees.  Thee streets have a storybook dreaminess, as if living simply, as people here seem to do, is the best way to live. Yet the towns aren’t prettily preserved, like Bruges or Tallinn.  Instead they seem ancient and also alive.  (Siena and Jaisalmer are cities with a similar kind of life.)  Here there are medieval churches and stone walls choked in ivy, and bank machines and dollar store too.  On one walk we watched a scrum of adolescent boys kick a soccer ball, happily, down a sloped cobbled street.  Their families might have lived in this place for centuries, and their ancestors might live here for centuries more. I recently met someone from Detroit who had just returned from a visit there.  He said that large parts of that city, the city he remembered from his childhood in the 1970′s, were gone.  They hadn’t been gentrified or fallen into disuse.  As plots were razed communities had simply disappeared.  Towns like Eltville have built parking lots and supermarkets while keeping the architecture of their town centers intact.  It’s an achievement that’s slightly miraculous. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/kloster-eberbach-architecture-historical-restoration monthly 0.5 2015-08-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515036225-Z10KRKZ553HGG90SJS8V/tumblr_nstlh2MUTZ1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BATS IN THE BELFRY I passed tranquil days during my German holiday at Kloster Eberbach, a monastery founded in the twelfth century that’s now a winery and hotel.  It’s tucked in the hills above Eltville am Rheim, a charming medeival village along the river.  The Kloster’s grounds are lush, planted with lawns, fruit trees, and flower beds.  The Kloster’s buildings are in various states of repair.  Those that house the hotel, restaurant, gift shop and winery were just recently renovated and offer every amenity.  The church, the heart of the Kloster, has a fresh look.  Its facade is finished in sparkling white stucco and bright red trim, and its steep roofs in slate tile.  Its interior has been stripped of generations of paint and plaster, to unadorned stone block, giving a spare, romantic feeling.  (Parts of The Name of the Rose were filmed here.) The monastery buildings, a short walk from the church, on lower ground, are currently being restored, with an unusually gentle hand.  They’re organized around a small, grassy courtyard with a fountain and a tower.  The low stone walls along the walkways are cut through with tall grasses and flowers – with weeds – and are left untended.  A dining hall that was converted to a winery five centuries ago has also been left as it is.  Its monstrous wood presses, rusting railings, cobwebs, and damp give off a strong sense of decay.  The exterior of the library, a narrow two-story structure that separates the cloister from the lay brothers’ dormitory, has been cleaned and repainted.  But the giant timber beams that frame its second floor sag visibly, almost comically.  The chapter house, a low, stone room with a single central column, is home to families of sparrows.  A sign inside explains that the birds are not to be disturbed.  This lackadaisical (and un-German) style of historical restoration feels right.  There’s sense, and grace, in allowing these old buildings to settle, naturally, and give themselves over to other uses. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/hiking-boots-fashion monthly 0.5 2015-08-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515036706-TZ968CIXQ8ABD52PFCSG/tumblr_nstm48HXit1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY CULTURE SHOCK In advance of a hiking holiday in Germany, my friends insisted that I purchase proper boots.  But when I researched the brand they recommended I was horrified: by the company’s tagline (”Shoes for Actives”), by the fact that all the shoes are unisex, and by the ungainliness of the designs.  I looked at other brands and found that all the available styles, even those specifically for women, looked like orthopedic shoes for hippies.  Obviously hiking boots need to offer support, water-tightness, agility, and durability.  But do they need to have bloated profiles and drab colors (mud brown, dust grey, fungus green)?  My friend Anne hiked in an old pair of traditional mountain climbing boots.  They were mannish, in rough brown leather with thick black rubber soles and red laces, but they gave off a whiff of Alpine charm.  Modern hiking boots offer no style at all. On the trails with my friends, I joked continually about how I could make my boots socially acceptable in New York: by adding brightly colored laces, by spray-painting them gold, by wearing them unlaced.  But there’s a real business challenge here: to make a hiking shoe that offers authenticity, technology, and glamor.  At a time when sassy details from running shoes (thick colored soles, breathable synthetics, neon accents) have made their way into mens and womens dress shoes, why haven’t they made a mark on hiking boots?  Serious hikers would respond to a better-looking shoe, and novices would be more eager to invest in a pair.  Non-hikers would use them for weather.  Certainly there’s a way to make a hiking boot that also lives up to the challenges of city living: icy sidewalks, ankle-deep puddles, salt, dog piss, and fashion? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/jacob-lawrence-migration-series-moma monthly 0.5 2015-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515037129-CIAJNUGXKI42TOLEV269/tumblr_nqzm520yO81qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MOVING DAYS MoMA has mounted a show about the great African American migration to the north called One Way Ticket.  It takes painter Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series from 1941 as its centerpiece.  This group of 64 small (about 12″ x 18″) oil paintings documents that movement in intimate vignettes with prose captions on wall texts below.  The language is simple, which makes the facts all the more devastating.  We read, “The trains were packed continually with migrants…  Many of them left because of Southern conditions… They were very poor…  Another cause was lynching… There had always been discrimination.” Each small panel is smartly and economically composed, with strong graphic shapes rendered in flat, acrid hues.  The sparse, controlled brushwork  allows the white of the wood panel beneath to show through, giving the paintings a rough, unprecious feeling.  But these paintings are not about painting.  And they are not really about history either.  They are about people, about the thousands of black Americans who left the rural south for the urban north between the wars, without money and work, searching for better lives. Though simply rendered, the figures are never cartoonish.  They’re ennobled by their actions, and move in formal, expressive ways.  These are paintings that have the character of dance.  Four men lifting bushels of cotton, seen in profile, have the solemnity and rhythmic clarity of figures on a Egyptian frieze.  A boy peering over a table to watch his mother slice bread from a loaf looks like a symbol of need.  Three men in handcuffs waiting deportation stand stiff with pride, like giants.  We rarely see people from the front, or see their faces.  Instead we see them from the side, from the back, or obscured by a newspaper, a fence, a hat, or a tree.  They don’t offer themselves, or their sorrows, up for consideration.  Instead they move on. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/moma-yoko-ono monthly 0.5 2015-07-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515037912-U92HVA2F3R31ACMZNSSM/tumblr_nqzmpzDOnr1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST One Woman Show at MoMA highlights Yoko Ono’s work from 1961-1971.  There are films that slow time painfully, projected in endless loops on the walls.  There’s an installation, Half-A-Room (1967), that collects ordinary household artifacts (a pot, a chair, a carpet) that have been sliced in half.  There’s a sculpture, Apple (1966), that is, simply, a green apple.  And there’s a sculpture, To See the Sky (1966), that is a monumental spiraling steel staircase that carries visitors to the gallery’s ceiling. The rooms are packed with art but strangely empty of drama.  No narrative seems to connect one work with the next.  What’s missing might be the character of the artist herself.  We all know who Yoko Ono is: she grew up in a prominent family in Japan, began her career as an artist in Tokyo, had a husband and then a child and then a divorce, became a vital member of Fluxus in New York, married a rock star, and was famously widowed.  But who is the woman who made this art? The most vivid piece in the show is a film of Ono’s performance Cut Piece (1964).  It shows her kneeling on a stage in front of a pair of scissors as, one by one, audience members step up and cut away parts of her clothing.  Here she looks like moon-faced co-ed, in a dark cardigan with a Peter Pan collar and an A-line skirt, without jewelry and makeup, her hair pulled away in a braid.  Throughout the performance her expression remains placid while her eyes scan the room anxiously.  There’s thick, quiet drama in the not-knowingness of who will pick up the scissors and what they will do with them.  And there’s something in this, the simple mystery of the performance and the fragility of the performer, that’s more compelling than all the other high-art high-concept works in the show.  We’re seeing someone take a risk, test her resolve, and construct a fresh identity for herself.  We’re seeing a young woman make herself into an artist. Photograph courtesy of Yoko Ono. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/whitney-piano-museum-architecture monthly 0.5 2015-07-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515038216-FM224KJXFG0ION2TMK5D/tumblr_nqzlqnDNBQ1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY LOST IN SPACE The Whitney Museum reopened two months ago in new expanded digs in the Meatpacking District, a colossus designed by Renzo Piano on Gansevoort Street that spans Tenth and Ninth Avenues.  It has huge column-free galleries on its fifth through eighth floors, picture windows on its west facade with views to the Hudson River, staggered balconies on its east facade with views to the Highline, and an open glass-walled lobby that doubles as a public plaza. It’s hard, from outside, to get a clear sense of the building.  From Fourteenth Street its decks and railings gives it it the feeling of an approaching luxury liner.  From Tenth Avenue it looks like a postmodern playhouse, a precarious stack of seven smaller volumes finished in different materials.  The Gansevoort Street facade, where one enters, is dominated by the sloping hull of the gallery spaces that’s cantilevered above.  This immense, inert mass is wrapped in blank green-grey metal panels that give no scale or sense of the interior. And it’s hard, from inside, to get a clear sense of the building.  The visitors’ pamphlet shows a building cross section rather than floor plans, suggesting that, like the old Whitney, it’s a vertical museum, experienced floor-by-floor.  But there’s no hierarchy or variety in the gallery floors – they’re all the same.  And there’s no element tying them together, like the iconic concrete stair in the old building. The ceremonial stair at the new building reaches from the ground floor to the fifth and then, abruptly, stops. The new Whitney is a super-large building that feels as if it’s been conceived in small moments, without any central organizing principle.  Many of its details are exuberant and exquisite: the staggered patio decks and runs of railings, the high glass curtain wall at the sidewalk cafe, the attenuated steel posts that support the cantilevered gallery floors, the punched ship windows at third floor study rooms.  But the building has no heart.  One walks through it searching for the vantage point from which all its operations make sense, and just can’t find it. Photograph by Ed Lederman, courtesy of the Whitney Museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/john-galliano-dior-china monthly 0.5 2015-06-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515038832-2BAYUQV1CUVLJ9PQLFCZ/tumblr_nqmplkWKss1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SHAPE SHIFTING John Galliano designed his 2003 Spring/Summer haute couture collection for Dior after a two-week trip through China, an experience that left him “electrified.”  Five gowns from the collection are on display in China: Through the Looking Glass, this year’s fashion blockbuster at the Met, and they serve as its theatrical climax.  In the quiet and chill of the museum’s China Courtyard, which has been transformed by sound and lighting effects into a rippling midnight pool, the dresses spring to life like wraiths. Galliano’s work has always swerved between hedonism and fastidiousness, and his China runway show was heavy on hedonism.  It included traditional Chinese circus entertainers: dancers leaping over swords, acrobats spinning plates, and a girl gymnast riding a unicycle around the top of an old man’s parasol.  The models, coarsened by clown makeup, could barely see through their frizzy hairpieces, and barely walk in their gilded platforms shoes.  The gowns themselves were as big as boulders, constructed from yards and yards of printed candy-colored silks, tucked and draped over asymmetrical crinolines that bumped out in unexpected places.  There were continuous wardrobe malfunctions as wide bias-cut collars slipped to the waist, and fishtail hems bunched at the ankle.  The models seemed to be carrying the clothes rather than wearing them. But when seen today, at the Met, in this cordoned-off courtyard, on plain white mannequins set yards apart from one another, lit by small spotlights below, the gowns are ravishing in the complexity and clarity of their construction.  They stand free from the body and then return quickly to it, shaping dramatic, exaggerated feminine silhouettes.  A powdery pink robe clings at the waist and fans out from the face, projecting monarchic grandeur.  A one-shouldered blue evening gown skims the bust and hips before exploding in ruffles just below the knees, fit for a cartoon femme fatale.  These are dresses with a stormy, monstrous beauty. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/china-saint-laurent-fashion monthly 0.5 2015-06-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515039136-M6A71MYT85OSL5HIAX82/tumblr_nqmtamSZyo1qdm8ato1_r2_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FANTASYLAND The curators of China: Through the Looking Glass, this years fashion blockbuster at the Met, know that the modern garments they’ve set out among historic Chinese artifacts in the museum aren’t really Chinese.  One wall text quotes scholar Edward Said’s savage critique of Orientalism.  Another explains, “This exhibition is not about China per se but about a collective fantasy of China.”  In the end this collective fantasy – and its attendant racist cliches – are undone, not by the scholarship of the show, but by two extraordinary personal fantasies of China, those of Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano. Yves Saint Laurent’s 19977-1978 couture collection was inspired by China, a country he had never visited, and knew only through history, photography and film.  The ensembles he sent down the runway were built from luxurious layered separates: quilted peasant jackets in embroidered silks, tilted and tasseled coolie hats, billowing jewel-toned trousers tapering to the ankle, and calf-high suede boots with wide cuffs and fur trim.  These clothes spin one man’s dream of China.  And it’s such a potent dream – proportionally refined, aesthetically complex, emotionally evocative – that it’s difficult to dispel.  I’ve never been to China, but I believe that these clothes (their tempestuous hues, their liquid silks, their hammered gold fasteners, their whirling silhouettes) capture something of the sensuality and mystery of the culture.  The small gallery at the Met where the clothes are displayed, on mannequins set in front of a long gold screen, is the heart of the exhibit. Other modern garments on display reference China, playfully and elegantly, but not deeply.  Karl Lagerfeld has, brilliantly, embellished gowns with motifs from traditional blue-and-white porcelain patterns, and tailored dresses in silks printed with traditional floral motifs.  And Vivienne Tan has emblazoned smart, striking separates with paintings of the Buddha and portraits of Mao Zedong.  These clothes reference China but they don’t give us China.  Saint Laurent does, and his fantasy, while simply untrue, is so deeply realized that it makes us believe too.  His clothes don’t represent China but, in their imaginative richness, they honor it. Photography courtesy of Platon and Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/domestic-bliss-the-small-house-frank-lloyd-wright monthly 0.5 2015-06-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515039406-T7DC8DK091NUK9090P3X/tumblr_nplminueMc1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY The house Frank Lloyd Wright built for Roland Reisley in 1959 in Pleasantiville, NY, might be more affecting than his better-known houses in Chicago.  It was the third and final house he built in the 26-house Usonian community there, a spread of one-and-a-half-acre circular plots.  Each house is unique, designed in a brazen modern language by Wright or one of his disciples.  And each house is modest – by contemporary standards, at least – with a living area, dining room, three or four small bedrooms, patio, and carport.  Most are one level, and are located at the tops of the small hills that run through the site, offering lovely views. The Reisley House is built on a grid of equilateral triangles, so that all its walls meet at 120-degree or 60-degree angles.  This creates dramatic roof and wall lines that exaggerate perspective views.  While the geometries seem eccentric and impractical, they shape dynamic, graceful interior spaces.  The house has an open plan, and only the bedrooms, bathrooms and closets are closed with doors.  The major rooms slide seamlessly into one another: vestibule into living room into dining room into hallway, and  – when the doors are thrown open, as they were on the summer afternoon I visited – into patio and lawn. The house is anchored by heavy retaining walls and chimneys, which are finished with local stones set in a rough horizontal ashlar.  Interior walls are finished with gold-stained cypress panels that unfold into bedboards, bookcases, banquettes, and tables, all constructed from the same wood.  There’s drama in the low thresholds and narrow halls one passes through moving from one room to the next.  And then, as one steps inside, there is uncommon repose. Photography by Roland Reisley, from his book Usonia, New York: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/body-configurations-the-heroine-of-joanna-hoggs monthly 0.5 2015-05-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515039961-2OFSQKKP8395ZD7ABKI1/tumblr_nothfjxAAc1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BODY LANGUAGE The heroine of Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition is deeply connected to her London house.  She settles into its corners and ledges, lost in reverie.  These gestures might have been inspired by the work of performance artist Valie Export.  In a 1976 series called Body Configurations, Export photographed herself, wearing plain dark clothes, nestled within elements of public buildings throughout Vienna.  We see her spread face-down in a corner of paving, wound around the base of a fluted column, draped over a steel basement hatch, bent kneeling across a curb, lying down a run of steps, seated inside a window box, squatting spread-legged at the outside corner of a building, and stretched corpse-like in the gutter along the base of a wall.  Each position is simple and expressive, as if distilled from a dance. Export is always at the center of the photograph, and always alone.  Enough context is given to understand the scale of the architecture, which is typically grandiose, at odds with the humility and vulnerability of her position.  In the most powerful photographs her face remains hidden and her figure slack; she’s entirely surrendered to her surroundings.  The radical passivity carries tremendous sadness, as if she’s abandoned all will.  It suggests that, in order to survive, we hide. Photograph courtesy of Valie Export. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/its-alive-joanna-hoggs-movie-exhibition-unfolds monthly 0.5 2015-05-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515041142-HOLZ7ZJL66VW70OF6I09/tumblr_notfqk4J6b1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A LIVING THING Joanna Hogg’s movie Exhibition unfolds almost entirely inside a London house built by architect James Melvin in 1969 and renovated by Sauerbruch Hutton in the 1990′s.  It has a brown-brick facade with ribbon windows, and open interiors with wood floors and a narrow steel spiral stair. From the outside it’s incredibly modest, the kind of building you wouldn’t look twice at unless you spotted someone at one of the windows or walking out the door.   From the inside it’s generous, with more space and light than a typical city home.  During the renovation, lacquered sliding doors were added along the perimeter of each floor to define rooms.  Their colors (fuschia, bubble gum pink, dove grey) are jarring but, somehow, entirely correct. The movie is a high-bourgeois melodrama, about an artist couple whose relationship suffers quiet crises.  The house is an exquisite shell that protects them from the noise, dirt, and bustle of the city, and from “real life” itself.  There are signs of money and good taste everywhere: a Mini in the driveway, piles of art books in the living room, an Airbook in the studio, and an Alessi teapot and Marc Newson dish drainer on the kitchen counter. But the movie never gives us authoritative, envy-inducing, Architectural Digest-style views of the house.  Instead it gives glimpses into its spaces and inner workings.  The husband tends to the house assiduously, sweeping water from the roof, checking the boiler and the elevator shaft.  The wife is preternaturally sensitive to its movements: the switching on of vents, the clicking of locks, the creaks of foundations.  Though photographed ecstatically, in still, exquisitely composed frames, the house is more than a luxury object; it’s a pulsating, living thing. Photograph by Helene Binet, courtesy of Suaerbruch Hutton. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/home-made-joanna-hoggs-gorgeously-composed-art monthly 0.5 2015-05-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515040612-2PVR7WIEAQG75251BST2/tumblr_notekiWsjA1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY HOME MADE Joanna Hogg’s gorgeously-composed movie Exhibition introduces us to a middle-aged bohemian couple, both artists, whose names we never learn.   They have lived and worked in a modern house in London for eighteen years, and now they are selling it.  He is a sculptor, and sits in a small studio on the third floor designing an installation with AutoCAD.  She is a performance artist, and sits in a spacious studio on the second floor, trying to make herself into Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy.  He and she communicate, mostly, through the intercom. He wants to sell the house and move on.  He comes and goes from it freely: he takes road trips, and walks through the neighborhood at night.  She would like to stay.  She is connected to the house in a primal, animalistic way; she will not let go of it.  She naps on the long window sill in the bedroom, sits alone under the table in the living room, embraces a boulder in the garden.  In one of the movie’s loveliest passages, she lies on her side in the hall and folds herself around a corner.  The house’s skin has become her own.  She’s constantly peering through the venetian blinds in her studio to see what’s happening on the street below.  (She wears shirts with horizontal stripes, as if she’s embedded in these blinds.)  She reveals herself most deeply to her husband from this window, when, dressed as St. Teresa, she pulls up the blinds and dances as he watches from the sidewalk below. The house remains something of a mystery.  The camera stays still for long stretches, and reveals only one bit of it at a time: one corner of a room, one floor of a facade, one panel of a sliding door, one run of spiral stair.  The layout is never made entirely clear.  It’s only at the end, at a farewell party the couple give for friends, when we see a cake that’s been modeled after the house, that we understand its organization.  At this point, as he and she cut into it, breaking apart its sugar walls, the fantasy of the architecture, and of their marriage, is coming undone.  What seemed uncluttered and modern, seamless and perfectly structured, is not. Photograph courtesy of BBC Films. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/under-the-gun-as-the-title-promises-theres-a monthly 0.5 2015-05-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515042203-W4EJR2EU4Z2B9XHPHQ85/tumblr_noio8cZeSc1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY IF THESE ROCKS COULD TALK There’s only one rock that matters in Athol Fugard’s play The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek.  That’s the hut-sized boulder at the center of the stage, that dominates the red sand, scrub brush, and rubble around it.  The rock is meant to stand for rural South Africa, where the play unfolds.  This is a faraway land whose whose earth and sky, whose rhythms and possibilities, are different from our own.  And this is a land that’s prehistoric.  The rock’s surfaces are ravaged, as if they’ve withstood centuries of sun and rain.  It’s stood here, in this place, far longer than people have. In the first act, set in the 1960′s, an old black man paints bright glyphs across the rock and tells his assistant, a small boy, “This is my story.”  Decades later the boy, now a young man, repaints the rocks, to reclaim the old man’s story in a world that has forgotten it.  While the rock is part of the play’s it’s peripheral to the performance.  This play is one of words: declarations, remembrances, threats, and ideas.  Everything is spoken.  Even as the old man paints the rock, he explains what each mark stands for.  The rock itself remains mute.  And that’s a shame, because it’s such a powerful figure.  Lit by a scatter of starry ceiling lights, it has an eery, lunar-like presence.  It’s the richest element of the play. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/showtime-more-than-the-product-what-dazzles-at monthly 0.5 2015-05-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515042506-VR3O81PC6F6NA7KE49UF/tumblr_noipyrvxsF1qdm8ato1_r1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SHOWTIME More than the product, what dazzles at ICFF 2015 are the displays.  In past years most exhibitors came with no-nonsense presentations, while the handful that came with more ambitious ones stood out.  This year it’s just the reverse.  Nearly all the installations have a sense of theatricality, with custom partitions, canopies, lighting, and display fixtures.  Many have signage, lit promotional images, and seating areas for visitors.  Those exhibitors who came with the same kind of barebones installations they did in the past (a table, a binder of product samples, a signboard, and a stool for their rep to sit on) look plain indeed. In addition, this year’s event has a cool, unified feeling.  Many of the booths have a slate grey or black carpet, or bare concrete floors.  And many have black or grey painted walls.  There’s a terrific rhythm to the layout and no corners lack energy.  There are intimate booths mixed in with grand ones, booths showing tabletop items mixed in with booths hawking furniture, and brazenly lit booths mixed in with shadowy ones.  It’s a pleasure to walk the aisles of the Javitz Center and take in the spectacle.  There’s a lot of the same kinds of things on display as in in past years: stools made from tree trunks, tables made from geodes, and hand-stamped wallpaper.  But this year they’re displayed with more sass and polish.  Standouts include booths by the Austrian contingent (who built a giant purple metallic backdrop), Antolini (who built a life-size marble labyrinth) and BECBrittain (who sunk one of their spare LED chandeliers into a pocket jungle garden).  The prevailing sensibility is no longer craft, it’s show business. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/paul-rand-everything-design-graphic monthly 0.5 2015-05-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515042311-7JNHLAK26FAAVU935IXP/tumblr_nnrwv1sUGD1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PLAY TIME The Paul Rand exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York is called Everything is Design, but it might better be called Everything is Delight.  This great graphic designer, who’s best known for the brand identity he created for IBM in the 1940′s, did work that gives remarkable pleasure.  All of it (corporate logos, advertising copy, book covers, cosmetics packaging, cigar wrappers) is characterized by candy colors, eye-popping geometries, and eccentric compositions that give a strong sense of play. Make no mistake about it; this is high design.  The familiar eight-bar IBM logo, when not orthogonal, is designed to sit at precisely 37 degrees from the horizontal.  An instruction manual Rand wrote for the company (Use of the Logo/Abuse of the Logo) notes the text size, spacing and information fields on an employee’s business card with fascistic authority.  While his graphics look like happy jumbles of words, pictures, photographs and glyphs, they’re composed rationally.  Each element floating on a blank white or black background is located with ravishing precision. Rand’s compositions erupt from the center of a page with child-like grace.  There’s an ad for Frazer automobiles that features a super-sized hand playing with the vehicle as if it’s a toy.  The designer creator the logo for Colorforms play sets, and illustrated several childrens books.  At a time when branding is a business science, shaped by focus groups and market research, Rand’s work is an argument for exuberance. Image courtesy of the Paul Rand Foundation. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/out-of-place-as-i-walked-through-the-newly monthly 0.5 2015-04-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515042149-AJ5V7QV3AHL0UK9ZTF2V/tumblr_nga5pcHYNP1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ROOF PARTY When I visited the newly-renovated Harvard Art Museums (HAM), a woman stepping out of one of the galleries stopped and groaned, to no one in particular, “Wait, where am I?  I can’t tell where I’ve already been and where I’m going."  That’s because the new building isn’t concerned with shaping a coherent museum experience, or with housing artworks, but with the heroics of its own architecture. The renovation, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, combines three smaller, older university art museums: the Fogg, the Bush-Reisinger, and the Sackler.  Those structures sat quietly in the maze of one-way colonial-era streets around campus.  The new building takes the gracious, colonnaded, three-story Romanesque courtyard of the Fogg, about the size of a basketball court, as its entry.  It’s this space that visitors step into from the street, where they queue for tickets, and where they linger at cafe tables before leaving.  A new floor of small galleries rings the atrium above, and, above that, two new floors of offices and classrooms.  The heightened atrium is capped with a glass and steel pyramid that, in its grandeur, recalls I. M. Pei’s entrance pavilion to the Louvre. Each of the small, square galleries is lit dimly, crammed with artworks, and offers only limited views to the streets outside.  So one staggers from one back out into the atrium and then onto the next, never quite certain of where she’s headed.  The glass roof is strangely charismatic, pulling attention up, away from the galleries.  Thought it funnels sunlight into the atrium, most of the galleries remain in shadow. It’s not the galleries, or even the atrium, but the glass pyramid that’s the heart of this building.  It’s been finely and extravagantly detailed, with a web of white steel ribs, ties and struts supporting sloped glass panels, in a display of technical wizardry that’s become Piano’s signature.  But when viewed from up close, on the balconies of the upper floors, the framing seems dense, much heavier that what’s required to support the glass.  And when viewed from the atrium it obscures any view to the sky.  The pyramid would be best observed from above, by a bird.  It does little to serve the art, and art-lovers, below. Photograph by Peter Vanderwarker, courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/prada-brutalism-winter-2014 monthly 0.5 2015-03-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515043122-Y6CNI42XREAAOZLFN23P/tumblr_nju082YvyW1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BEAUTY AND BRUTALITY The Prada Winter 2014 campaign, shot by Stephen Meisel, unfolds under an overcast sky, in a barren landscape, as a beautiful young couple loiter about an abandoned Brutalist house.  Their clothes and accessories are “architectural,” rendered in black and white, accented in undiluted primary colors, and cut in crisp geometric lines.  Against the bare concrete of the house the man and woman, in their luxurious duds, pop.  The shots capture dramatically the contrast between hard and soft, bright and dull, flesh and stone.  In the accompanying promotional film the couple play out an amour fou inside the house, which is furnished only with a bare mattress and folding chairs.  It’s like a high design crack house.  But what building is this?  It’s rough skin recalls a Paul Rudolph house in New England, but its curving concrete retaining wall recalls a Scarpa house in northern Italy. Credits for the campaign give us the name of the make-up artist and models but not of the house or its designers.  Some of the campaign’s  images are remarkable in that they do not even feature clothing, bags or shoes; they simply position the Prada logo against an enlarged detail of the architecture: a cornice, a stair, a wall.  In these shots the texture of the aging concrete (crumbling, shadowed, damp) is richly sensual.  It’s a roughened, sensibility that goes against the prevailing gloss of high fashion.  But there’s nothing “architectural” about these images.  They never reveal the entire building, or describe compellingly the place where it is.  The movie is even less revealing, focused mostly on close-ups of the models and their clothing.  This house isn’t a structure, really; it’s just a sign of Brutalist style. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/turner-sunrise-with-sea-monsters monthly 0.5 2015-03-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515044021-TTUIGMDWFDBMIJMF6H1E/tumblr_njtxrgEjNH1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY STORMY WEATHER The movie Mr. Turner gives us the person of J.M.W. Turner, not the painter, and that’s unfortunate.  Because, as depicted here by Timothy Spall, he’s a cantankerous middle-aged coot with a crab-like shuffle who communicates, when he cares to, in caveman growls.  He neglects his adult daughters, sexually exploits his maid, bullies potential patrons, and insults  fellow painters.  Maybe the warts-and-all portrait is meant to show that beautiful things are often created by unbeautiful people.  But, except for the tenderness he shows his father and his mistress, we see little more than the warts. More confusingly, we don’t see the things that make Turner a great painter: vision, discipline and passion.  I can’t believe that the doltish half-man in this film could have painted the way Turner did.  In the movie we see Turner stabbing the canvas with brushes, scrubbing paint off it with rags, spitting into its surface, smoothing patches with his fingers, and blowing pigment across it from the palm of his hand.  But we don’t ever see him paint.  That is, we don’t ever see him look deeply into the world around him and then into to the one he’s making.  Instead we see him hop out of bed each morning, march into his studio, and make paintings.  (Compare this to Lust for Life, which shows us how uniquely Van Gogh sees the world, and how he puts that world into his work.) The paintings used as props in the movie are poor reproductions; most don’t look like paintings at all.  But they give glimpses of the power of Turner’s art.  In a scene set at the Royal Academy we see a young, petulant Queen Victoria belittle Sunrise with Sea Monsters to Prince Albert as “an oily yellow stain."  That painting, hung high on the gallery wall, hemmed in by dutifully observed landscapes and hokey pre-Raphaelite melodramas, jumps out at us.  It’s a fiery, emotional utterance, an explosion of light, a composition perched audaciously between the abstract and the figural; it’s like a scream. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-promise-of-a-new-dress-ive-never-read monthly 0.5 2015-02-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515043525-3SWEFQ5NKQK1MRM3NSCE/tumblr_nhbp935d0x1qdm8ato1_400.png DROWN ME IN BEAUTY THE PROMISE OF A NEW DRESS The Cazalet Chronicles, a trilogy of novels by Elizabeth Jane Howard, follows a wealthy English family during World War II.  Three generations of the family, along with their servants, lovers, nurses, school friends, and a governess, retreat to a country estate in Sussex to brave out the war.  The daily life here is richly described.  Howard has a gift in offering seemingly mundane details (what’s served for dinner, what’s blooming in the garden, what’s being worn) that also, somehow, work to reveal the inner life of each character.  There’s a precision and ease about the writing that makes the harried, melodramatic storytelling on Downton Abbey, which covers similar territory, seem downright amateurish. During the war clothing can only be purchased with ration coupons, so the Cazalet women continually mend existing garments and fashion new ones from scraps.  But every so often they take the train into London and visit a dress shop run by the socialite Hermoine Monkworth.  They typically visit as they are about to embark on a new romantic drama, and Hermoine outfits them properly for it while also offering words of encouragement.  For these ladies a new dress is more than a new dress.  It’s a treasure, a talisman for romance, glamor and sex in a world whose foundations seem to be crumbling about them. Juliettte Longuet’s silk Olympe dress is that kind of dress.   It’s both modern and modest, cut slim, skimming the body, without any fuss. Villy could wear it to to rendezvous with her composer heartthrob, Angela to go dancing at a club, or Zoe to meet her soldier paramour.  It’s a warm, deep shade of peacock blue that would draw attention in the dark wood-paneled lounge of a private club, or a first class train compartment.  The silk has a lustrous skin, and is embellished  with tiny pintucks and bias inserts.  The dress has been crafted like jewelry, and would feel just as precious for the woman wearing it. Image courtesy of Juliette Longuet. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/awesome-twosomes-surupa-sen-and-biyajini monthly 0.5 2015-01-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515044330-MTG1019WAWGVUGTZJOW4/tumblr_ni126auI1m1qdm8ato1_r5_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A MORE PERFECT UNION Surupa Sen and Biyajini Satpathy, principal dancers from the troupe Nrityagam, performed at the Temple of Dendur at the Met last Saturday at dusk.  It was a romantic setting for a romantic dance form, Odissi.  All five short pieces they performed showcased its signature baroque postures, that bend the body into dramatic, shifting “S” curves that ripple from the face through the torso to the fingers and feet.  In the first dances the two women performed standing side by side, about six feet part, in unison but independently.  They were majestic but formal. The three other dances, when the dancers performed as characters who danced “at” one another, were electrifying, charged physically and mythologically.  In the first of these they depicted male and female lovers who came together playfully, broke apart agonizingly, and then fell together again, finally, gingerly.  The extraordinary final dance described a divided male-female spirit, with Surupa acting the masculine principle and Satpathy the feminine.  Sometimes one woman danced standing close behind the other, spinning limbs in mirrored formation.  Sometimes one woman squatted and turned to the side while the other hovered above her, balanced on one foot, turned in the opposite direction.  Finally, standing side by side, elbows and knees bent, the two shuffled off the stage like a single eight-limbed two-faced creature. At these moments the dancers seemed blissfully conjoined.  Yet they performed throughout without touching; while twisted together they mantained a long, fingers-wide sliver of space between them.  More than the Temple or the costumes, this was the afternoon’s outstanding spectacle: two bodies moving in passionate duet. Photograph courtesy of Nrityagam. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/moving-images-is-being-too-beautiful-a-problem monthly 0.5 2015-01-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515045712-S3YLFDPONPMYB1OJN2UL/tumblr_ni49avBnWi1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MOVING IMAGES Is being too beautiful a problem?  There are times, certainly, when it gets in the way.  The well-reviewed movie Ida, the story of a young novitiate in 1950’s Poland who learns that her family is Jewish, is a good example.  It’s photographed in stunning black and white and unfolds in mis-en-scene, slowly, cryptically, with little dialogue and explanation.  It’s less a full-length movie than an array of dazzling shots, each one lit in a dreamy silver haze and composed with an angel’s eye, with all of its lonely characters, austere interiors, shadowy landscapes immaculately framed and rendered. The visual schema is the movie’s chief virtue and also its chief problem.  Because the stories it tells – about the hatred of Jews, about the complexities of identity, about the ravages of memory, about base self-preservation – are underdone by the superficial beauty of the images.  We watch, enraptured by the string of lights at the hotel bar where the heroine has a sexual awakening, by the stray electrical cord cutting across the hospital corridor where an old man is dying, by the velvety texture of the soil tumbling into a child’s grave.  Yet these moments of astonishing beauty all remain static.  The movie, and its characters, never break outside the frame or outside our expectations; they stay rooted in the composition.  This movie doesn’t really move.  Because of its serious look and story Ida has been compared to European art films from the 50’s and 60’s.  But its look reminded me more of 80’s Jim Jarmusch, like Stranger than Paradise.  And when Ida and her brassy, hard-drinking, chain-smoking aunt drive to the country to find her parents’ grave, the movie begins to feel like a Jim Jarmusch movie too: and odd couple fish-out-of-water road movie.  But Ida is so tasteful and so humorless that it lacks the simple pleasures of that kind of entertainment.  Its arch elegance and elliptical storytelling gloss over the ugly uncertainties, and potential explosiveness, of human emotions, of which there would be plenty here, if only they had been expressed directly.  There is one death depicted in the movie, and it plays out so handsomely and so seamlessly that it doesn’t even sting.  Image courtesy of Ida. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/feeling-blue-diana-vreeland-declared-that-fuchsia monthly 0.5 2015-01-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515045037-BASITF6MNGDRAZ9JKAIC/tumblr_nhm0q0RY5K1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FEELING BLUE Diana Vreeland said that fuchsia was the navy blue of India, but Tom Stoppard thinks differently.  The current New York production of his decade-old play Indian Ink is blue.  The small off-Broadway stage where it is performed, that’s tucked three stories below street level, has a high backdrop that sets the scene in both 1930’s India and 1980’s London.  And it is painted blue, a cool, clear, synthetic blue that evokes, more than the subcontinent or England, the sky of a children’s story book. Throughout the production color is used symbolically rather than descriptively. When the heroine, an English poetess, arrives in India, she wears white, and then, as she takes to the climate and culture (and natives), she wears buttercup yellow, pink-and-green paisley, and screaming red.  The hero, a Indian painter, wears white throughout, and behaves with more propriety and restraint than the English men and women around him.  Fuchsia does appear, briefly, on a local maharajah’s brilliant jewelled waistcoat.  The color stands, very obviously, for India, but for an India (dynastic, fedudal, opulent) that is about to be lost. Like other Stoppard plays, the drama moves swiftly and seductively between different times.  But the production seems curiously placeless, and evokes neither India or in England strongly.  Instead it seems to unfold in a fictional space that could be either, or anywhere, really.  In that case, why use a backdrop at all? Photograph by Joan Marcus. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/grounded-architect-francisco-sanin-delivered-an monthly 0.5 2015-01-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515045114-C70408SAE9YY9BRLATUA/tumblr_nfim7mdwA51qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY GROUNDED Architect Francisco Sanin opened the recent symposium Past as Prologue, which honored the fifty-year career of Michael Graves, with an incisive and touching lecture.  He highlighted the moment in the mid-1960’s when Graves began working as an architect, describing the avant garde thinking that gripped the schools, the radical politics that swept the culture, and the conceptual projects that were being published in architecture journals. The images of Graves’ paintings that Sanin showed seem alive with these ideals.  They are elegant and audacious: flat Mediterranean landscapes rendered in sunburnt hues and inhabited by still streams, rows of cypress trees, and a variety small freestanding structures, all of which are rendered in platonic geometric forms.  The paintings are, presenter Adelle Chatfield-Taylor later commented, “faint landscapes,” with a delicate, empty feeling.  They are mapped only lightly, and left open to dream, desire, and imagination. The influence of Corot, Cezanne, deChirico and Morandi are all apparent.  But what’s unique about these paintings is the charged presence of the buildings within the landscape.  Each one is an architectural cipher – with its own geometry and syntax – as well a physical structure – a primitive hut.  Each one is its own character.  Sanin described Graves’ understandings of “the city as a series of fragments,” and of “building as composite.”   Even more than his best-know buildings, Graves’ paintings make these ideas apparent.  And they show a spatial and narrative complexity that’s not always apparent in his architecture. Image courtesy of Michael Graves. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/twine-story-game-software monthly 0.5 2014-12-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515045829-ADHURZJ9E56G1URLKG74/tumblr_nfir6g0wqI1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SCREEN WRITING There’s been lots of talk about how the internet is changing the way we read, but little talk about how it’s changing the way we write.  So a recent Times Magazine article about the video game platform Twine strikes a chord.  Like other video games, Twine games are immersive, shaping participatory narratives that stir up real-life emotions.  But Twine games are entirely text-based, so they are also a (new) kind of literature. The software has a deliberately unsophisticated feeling: most games are composed with a single font style, on a single-color background, with no more than a single paragraph on each screen, and in language punctuated very loosely, in the manner of text messages.  Playing a Twine game requires less focus than reading a novel and more decision-making.  One moves from screen to screen by selecting between different highlighted passages of text, which gives the story a strong sense of linearity, and cause and effect.  These are qualities that are appealing, and that aren’t always served up in literary fiction.  Though if one plays the same game more than once, one finds recurring routes and brushes up against the limits of the narrative. Like the graphics, the writing in Twine games is deliberately unsophisticated.  In Breakfast on a Wagon with your Partner, Porpentine, one of the platform’s most celebrated authors, depicts a critical early-morning conversation between two lovers.  The game is written entirely as dialogue, without any clear indication of historical time and place, and with few physical descriptions.  An early screen that alludes to physical devastation (asking the player to choose between asteroids, a plague, and bombs), and soft country-inflected music playing in the background, are all that set the scene.  The game is entirely gender-neutral, and we know nothing about the two characters except that one is called Sam.  It lasts only about two minutes, yet at its conclusion the fate of the relationship is settled, convincingly and often sadly. Twine is simple to use; basic commands can be learned in about five minutes.  It’s free, and programers typically distribute their games through sites that are also free.  The software’s genre-busting potential is amazing.  Twine calls those who aren’t particularly artsy, or articulate, to write stories.  And it calls those who aren’t tech-savvy, or escapist, to play video games. Screenshot from Breakfast on a Wagon with your Partner, by Porpentine. . https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/of-grave-concern-it-was-december-i-had-never monthly 0.5 2014-12-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515045933-1Y7FBO25IYV8LZKNY2BE/tumblr_ngrbc6DAWB1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY OF GRAVE CONCERN “It was December, I had never felt so cold, the eel soup lay heavy on my stomach, I was afraid I’d die, I turned aside to vomit, I envied them."  Has there ever, in English, been a sentence as dreadfully elegant as this?  It’s like six small stories, all miserable, smashed into one another.  It’s by Samuel Beckett, from a short story called First Love.  The narrator, an unstable young man, walks through the cemetery where his father has just been buried, eating bananas and looking down on the dead. The story conjures Pere Lachaise, the sprawling  nineteenth-century Parisian cemetery.  It’s a place Beckett, who spent his adult life in the city, knew.  And it’s where he’s buried, alongside his wife, in a low tomb topped with a suitably austere slab of black granite. The cemetery is immense, over 100 acres, and its oldest parts are laid out in a web of curving stone paths that, gently, rise and fall and turn in upon themselves.  I visited on a summer afternoon when the air was heavy and still, and there were few other tourists.  I ignored the maps highlighting  major attractions, including the graves of anti-austerity icons Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison.  Instead I wandered, following the footpaths so far inside I didn’t know my way out, and didn’t care.  The cemetery’s turning walkways hold what lies just ahead tantalizingly out of sight and pull one forward, as if one is moving toward something, while one may very well merely be walking in circles.  It’s a notion – both funny and sad – Beckett would have approved of. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/george-stacey-interior-design monthly 0.5 2014-11-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515046025-EDAHT9YWWU0ZN2JHZWR1/tumblr_nfen9hMdJL1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY WITH THE GREATEST OF EASE Author and interior designer Maureen Footer opened her book-talk about the legendary George Stacey at the ICA last week by making a distinction between style and chic.  Chic, she explained, was spontaneous and not belabored.  It’s a quality that’s notoriously difficult to achieve in both exterior and interior architecture, which require substantial time and labor, but one that Stacey brought to all his commissions.  In the dining room of the Levy House in Palm Springs, for example, Stacey sets a baroque Italian stone transom over a sleek moderne fireplace, and playful flamingo-pink upholstered chairs beneath neo-Gothic blackened steel candelabras.  He paints the wall a creamy white and bookends the entire arrangement with giant-sized potted ferns that look as if they’ve just been carried inside from the patio. Interiors are by nature ephemeral, as they are transformed to best serve  the changing lives of their inhabitants.  But there’s something particularly immediate about Stacey’s work, which always looks fresh, and just a pinch underdone, with splashes of open space and bright light throughout.  It’s as if the room arrived all in a moment, like a happy explosion.  There’s no doubt that this sensibility requires a lot of work from the designer to get right, so that it feels unified.  But it leaves a feeling – improvisational, unorthodox, free – that’s deeply modern and deeply American. Dining Room, Levy House, Palm Beach, by George Stacey.  Image courtesy of Rizzoli. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/after-decades-of-postindustrial-depression monthly 0.5 2014-11-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515046911-F1F2YCPLNK36HBLJDS25/tumblr_n7pew7o8cs1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY THE EIFFEL TOWERS OF BUFFALO Are the grain elevators the Eiffel Towers of Buffalo?  These monstrous concrete silos along the Niagara River were built in the nineteenth century to collect and store grain as it was shipped throughout the country.  They are higher than the city’s office towers and longer than its blocks.  The elevators have the careless grace of structures that grew from need rather than pride, and were engineered rather than designed.  They are bare in form.  Their silos are poured concrete, their headhouses red brick or corrugated steel.  They are brutal in scale.  They dwarf the modest residential neighborhoods behind them so dramatically that they feel, from the street, like apparitions, pictures hanging in the air. Perhaps the grain elevators are more properly thought of as machines than as buildings.  Inside there are retractable chutes that can siphon grain from ships and then pour it into others.  In patent drawings describing their workings, they look like insects, packed with folding limbs and tubes, and interconnected chambers. In A Concrete Atlantis, Reyner Banham compares the inside of the Great Northern grain elevator to “the abandoned cathedral of some sect of iron men."  These structures, mostly abandoned, have a gorgeous ruined feeling.  Yet they survive intact and rule the city, presiding over its rivers.   Can they be left in place, just as they are, for centuries more? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/guaranty-building-buffalo-sullivan monthly 0.5 2014-11-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515047514-AU4BTUW6JGCD4QYJ34K1/tumblr_n7pfuy6IDD1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BOOK LEARNING My first college art history course was a survey that covered all of Western achievement, from scratchings on cave walls to video installations.  The syllabus focused on paintings and sculptures, with a handful of buildings from each era thrown in, to broaden the perspective.  One of them was the Guaranty Building in Buffalo by Louis Sullivan, from 1896.  I can still remember the small, square, black and white picture of it, not much larger than a postage stamp, in my textbook. And I can recall the reasons we learned that the building was, for its time, so remarkable: its steel frame, its impressive height, and the strong vertical rhythms of its facades.  I’ve kept this image of this building with me for decades. So it was a surprise, when visiting Buffalo for the first time, to see that the Guaranty Building is dressed in thick terra-cotta tiles the color of an uncooked, unwashed sweet potato.   And to see that each of these tiles is cast with a dense filigree of twisting vines, leaves and blossoms, rendered with both Celtic and classical accents.  And to see that the building overpowers: it stands, sternly, squarish, twenty-three stories high and half a block wide, on a prominent corner downtown.  It’s brutal mass and angelic surface serve up dual, flickering identities.  No longer a monument trapped in a photograph, the building is, now, for me, a complex, living thing. Photograph by dIPENdAVE. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/frank-lloyd-wright-darwin-martin-house-buffalo monthly 0.5 2014-11-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515048114-BNXDJ54T9NCOSP7N7DRD/tumblr_n7pf8bdiiG1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY INTO THE GROUND From the outside, the Darwin Martin House (DMH) in Buffalo might be the most lyrical of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style homes.   It’s a lovely bundle of low-lying horizontals: brick walls, concrete railings, ribbon windows, and overhanging eaves, that seems to hover above the flat lawn.  In its composition it feels more relaxed, and refined, than even more celebrated Wright works like the Robie House. But the house’s interiors are something different.  The rooms on the ground floor (entrance, living room, sitting room and dining room) are set in a dense, interlocking plan around two large freestanding brick fireplaces.  There are no doors or archways to mark the boundaries between the rooms, only wood beams and shifting heights in the ceilings.  These ceilings are set low, so low that someone six feet tall would have trouble moving from one to the next. The walls are all finished with a gold-tinted plaster.  And they are trimmed with wood bases at the bottom, wood frames at the corners, and wood coves at the top.  What plaster surfaces that remain are encrusted with wood display niches, bookcases, radiator covers, and window seats.  Overhead, the ceilings and beams are also trimmed in wood.  All this heavy woodwork – in teak with a heavy grain, stained the color of tea –  weighs the space down.  And when one moves to the windows for relief one can’t see beyond their intricate stained glass panels and the deep eaves to the sky.  So one’s view remains pinned low, to the horizon. It was one of Wright’s commandments to build into the ground rather than on the ground.  And one typically finds inside a Wright house, like Robie House, a protected, burrowed feeling.  But at DMH one finds instead a sense of compression, as if one is being pressed into the ground.  This is an uncommon Frank Lloyd Wright house.  Rather than a dynamic, fluid interior, it offers one that’s tangled, and overbearing. Photograph courtesy of Darwin Martin Complex. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/act-ii-i-wrote-earlier-this-year-about-a-project monthly 0.5 2014-11-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515048328-1FNZDLDR7JL5ASCYU6DN/tumblr_n7pgacOnXB1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ACT II I wrote earlier this year about a project to turn the Richardson Olmsted Complex (ROC), a former asylum in Buffalo designed by the legendary nineteenth-century architect Henry Hobson Richardson, into a hotel and convention center.  The project’s developers and designers are talented and inspired, and working hard to do what’s best for the city.  But as I researched and wrote the piece I understood that the whole endeavor was, in one sense, a typical gentrification project.  The ROC is taking a historic property, obscuring its original purpose, retaining what’s notable about its architecture (in this case: rough stone facades, super-wide hallways, high gable roofs), and increasing its value.  And the transformation in program – from mental hospital to boutique hotel – invites satire. But after visiting the ROC this summer, seeing the grounds, and walking through some of the buildings, I feel differently.  The hospital complex was abandoned after the 1960’s, as more and more mental patients were treated as out-patients, and its wards fell into disuse.  Since then its buildings have been weather-sealed and structurally stabilized, but they remain dramatically dishevelled: emptied of furnishings, with paint peeling in tendrils from the ceilings, rubble piled in corners, and, in some rooms, fire-scarred walls.  The rooms carry incredible sadness.  That’s not only in remembering the lives that passed sequestered inside, but in seeing how the facilities remain unused. The ORC is an immense property, with nine individual structures and a property about the size of four city blocks.  Its buildings have magnificent (i.e. Richardsonian) proportions, generous daylight, and stunning landscaping, and they’re literally turning to dust.  It’s something of a miracle that they weren’t destroyed earlier, and that the property wasn’t redeveloped as a subdivision or a mall.  Making these buildings habitable once again is a monstrous undertaking, not for the faint-hearted, or the cynical.  It’s an act of gentrification, and an act of hope. Photograph by Christopher Payne. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/comme-des-garcons-gold-architecture monthly 0.5 2014-11-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515049324-WY7UG8DR3TNS7AG7ZD09/tumblr_mzzad3Wa1W1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY GOLD RUSH I’d always loved the original Commes des Garcons (CdG) boutique in Chelsea, designed by Future Systems, from 1998.  It was tucked on a quiet block of far west 22nd Street, and identified only by a little battered steel sign from the previous tenant, that read, alluringly “Heavenly Body Works."  One entered through a curved aluminum tube with a giant glass door inside.  That door had a huge kidney-shaped hole in the middle that one reached through to open it.  A sloped aluminum ramp carried one down to the sales floor, where the artsy, pricey dresses and suits were displayed in an array of shining white cabinets that tilted this way and that, like icebergs.  The architecture had a novel quality; each time I visited I felt I was discovering it once again.  So when CdG closed for a remodel last year it felt like a big mistake. CdG kept a good portion of the old store intact.  The entrance sign,  tunnel, door and ramp are still there, and still delightful. The new interior is similar to the original, with chunky freestanding cabinets.  But they’re gold.  It’s a finish that’s less garish, and less opulent, than it sounds: an aluminum veneer with a dull, mottled surface, like the inside of a tomato can.  The new cases have the same eccentric, canted geometries as the old ones, but they’ve been constructed more crudely (which is, most likely, unintentional).  The edges of the gold panels don’t meet neatly, exposing strips of bare construction board behind.  The fluorescent lights inside them are plainly visible, and there are stray pencil marks  where installers noted joints and measurements.  The store’s original bare concrete floor remains, but is scarred at those points where the old cabinets had been screwed down, which have been roughly patched with epoxy and painted.  The informal spirit of the remodel breathes new life into the store.  The old white cabinets had a bright, super-modern sheen.  The new gold ones are gentler, earthier, and kookier.  Their raw construction and dull glow warm the room.  The clothing being peddled here has been conceived with architectural precision and pretension, but the store has not. Image courtesy of Comme des Garcons. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/joe-fresh-manufacturers-hanover-trust monthly 0.5 2014-10-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515049643-NNB3JIAHWMLXNYQ6J5GH/tumblr_mzz882ktrU1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY REFFRESHED There was a kerfuffle last year when Canadian fashion retailer Joe Fresh took the Manufacturers Hanover Trust building as its New York City flagship.  The trim, five-story glass box on the southwest corner of  Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, completed in 1954 by SOM, is a beloved modern icon.  It’s two street-facing sides are dressed in glass panels that drop straight down to the sidewalk, without any frame below.  This stunning skin exposes, at day and night, every corner of the building’s glowing, open insides.  The interior and exterior are both landmarked, and thus protected from substantial alteration.  Nontheless architecture historians, preservationists, and enthusiasts wondered what the brand was up to.   There was no need to worry.  The shop, designed by Burdifilek, heightens the building’s original transparency.  It leaves the exterior glass skin untouched, so that both ground and second floors remain radically open to the outside.  Rather than perimeter cabinets, the clothing is set out on clusters of low white tables and shelves – moveable islands of merchandise.  And two key original ornamental features on the second floor, an immense cloud-like wire sculpture hovering from the ceiling in front, and a seventy-foot-long freestanding screen in back, both by Harry Bertoia, have been restored and reinstated.  In the bright wide-open interior these pieces, shaped from a hammered, burnished, gold metal, are magnificent grace notes. The result is a shopping experience that’s a complete bliss-out.  Stepping off the escalator onto the second floor is like arriving in mid-century modern heaven.  Unlike other stores, that conceal windows and pack floors densely with product to keep shoppers focused on shopping, Joe Fresh keeps things clear.  The audacious stretches of free space (along the perimeter glass walls, below the high ceilings, between the merchandise displays) is deeply luxurious.  Shopping there, on a polished white marble floor beneath glowing ceiling tiles, one feels suspended from the city and its rhythms.  Fifth Avenue appears, through the windows, as a hazy dream below.  It’s a celestial experience of modernism and midtown. Photograph courtesy of SOM. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/gap-dress-normal-normcore monthly 0.5 2014-10-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515049827-2J2X7WKEEILC5QM5W5D4/tumblr_ndz649ppVp1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.png DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BELOW AVERAGE Two years ago Gap brought in Creative Director Rebekkah Bay to steer the brand, and then, suddenly, there were streaks of life inside the stores: capri pants cut from floral prints, denim shirts trimmed with pixellated borders, and shift dresses cut with an assertive minimalism, all in a palette of chalky pastels.  While these pieces could shape a compelling story about understated modern dress, Gap is trumpeting their anonymity.  Their Fall 2014 print ads feature actors modeling the most current clothes with the tagline “Dress Normal."  It’s a campaign that’s been disastrous financially.  No wonder.  It breaks cardinal rules of American life and of fashion: that each one of us is special, and that what each one of us wears declares who we are. The company’s PR positioned the campaign, bizarrely, as a call to individuality, but others see it as a stab at normcore.  When delivered properly, by brands like Band of Outsider, normcore takes anonymous middle class clothes (button-downs, khakis, sweatshirts, cardigans) and reconceives them ironically (with tighter fits, higher hems, bolder prints), illustrating that the wearer has a heightened sensitivity to such matters.  Slight eccentricities in style are amplified by knowingness.  In comparison, the "Dress Normal” ads promote banality. But the models, including off-center beauties Zosia Mamet and Anjelica Houston, are appealing, and the copy could have been tweaked to frame the images more richly.  One shot shows Michael K. WiIlliams standing beside a fern-green Pontiac GTO, while a commerical plane takes off in the middle distance.  The actor sports a greying beard, wears a wool baseball jacket over a white turtleneck, and twists purposefully away from the camera.  He’s an unusually sober, enigmatic mannequin.  He could be a contemporary anti-hero, taking pains to remain unobserved while waiting for an accomplice, an enemy, or a lover.  Instead the ad presents him as an icon of conformity. Image courtesy of Gap. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/koons-whitney monthly 0.5 2014-10-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515050156-W5XUGO8SLARHFPEZ8UG1/tumblr_ncz6xpVkWR1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS The Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney is splendid art world spectacle.  The lines are long, the crowds are lively, and the artist’s sculptures and paintings, particularly the monumentally-scaled works on the higher floors, spring to life inside the museum’s cavernous white-walled, stone-floored galleries. The art varies tremendously in terms of materials, but it’s all of a piece: bright, synthetic, energetic, and relentlessly positive.  Rather than beauty or pleasure, it goes after happiness.  In his work from the 80’s Koon was focused, more intellectually, on consumer culture and advertising, and their promises of satisfaction.  In later work, to get at the same, he crafts his own iconography of happiness.  He shows us candy, toys, cartoon figures, pop culture heroes, romantic love and (very literally) sex.  Embedded in all of this is a notion  – sweet, uncomplicated, contemporary, and profoundly American – of what happiness is. The most powerful pieces are from the 1994 Celebration series, massive sculptures and paintings based on popular imagery.  The series includes the iconic sculpture Yellow Dog, a 10-foot high yellow stainless steel rendition of the kind of balloon animal distributed at childrens’ birthday parties.  (It’s an elegant piece, and the most popular spot in the exhibit for selfies.)  Also on display, from the same series, is a monumental, multi-colored aluminum sculpture of a pile of Play Dough, and paintings of toys: action figurines, plastic horses, stuffed animals, and building blocks. My favorite painting shows of slice of birthday cake wrapped in pink mylar.  It’s gigantic, about the size of a double door, and rendered in vivid, baroque perspective, as if it’s about to be shoved into the viewer’s mouth, in a palette of bracingly artificial colors.  The cake is no longer food – a form of nourishment – but a symbol of bliss.  The painting is set in a futuristic, hyper-real style, yet remains a literal, innocent image.  There are no hidden depths here, no irony and no commentary.  The dazzle is, for Koons, what happiness is all about. Image courtesy of Jeff Koons.  Jeff Koons.  Cake, 1995–97. Oil on canvas; 125 3⁄8 x 116 3⁄8 in. (318.5 × 295.6 cm). Private collection. © Jeff Koons. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/isnt-it-fantastic-i-was-horrified-when-i-learned monthly 0.5 2014-10-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515049985-U6PII8T10Q7DOPL12ZWP/tumblr_nckii7tBZh1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ISN’T IT FANTASTIC I was horrified when I found out that Kenneth Branagh is directing a live-action version of Cinderella for Disney.  He seems far too classy to retell this politically retrograde fable.  In a recent interview he explained, gorgeously and somewhat convincingly, “It’s a story with which we all identify.  Somehow, the idea of, when life is tough, having things work out, sometimes with a bit of magic … for certain kinds of moments it’s a marvelous thing."  For "magic” why don’t we substitute fantasy, or voodoo, or wishful thinking, or pornography?  At the heart of the Cinderella story lies a notion that’s a little bit troubling, that a romantic partner will come along and solve all of our problems for us.  It’s a fantasy that doesn’t play out too frequently, and, for many, remains persistent. Then last month I attended an event with Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay.  In addition to being an accomplished academic and novelist, she’s a fearsome television critic and live tweeter.  She spoke, enthusiastically, about how much she loved shows like Scandal, The Good Wife, and SVU.  When asked why she explained, “Without fantasy, we don’t have a lot of hope."  She pointed gleefully to some of the more far-fetched elements in Scandal, including the way Kerry Washington’s character works as a political fixer while sleeping with the married president, and can wear a white cape and drink red wine. If fantasy is necessary for the long slog through adult life, the content of the fantasy we allow ourselves to fall into matters too.  A successful professional woman leading a stylish and sexually satisfying life  is one fantasy.  A young woman waiting to being rescued from poverty and drudgery by a prince is another.  Fantasy might be a deeply human need, but it can also mask genuine desire and conflict, and cloud crucial life decisions.  There’s truth in what Branagh and Gay say about it, and there’s truth in what Yeats says too.  [Here I’m thinking specifically of this poem: Meditations in Time of CIvil War.] https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/beats-pill-speaker-boombox monthly 0.5 2014-10-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515050411-GFFGJW2RT9MMRAB2KBMV/tumblr_ncwibeIiSG1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BOOM WITHOUT THE BOX Stumbling from the subway station to the office on Friday morning, in an end-of-the-week haze, I was overtaken by a young man playing a lusciously-textured slow-moving rap song out loud on his black Beats Pill XL portable speaker.  The music hit me when he passed, a big warm cloud of sound.  The Pill is a simple, sleek baton-like device that broadcasts audio from a remote player.  Though it’s been branded “XL” it’s small, about the size of an evening bag, and could be tucked easily under the arm or in a tote bag.  This man carried his from its handle, swinging it back and forth as he made his way breezily, otherwise unburdened, up Broadway.  He was dressed smartly, in Levi’s straight legs with deep cuffs, a plain black t-shirt, a White Sox cap, and black high tops with a thick white sole.  Brandishing the Pill, he was an image of supreme cool. This encounter me took me back decades, to a time when young men in the city carried suitcase-sized boomboxes, with shining silver knobs and multiple cassette decks, that required six or more D-sized batteries to operate.  Today the fashion is to listen to music on small devices like iPhones, through headphones with cushioned earpads the size of hamburger buns, retreating deeply into an inner world.  Broadcasting one’s music in public has become outrageous, an act of transgression and aggression.  The young man I saw was asserting his taste, his identity and his turf, and also sharing his tunes – something of himself – with the city.  It would be tiresome, certainly, if everyone on the sidewalk played his music out loud.  But that morning it made for magnificent street theater. Image courtesy of Beats Audio. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/mcqueen-alexander-tartan-scotland monthly 0.5 2014-10-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515051122-X6VV1W5WLTKE8P9UJYIK/tumblr_nckqu8GzjZ1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PLAID PASSIONS After last month’s independence referendum in Scotland, I’ve got tartan on my head.  These plaids, woven and worn for centuries, originated to distinguish Scotland’s clans (i.e. families) from one another.  Some standard ones date back to the seventeenth century.  Now their specifications, old and new, are officially administered by The Scottish Register of Tartans, established in 2009.  I wonder if Scottish identity is essentially clannish, and, if so, what happens if Scotland becomes nationalized?  Will there be a need for a universal tartan, a federal tartan? This little dress by McQ, that’s been photographed, flatteringly, on a number of non-Scottish celebrities, points one way.  It mixes Rupert and Paddington tartans in a manner that’s simple, stylish, and politically progressive.  It’s a classic sheath with a scoop neck and straight hem, complicated with a syntactical riddle.  Its skirt is draped conventionally, with the grain of the fabric running orthogonally.  But its top is draped on the bias, running at a 45 degree angle in front, falling along the left side like a shawl, and then resolving itself in a different, more acute angle at the back neck.  I’ve studied pictures of the dress from all angles and still don’t understand how the side seams in the bodice work, and where the back zipper is hidden.  The two plaids don’t match in color or tone, but the dress makes a harmonious whole.  They are boldly scaled, but don’t seem tritely Scottish.  Can happily mismatched tartans be the uniform for a modern, independent Scotland? McQ by Alexander McQueen, Tartan Drape Top Dress (Rupert tartan draped top dress with Paddington tartan mini skirt, with zip closure at the back), Pre-Autumn/Winter 2014. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/nam-jun-paik-digital-analog monthly 0.5 2014-09-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515051750-5MCV6JCQ6GE3IOZ6YA5R/tumblr_nbw9dasmVz1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ANALOG DAYS The Nam Jun Paik retrospective at the Asia Society, Becoming Robot, is a bright blast of 80’s nostalgia.  The video and robotics technologies that were available to the artist then, when he completed his best known works, are now obsolete.  The CRT monitors he incorporated in so many installations and performances – his trademark – are deeper than they are wide, and even the smallest ones require remote adapters and transformers, and bundles of cables to tie them together.  The technologies are mechanical rather than digital, and imposing physically as well as conceptually.  There’s a wonderful photograph of Paik from 1990 in one of the galleries that shows him sprawled, ecstatically, on a studio floor, surrounded by a mess of televisions, cords and plugs.  These elements give his work, when seen today, a sweet low-fi, high-tech, Radio Shack kind of aesthetic. Paik’s videos also have distinct 80’s stylings.  The resolution is grainy and the lighting is clouded.  Colors are acid-tinged, as if we’re watching through an infrared lamp.  Shots dissolve into one another slowly and are held for uncomfortably long stretches of time, as if they were edited by stoners.  These videos remind me of very early programming on MTV and Nightflight.  And they remind me of amateur Super 8 footage, with shots slipping in and out of focus, frames drifting unintentionally downwards, and everything hovering slightly off-center. Despite these formal limits, Paik’s videos are jarring and often deeply funny.  One shows him dressed in a tuxedo playing a piano, while a naked cohort, Charlotte Moorman, sits on top of it and keeps time by tapping his head with her foot.  Another shows him crashing a five-foot high robot – a delicate jumble of metal angles and wire – with a white sports car on Madison Avenue.  Today just about every smartphone is equipped with software to record, edit and distribute high-quality video.  We’re inundated with clips, but rarely find ones that surprise or move us.  The technology has moved forward, but for what? Robot K-456, 1964. Twenty-channel radio-controlled robot, aluminum profiles, wire, wood, electrical divide, foam material, and control-turn out. 72 x 40 x 28 in. (183 x 103 x 72 cm). Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnof, PAIKN1792.01. Photo: Courtesy of Nam Jun Paik Estate. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/korakrit-arunanondchai-ps1-2012-2555 monthly 0.5 2014-09-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515052135-K1V22WXVO7LD52VRYGVN/tumblr_nbwc6hwoDx1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY WHAT PEACE THERE MAY BE IN SILENCE The heart of a small solo show by Korakrit Arunanondchai at PS1 is an installation called 2012–2555.  It consists of a theatrical trompe-l'eoil architectural backdrop, colored fluorescent lights, an effigy of the young artist, piles and piles of plastic flowers, and – presiding over it all – two flat-screen video monitors set on easels.  The artwork is right on trend, a willfully eclectic assemblage that deflates distinctions between sculpture, video, and performance, and conventional notions of composition and aesthetics.  It’s just way too much: too much light, too much color, and too much stuff, all shot through with too many ideas. The video content is similarly eccentric.  The monitors are programmed with a series of artful, slow-moving clips, each about five minutes long.  Among other things, they show the artist backpacking in the woods, a go-go dancer performing on a TV talent show, the artist’s grandparents walking down a shopping street in downtown Bangkok, and, movingly, the artist, disguised in pale blue bobbed wig, launching an effigy of himself into a tropical sea. Yet, in spite of its sculptural extravagance and fragmented narratives, the installation has a deep, restful effect.  It’s entirely silent.  Also, huge denims pillows are piled right in front, for viewers to sink into as they take it in.  My friend and I stayed for almost an hour, through an entire cycle of the videos, our bodies and minds at ease.  My friend commented that the sensibility of the installation –  the wild mix of plastic flowers and bright lights – was “very Bangkok,” and reminded her of the Buddhist shrines she saw there on the streets, piled thick with fruit, plants, candles, and other offerings.  It’s an aesthetic of excess that, here, somehow, leads to peace. Korakrit Arunanondchai. 2012-2555. 2012. Performance, two-channel video loop, flat screens, metal, wood, plastic, digital print on canvas, digital print on vinyl, fluorescent lights, plastic flowers. Courtesy the artist and CLEARING, New York. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/kawiaka-karolina-sculpture-architecture monthly 0.5 2014-09-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515052020-JA2RIPWKBP610Q0MFF1I/tumblr_nbwe0n6QMV1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BARELY THERE After writing earlier this summer about how difficult it is to work successfully at the junction of art and architecture, I came across an installation that does just that: Karolina Kawiaka’s Fractured Reflections, currently on display outdoors at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe, Vermont.  Kawiaka, who was trained as both an artist and architect, created the piece “deliberately as a folly."  But it engages, deeply, concerns of art, architecture, landscape and theater. The structure cuts an elegant, barely-there, figure in the landscape.   It’s a pavilion five feet wide, eight feet long and eight feet tall, constructed from narrow galvanized steel angles set in a Mondriaan-like grid.  It can be entered through high slots on each of its four sides, and its inside remains open to the sky above and the ground below.  Selected openings in the frame are filled with mirror panels, that capture partial reflections of the lawn, shrubs and trees all around, and of visitors themselves as they move through.  The structure complicates the landscape, weaving fleeting micro-views into a lush, cinematic spectacle. What’s most remarkable about the piece is how quiet its forms are.  With its platonic, cube-like proportions and skeletal skin, it looks like the diagram of a structure more than a structure itself.  Its materials, which can be found at a lumber yard, give it the feeling of an apparatus rather than an artwork.  And it doesn’t interfere with the ground, touching it only along the bottom edges.  As both an artist and an architect, Kawiaka has an admirably light touch.  Without minimal means, she has fashioned a structure with an fine, complex presence. “Fractured Reflections” by Karolina Kawiaka. 2014.  Galvanized steel and scrap mirror.  Photograph courtesy of Karolina Kawiaka and the Helen Day Art Center. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/gary-winogrand-the-falling-man-9-11 monthly 0.5 2014-09-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515053312-BOQZ8155Q4BC9BOSTL40/tumblr_nbw5ziy8w21qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FALLING MEN An opinion piece in today’s (September 14, 2014) Times, which describes (and endorses) the way one can fall in love with a work of art, is illustrated with this Garry Winogrand photograph of a man falling off a building.  I was stunned by its uncanny resemblance to The Falling Man, the famous AP photograph of a man falling from the top of the World Trade Center on 9/11.  Both images show the men in virtually the same position: upside down, facing the building, with arms flailing and legs bent. Of course the context is dramatically different.  Winogrand’s man is a performer, falling off of a low ledge, with three other men dressed as bellhops watching admiringly, and a bin of crushed paper to cushion his landing.  The 9/11 falling man hovers high above the ground, but the striped skin of the Twin Towers behind him is instantly recognizable, and his fate is clear.  Just days after marking another anniversary of the event, seeing Winogrand’s falling man, and reading the lighthearted piece accompanying it, which makes no reference to the other photograph, is chilling.  Each time I look at Winogrand’s falling man I can only see the 9/11 falling man, who conjures violence and sadness. “New York, 1950s,” by Garry Winogrand. Credit The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/chandigarh-furniture-corb-architecture monthly 0.5 2014-09-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515053707-6GL5EYTZPFBJ2RCHVL7H/tumblr_nb8zpqQ7Op1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MODERN RELICS While its purpose is to track the original furniture from Le Corbusier’s government buildings in Chandigarh, India, Amie Siegel’s film Provenance might be more stirring as a portrait of the buildings themselves, nearly sixty years after they were built.  To set the scene, passages show exteriors and interiors of the Secretariat, Assembly and High Court buildings, which were designed, in the 1950’s, as the heart of the new state capitol. After decades of heat and rain, and no particular concern for scrubbing them clean, the buildings’ facades are mottled with grit and mold.  Feral monkeys crawl up and down them.  Special piers and partitions that were painted in glossy primary colors, intended as architectural grace notes, are dull.  These ultra-modern buildings have given themselves over to time and to the elements; they have a weathered, ancient cast. Out of necessity, most of the interior spaces seem to have been overcrowded or repurposed to meet current needs.  Cars are parked in shaded ground floor walkways.  Small offices have been crammed with grey cubicles and padded rolling chairs, and hallways with metal filing cabinets.  The most outstanding feature of the buildings, their brise soleil, the immense concrete screens that block sunlight and break their monstrous, blocks-long facades into deep, dynamic micro-rhythms, have been clotted with window fans, air conditioning units, wire mesh and curtains fashioned from old saris.  None of this dims the sculptural excitement of the architecture.  One moves inside, through the grilles, into cavernous, multi-story atriums animated with dappled light.  Ramps and stairs carry shuffling government servants through forests of slender columns and beams.  The pan shots Siegel uses throughout the film (hypnotically slow, sliding consistently from left to right) capture the composition of the spaces clearly and also erotically, instilling desire.  These are buildings of considerable beauty.  They’ve lost their luster, and most of their furnishings, but their grandeur remains intact. Image courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Amie Siegel (American, b. 1974). Provenance (still), 2013. HD video, color, sound; 40 min., 30 sec.., https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/chandigarh-le-corbusier-furniture monthly 0.5 2014-09-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515053931-47CI1IV2ENL5BGLFQ60L/tumblr_naucucZrtD1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SEATING ARRANGEMENTS Amie Siegel’s 40-minute art film Provenance traces the history of the simple, wood-framed, leather-cushioned chairs, tables and stools that furnished the capitol buildings of Chandigarh, India in the 1950’s.  They were designed by the buildings’ architects, Le Corbusier and Charles Jeanneret, with mid-century modern stylings that are, today, incredibly fashionable.  The film shows us these pieces (battered, broken, scratched) in place in the government buildings, in the French workshops where they are taken (not without protest) to be restored, and, finally, in the lofts, townhouses and yachts where they land after they are sold through international auction houses, for tens of thousands of dollars each. As the film’s title implies, the pieces carry considerable aura.  Each one was cataloged in Chandigarh with a unique number that’s hand-painted in a florid script, in white paint, on its side.  During the refinishing process these numbers are preserved to attest to their authenticity.  But after their frames are stripped and stained and their upholstery remade, how “authentic” are they?  Slipper chairs originally covered in orange and blue leather are remade in crushed white linen for a loft in Antwerp and pony-printed cow hide for a house in the Hamptons.  Wouldn’t it be simpler and cheaper (and more ethical, too) to simply reproduce the pieces? In the movie we see unused chairs and tables in Chandigarh piled, uncovered, in storage spaces and on the roofs of the buildings.  There are couches whose upholstery has been patched with duct tape, chairs whose legs have split and been nailed hastily back together, and tables whose tops are burned from coffee cups.  It’s sad that they’re being spirited away for western collectors. And sadder still that they weren’t treasured by their original owners. Image courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Amie Siegel (American, b. 1974). Provenance (still), 2013. HD video, color, sound; 40 min., 30 sec. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/fit-lingerie-rudi-gernreich monthly 0.5 2014-09-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515054629-DLJX0XQBIU4X3LF606VP/tumblr_naua4jxrxo1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SKIN TRADE What is it that makes underwear dumpy, campy, or sexy?  As I walked through the F.I.T. exhibit Exposed: A History of Lingerie, a survey of womens undergarments from the nineteenth century to the present, it seemed that each of the ensembles fell straight away into one of these three categories.  And the category into which it fell had precious little to do with its vintage, or the amount of flesh it left exposed. A black corset by Lady Marlene and a satin teddy by Patricia Fieldwalker, both from the 1980’s, and both trimmed in fine black lace, are worlds apart.  The corset is cut classically, with softly swelling curve along the top and bottom, and the teddy is cut dramatically, climbing super-high at the thighs and dipping super-low at the cleavage.  But the teddy feels, somehow, stale, as if it’s trying too hard.  Some pale green silk “caminickers” (a slip with concealed shorts) from 1924, that just skim the hips and breasts, seem infinitely more sophisticated than a bra and briefs from the 1930’s, which fit close to the body and bare the midriff, but are cut from coarse white knits.  A 2006 Agent Provocateur leopard print bra and panty set, elaborately pieced and trimmed with thin black satin ribbon, is terrifically camp, while a giraffe print set by Rudi Gernreich, from forty years earlier, with the simple lines of a bikini bathing suit, seems effortlessly sexy.  It’s those underthings that flatter the figure without constraining it, that allow its shape to show through, that entice. Rudi Gernreich, “No Bra” and half slip, sheer nylon and printed nylon, ca. 1966, USA.  Collection of the Museum at F.I.T.  Gifts of Mitch Rein.  Photograph courtesy of The Museum at F.I.T. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/herzog-bellow-book-cover-art monthly 0.5 2014-08-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515054220-5TMOLGSTUNXHROX0UC4S/tumblr_nagp13Wb7Q1qdm8ato1_r1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY COVER CHARGE There’s a small exhibit at the Morgan Library of literary documents from the collection of Carter Burden.  It includes first editions, galleys, manuscripts, handwritten letters, and an aerogram, all related to canonical twentieth-century novels.  It’s really a love song to books, assembled at a time when so many of us read and write mostly on screens, and have stopped reading and writing seriously (that is, for anything more than information) at all.  It’s humbling to walk through the gallery and recall what was required to produce a book in times before the computer: the rounds of drafting, typing, printing, revising and proofreading.  Now these steps, and maybe even the act of writing itself, have become frictionless, requiring little physical exertion. The exhibit also serves as an excellent survey of book cover artwork.  There is The Great Gatsby, with a sly, smiling face in the night sky over East Egg, an image that’s kooky and glamorous, and that remains in use today.  There is the The Sun Also Rises, with a muse in toga and sandals, a romantic figure at odds with the book’s bluntly contemporary narrative and syntax.  And there is Light in August, with a small house on a hill rendered in a deco style that disguises the complex, broken language and souls of the story. The most audacious cover on display is the one for Saul Bellow’s Herzog. It gives us a heroic, Motherwell-like cloud of black paint hovering on a blank, peacock blue field.  It’s the kind of action painting one would find hanging in a Manhattan psychiatrist’s office in the early 60’s, when the book was first published, and also the kind of ink blot test he might administer.  The image speaks to masculine bravado and the tumult of personal desire, themes appropriate to Bellow’s dense, textured writing and to the novel itself.  The graphic is economic, and uses just three colors, one type face, and one figure.  It’s simple and symphonic. Photograph courtesy of Viking Press. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ali-farka-toure-red-green monthly 0.5 2014-08-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515054327-EGW4E8VZPM97HYNPCE12/tumblr_nagtacX1vo1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SO FAR After finishing Americanah, a novel set in Nigeria, I was starved for another experience of Africa, any experience of Africa.  I began listening to West African-themed playlists online, and one brought me to this album by the late Malian singer and guitarist Ali Farka Touré, Red & Green.  Because I don’t understand the words, the music seems incredibly abstract, built from streams of sound (some tinkling, some swirling, some pulsating) that move forward in endless, gentle surges, so that the compositions don’t begin and end so much as come and go. Touré, who died in 2006, recorded and toured abroad, but lived his entire adult life in Niafunké, the village where he had grown up. Yet this photograph of him in caftan and trousers, leaning on his acoustic guitar beneath a concrete fence, is profoundly urban.  It has the formality, and rich black and white tones, of studio portraits by Malian photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe, and also the same sense that the subject is summoning his finest self for the camera.  But the way that Touré’s body, and the entire composition, open so broadly to the left, suggest that the musician is not entirely captured here, that something slips away. It’s a strongly graphic image, with bold, contrasting patterns: the grid of the fence, the hatching on the caftan, the stripes down the trousers.  These are tied together by a cluster of criss-crossing lines: Toure’s figure sloped right, his guitar tilted left, and the wall falling off to the far left.  Touré wears generic twentieth-century century sandals, trousers and wristwatch, and plays a guitar that looks like one an American folk singer would.  But the scene is clearly African.  There is something about the low slant of the light, the bare ground, and Touré’s inscrutable expression – both remote and joyous – that tells us so.  Here Touré, and Africa too, seem far away. Photograph courtesy of World Circuit. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/heydon-hall-norfolk-cock-bull-story monthly 0.5 2014-08-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515055316-XRL6ZWD9ZBPXM3S6FX77/tumblr_n9umj57eOQ1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ENGLISH ECCENTRIC The comic setpiece of Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is the hero’s birth, reenacted by actor Steve Coogan, who writhes anxiously while suspended naked, upside-down, inside a giant, sweating, pink foam womb.  But the movie’s most unforgettable image comes right at the beginning, as an adult Tristram addresses us (that is, the camera) in front of his family home.  Photographed in luscious hues, in the gauzy light of a summer morning, the stately brick house makes an indelible backdrop, one that establishes instantly that we are in Great Britain, centuries ago, and that we are among the landed gentry. The house (it’s Heydon Hall in Norfolk, England) was built in the late sixteenth century in typical Jacobean fashion, from red brick, with stone accents and a steep tiled roof.  It’s tautly composed, absolutely symmetrical about its center bay, and richly textured, with a storm of ornament.  Its front facade is dressed with so many dormers, windows, entablatures and finials that there is hardly any blank wall at all.  And the ridge of its roof is capped, musically, with a string of elements that are all nearly a story high: a central cupola, two lone chimneys, and, to each side of them, runs of five identical chimneys.  The house is both restrained  and ridiculous, which might also be said of Tristram himself. Photograph by Steven Brooks. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sigmar-polke-moma-alibis monthly 0.5 2014-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515055610-Y7ZQZP31UZJCPFX8YMBC/tumblr_n91gqcCj0Z1qdm8ato1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PRETTY UGLY Sigmar Polke said, “The unforseeable is what turns out to be interesting."  He might have added, There is no telling what the unforseeable is going to look like; it could be very ugly.    As I walked through the Polke exhibit at MoMA I was bowled over by the passion and energy in the work.  There’s a vitality to every sketch, every canvas and collage, every page of every notebook, on display.  Polke generated ideas feverishly and implemented them with startling immediacy.  Each piece, however small in scale or ambition, looks as if it absolutely had to be made, as if, in it, the artist is searching for something essential. Of course there’s no covenant that art must be pretty, but it’s something I hope for.  In addition to being  powerful (i.e. carrying indelible emotional impact), and surprising (i.e. exposing something unseen) I expect a great painting or sculpture to be complexly internally balanced, judiciously composed, possessing a deep order, a formal beauty, that stills and silences. Polke’s work, which is substantial, has something altogether different: an untidy, over-ripe physicality.  He makes collages cluttered with roughly cut magazine clippings, and paintings with arrays of images running across patchworks of printed fabrics.  His is a strange, unglamorous style.  He leaves audacious stretches of a canvas bare, he draws by filling the margins of a page with cartoons, he studs plywood and wire sculptures with little baby potatoes.  The uncensored aesthetic gives his work a highly personal, expressive character.  It’s not ugly, really, because it’s unconcerned with what is beautiful. Image courtesy of the Estate of Sigmar Polke. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/whistler-painting-cremorne-gardens monthly 0.5 2014-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515056609-A3KN70XY8ZG2FKLBAWE6/tumblr_n8tl76sGIs1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PAINT INTO SPIRIT As I read a review of the new biography of James MacNeill Whistler, A Life for Art’s Sake, I learned that he was 5’-3" tall, a dear friend of Oscar Wilde’s, and, basically, a cad and a profligate.  These final revelations sat oddly with the gorgeous delicacy of his paintings, particularly the nocturnes, which flicker between abstraction and depiction before settling, gloriously, into abstraction. So I hunted down the Whistler paintings at the Met.  There are two of them in the main galleries: a formal portrait of French art critic Theodore Duret, and a nighttime view of Cremorne Gardens in London.  The portrait is lovely, and exactly what one expects: a flattering depiction of a fop in a tuxedo, top hat and pince nez posed against a plain white backdrop.  It’s executed in feathery, fluid brushtrokes that give the entire image, even the tiniest details, a tone of dreamy indecision. The painting of Cremorne Gardens is a revelation.  While it depicts a complex, vivid scene, of fashionable men and women seated in the garden at night, it stays close to abstraction.   A few broad strokes from left to right, across the top of the narrow, horizontal canvas, make a line of tree tops.  Some strokes across the bottom of the canvas make a sandy, open ground.  And a dark slash in the between them opens the middle distance, giving depth to the canvas and life to the illusion.  On the left-hand side, one vertical stroke – a flick of the wrist, a smear of blue paint – is a woman in a fancy dress and hat standing and taking in the scene. After looking at the canvas for a few seconds the brushstrokes, ethereal, come to the forefront, and it is they, not the scene, that linger in memory.  The paint has no substance; it seems to hover above the canvas like smoke. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/dan-graham-met-museum monthly 0.5 2014-07-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515057425-8HI6E1H2ULLQHOWMZ9ZA/tumblr_n8tluqiNfv1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SCREEN CAPTURE Does it make artists crazy when architects make art?  Because it makes me crazy when artists make architecture.  Too often, when artists use architectural forms they fashion structures that are unintentionally naive.  That’s as it is with the current installation on the roof of the Met, a collaboration between artist Dan Graham and landscape architect Christian Vogt. The roof is covered in padded green astroturf, which gives it the hyper-real intensity of a manicured suburban lawn.  Right at the center there’s a paved stone pad about the size of a two-car garage.  This pad is bound on its east and west sides by eight-foot-high green walls, lush with vines. Between these green walls, connecting their far corners, is an “S”-shaped screen made of two-way mirror glass, set in a heavy steel frame.  As one looks at the screen one is met with reflections of oneself, the rooftop lawn, the foliage in Central Park , and the Manhattan skyline, all collapsed onto views of what one sees through the glass. It’s a rich effect, executed with details that are, when considered architecturally, awkward.  Why isn’t the glass a single piece, rather than two separate ones that meet with a gap right at the critical point where the two curves meet and turn?  Why isn’t the frame made from a polished metal with a clean, narrow profile, to heighten the barely-there nature of the glass?  Why isn’t the screen freestanding, pulled away from the green walls, so that visitors can circle it and take in more fully its shifting, cinematic views?  And why doesn’t the whole screen sit directly on the lawn, so that it rises from it like an apparition?  Rather than an instrument that reorients visitors within the roofscape and the city, the screen ends up being an object on the lawn, not so different from a traditional sculpture.  One sees it, walks towards it, catches the web of reflections on its surface, and then turns around to lose oneself in the magnificent, unobstructed views of Central Park all around.  Those views, while static, are immediate, and stirring. Photograph by Nalina Moses. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/joy-mitra-designs-fashion-india monthly 0.5 2014-07-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515057525-PB9ZKTWDHZ5M19HYKEHV/tumblr_n8nmsyGZeF1qdm8ato1_r1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY OH!  CALCUTTA! Sandwiched between other designers who showed Bollywood-style getups on models strutting to booming film music, Joy Mitra’s presentation at the Splendid India Closet event was memorable for its restraint.  That’s not a quality one typically associates with Indian fashion. The designer took inspiration from Devdas, a novel set in nineteenth-century Calcutta that has spawned several well-known film adaptations, most recently a  blockbuster starring Aishwarya Rai and Shahrukh Khan.  The models wore billowing ankle-length skirts and pantaloons with short, fitted blouses that buttoned up the back, and sheer draped shawls.  Each piece was in a strong, saturated hue with subdued, coppery undertones, and was mixed with pieces in contrasting colors.  The combinations were unforgettable: tangerine orange with peacock blue, mustard yellow with burgundy, teal with chocolate brown.   The fabrics were embellished with gold seed beads and lines of embroidery in delicate, traditional motifs.  But this ornament didn’t have the bright yellow shine of typical zari.  Insted it reminded me of gold jewelry that has been worn for decades – dull, mottled, with all the polish worn away. The models carried cloth purses, puckered like dumplings, on colored cords from their wrists, wore little embroidered patches in their hair, and held their heads high, staring somberly into the distance.  They looked like they were on their way to the market or to school; they were not simply swanning about.  The modesty in cut (there were a few exposed bellies, but no ankles or cleavage) and decoration, coupled with the richness in the palette, set a somber, nostalgic mood.  The garments evoked another time and place, one with its own unchanging codes of dress and behavior.  The friend I was with remarked that the clothing was “very old Calcutta."  I’ve never visited that city, but after seeing Mitra’s clothes I have a full fantasy of it. Image courtesy of JOY Designs. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/masaba-gupta-satya-paul monthly 0.5 2014-07-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515058227-SYGPVL2P7T9Z4FA0DSGJ/tumblr_n8ni2r40go1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MAKING THE OLD BOLD I nearly fell off my chair when a cluster of models wearing saris designed by Masaba Gupta for Satya Paul hit the runway at the Splendid India Closet show.  I’ve never seen anything like them.  They use large-scale contemporary graphics to highlight the garment’s classically fluid, draped form.  Masaba’s most recent collection takes pop imagery including road maps, phone booths, and lipstick tubes and smears, and prints them on gauzy silk chiffon.  I can only imagine the drama that erupts when a woman wearing a lipstick sari walks into a cocktail party in Mumbai.  Surely she makes it clear that she is the wittiest, most modern, and elegantly appointed woman in the room. A sari is, very simply, a six-yard length of 44"-wide fabric.  It’s the way it’s draped and folded and tucked that gives it its dynamic, graceful shape.  So to incorporate a sizeable graphic, rather than a small, all-over pattern, it’s necessary to plot out where every bit of fabric will land on the figure, how it will fall, and how it will move as a women walks in it.  Masaba plays with ombre, incorporating long stretches of dove grey, bubble gum pink and electric yellow that accentuate, in turn, hips, legs and shoulders.  She adds contrasting hot pink and cherry red borders to set off stark black and white motifs.  And she sets the boldest graphics on the length that winds across the front of the torso rather than saving it for the pulloo, the end that falls freely over the shoulder and that, typically, receives the most specialized decoration.  The graphics she selects are bold and loaded with pop cultural references (Warhol, Picasso, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist), but they don’t distract from the garment’s traditional silhouette. Masaba is executing centuries-old draping, masterfully, in a style that’s audaciously contemporary. Ombre Grey Digital-Print Lipstick Saree by Masaba Gupta, 2014.  Image courtesy of Satya Paul. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/suneet-varma-india-fashion-sari monthly 0.5 2014-07-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515058327-SLKGHDJ80V1DKXYAYRHX/tumblr_n8nlibFoBs1qdm8ato1_r1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DECORATIVE ARTS I recently spent a day hiding out inside the Pierre Hotel, at the Splendid Indian Closet, a trunk show where twelve celebrated Indian-based designers showed their current collections.  As I watched the presentations I was struck by the persistence of tradition.  Virtually all of the clothes shown that day were traditional garment types (sari, lengha, kurta, salwar kameez), executed in traditional palettes (fuschia with red, saffron with burgundy, sea foam with navy) and with traditional embellishments (embroidery, lace, zari, beads).  The one designer who succeeded in taking these conventions and elevating them to dazzling, supernatural effect was Suneet Varma. This designer’s work has a sense of refinement that’s not always evident in Indian fashion, which can be over-embellished without being purposefully so.  In many of the garments from this recent show, the ornament is so lavish that not much fabric is left bare.  But each ensemble remains monochromatic, built from layers of gauzy chiffons and slithering silks in a single glowing hue (pale peach, bright lime, berry red, sky blue).   And the ornament, while over-the-top, is carefully structured, repetitive, rhyming, pulling the entire garment together. Varma worked as in intern in Paris, with a stint at Yves Saint Laurent, and there is a very French sense of exoticism (India!) and theatricality to his work.  The models moved down the runway slowly, self-consciously and regally.  They held enormous jewel-trimmed veils over their heads, rolled their hips like Jessica Rabbit, and took dramatic pauses in the middle of the runway.  They were styled with elaborate knights-of-arabia turbans, hooker-high gold heels, and glittering, shoulder-grazing chandelier earrings.  Like John Galliano’s gowns, Varma’s lenghas and saris are costume-like, magically transformative.  They turn the women wearing them into courtesans and movie stars, vamps and queens.  Photograph courtesy of Suneet Varma. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tartt-secret-history-vuillard-intime monthly 0.5 2014-07-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515058630-1IWVLJIIND4PTLC5ZT58/tumblr_n7xx4tt8621qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY INTERIOR LIFE While the rest of America is reading (and bickering about) The Goldfinch, I’m finishing Donna Tartt’s 1992 book The Secret History, a murder mystery set at a small, exclusive liberal arts college in Vermont.  It follows a coterie of six students studying ancient Greek with a lunatic-renegade professor named Julian Morrow.  Each morning they gather in his classroom for lessons in grammar and translation. The book’s plot is well-paced, its language glorious.  But what’s most enchanting is Tartt’s evocation of college life.  The types of students (California girl, old money scion, prep school jock, working class transplant, rich kid drug dealer) are cataloged with devastating precision.  And so are the details of campus life, circa 1992: stealing a slice of cheesecake from the communal  fridge, decorating a dorm room door with a naked Barbie doll, listening to rap from a boombox on the roof, playing Hackey Sack at night on the lawn.  It’s all bringing me back, not without some nostalgia, to my own college days. In the first chapter there’s a stunning description of Morrow’s office, where the students sit sequestered from the rest of the college most of the week.  Here there was “… a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills.  The roses were especially fragrant: their smell hung rich and heavy in the air, mingled with the smell of bergamot, and black China tea, and a faint inky smell of camphor.  Breathing deep, I felt intoxicated.  Everywhere I looked there was something beautiful – Oriental rugs, porcelains, tiny paintings like jewels – a dazzle of fractured color… .” That passage reminded me of Edouard Vuillard’s interiors, that convey the same sense of refined, hothouse sensuality.  Like Morrow’s classroom, Vuillard’s interiors have dappled light, still air, and uninterrupted quiet.  They’re stuffed full of exquisite decorations, overripe blossoms, books and papers.  The students in The Secret History drink from mismatched china cups and read from tattered, cloth-bound books.  The women in Vuillard’s interiors lounge with novels, cut flowers, and embroidery in their laps.  In these small rooms, in contemplation and discipline, they find freedom. L'Intimité by Edouard Vuillard, 1896.  Courtesy of Petit Palais. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/venus-williams-espn-beauty monthly 0.5 2014-07-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515058733-F95MIBQJSE94M19OP1GO/tumblr_n8i29qPkGT1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY AND VENUS WAS HER NAME In a 2012 Times Magazine profile of Venus and Serena Williams, acclaimed essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote this about meeting Venus for the first time: “it’s easy to find yourself unprepared for her sheer prettiness."  Reading that made me want to scream.  Grown men have never been shy about admiring the looks of female tennis professionals.  Virtually all of the women on the WTA tour acquire sex symbol status, and for some it even eclipses their game.  So why the surprise that Venus is pretty?  Is it her ferocious, unfeminine sportsmanship?  Our narrow ideals of beauty?  Or that she’s rarely photographed with the intention of making her pretty? Right now Venus is on the cover of ESPN Magazine’s Body Issue, naked, perched tastefully and somewhat ridiculously against chalky white hills and a cloudy blue sky.  The photos show off her enviable, classical proportions; she’s long and lean, almost like a Botticelli figure.  Her body is lithe, curvy and muscular all at once.  She’s smiling easily, entirely comfortable in herself.  Typically when we see her she’s sporting a warrior-like grimace, on court, or extravagant hair and makeup, at public appearances.  Here she’s flat-out pretty. Photograph by Williams+Hirakawa, courtesy of ESPN. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/lupita-nyongo-beauty-black monthly 0.5 2014-07-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515059717-9CIEDRQ5YF5V6K5TQKPA/tumblr_n89l1zj9f31qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY LOOKING AT LUPITA There’s something a bit disingenuous about America’s love fest for starlet Lupita Nyong'o.  Yes, she is gorgeous and talented and intelligent and accomplished.  This Mexican-born, Kenyan-raised, Yale-educated actress, barely thirty, has won an Academy Award, was named People Magazine’s Most Beautiful Person 2014, and now graces her first American Vogue cover.  The press she receives is unanimously glowing, so much so that I sense, lurking underneath, undertones that are self-congratulatory (in acknowledging the physical beauty of a black woman), exoticizing (in adopting her as a symbol for all our notions about “Africa”), and aspirational (in assuming that she’ll receive the same opportunities as a white actress of her caliber). The Vogue spread is tasteful and predictable.  The text, by Hamish Bowles, says she’s “as beautiful and hieratic as an ancient Egyptian statue of a cat goddess."  The locations are, of course, in Africa, though nowhere near Kenya.  Most of the shots were taken inside the Ksar Char-Bagh resort in Marrakech, and two were taken outside at the local market.  Lupita is styled in two distinct ways: in clothes that are minimalist and earth-toned  – non-fashion – and in clothes that are hyper-embellished – ethnic.  In the first photograph she’s standing in a stiff Martha Graham-like position, with both arms and one leg raised.  In other shots she’s reclining, on a lounge and then on a big blue exercise ball.  Except for a single picture of her in the market, wearing a cartoonishly oversized hat and grinning straight at the camera, she seems passive, a lovely ornament.  And, aside from a pair of fringed, baubled, thin-strapped Casadei stilettos she’s wearing throughout, there’s nothing bold, nothing high fashion, about the images. Now take a look at Lupita’s spread from February’s Vogue Italia.  Here she’s wearing separates from St. Laurent by Heidi Slimane, and photographed by Tom Munro against an inky blue backdrop.  The shots have a metallic finish that gives her skin a cool glimmer, and highlights the silky, sequined, form-fitting clothes.  In these shots she’s energetic: striding, shrieking, vamping, smoldering, leaping in the air.  She’s styled simply, without jewelry, and with a blood-red enamel on her lips.  The images are strongly graphic, and in them her presence is assertive, sexual, and emotional.  The difference in tone says something about the editorial policies of these two editions of Vogue.  Does it also say something about the way Americans see Lupita? Photo by Tom Munro.  Lupita Nyong'o from Vogue Italia, February 2014. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/kara-walker-subtlety monthly 0.5 2014-07-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515059428-O1LZU7Z8IP154BUB2HWW/tumblr_n89k9c4Ml41qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY NOT SO SWEET When I went to see Kara Walker’s A Subtletly, or Marvelous Sugar Baby at the Domino sugar factory in Williamsburg, I spotted two young black women in the crowd wearing knotted turbans and impassive pouts.  They were paying tribute to Walker’s monumental statue of a black woman, coated with 30 tons of white sugar, and they were taking back the image of the mammy. I don’t think these two women really looking at the sculpture.  Sitting Sphinx-like, naked except for the turban, with exaggerated breasts, buttocks and vulva, it’s a caricature of a black woman’s body, one that evokes racially and sexually charged popular and pornographic images.  The statue is, intentionally, obscene.  Sitting inside the abandoned factory, the work recalls historic roles of black women in the production and distribution of sugar, as slaves on plantations and servants in houses, which subjected them to physical and sexual abuse.  The artwork seems more concerned with a black woman’s body than any image of her body. I don’t think anyone was really looking at the sculpture.  Because of strong press and word of mouth, the installation landed on everyone’s (including my own) list of Fun Summer Things To Do.  Visitors brought along elderly parents who were visiting from out of town, and babies in strollers.  There were ladies in cocktail dresses and heels, lads in soccer jerseys, and French tourists with backpacks and guidebooks.  Middle-aged dads allowed their kids to run around, playing on the sticky, sugar-stained floors, as they took selfies in front of the statue’s saucer-sized nipples.  Amateur photographs with long-lensed cameras incorporated the work into artful compositions, seeking its reflection in the pools of water scattered around the factory floor.  And many visitors, like myself, simply stood back and took in the happy commotion. Walker’s best-known work, her cut-outs, require a viewer to step up and look closely inside in order to grasp the narrative, to see beyond the supremely elegant, abstracted graphics to the historical scenes they depict, and to let their facts (rape, pillaging, abduction, torture) rush in.  In contrast A Subtletly demands no inspection or introspection, and carries no complicated political charge.  One sees it from the front and then the back, one gets it, and one doesn’t think too hard about  it.  The work’s gigantic size and scale overwhelm its content.  As installed at the Domino sugar factory, A Subtlety is less a sculpture than an artsy urban spectacle, like The Gates in Central Park.  And the spectacle is so successful, so big and so loud, that it suspends thought. Photograph by Jason Wyche, courtesy of Creative Time. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/hindustan-motors-ambassador-india monthly 0.5 2014-07-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515060464-XPAIWOGS8P8BDM1A257L/tumblr_n7xrzaACq01qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY LAST YEAR’S MODEL It’s sad that Hindustan Motors is no longer producing Amassadors, the hefty, bubble-topped sedans that were, in the 60’s and the 70’s, basically, the only car on the road in India.  The car is iconic, and stood for middle class India the same way the Beetle stood for 60’s America, and the Trabant for postwar East Berlin. Virtually all Ambassadors were painted the same color, a chalky grey-white, and personalized with garlands and trinkets, often religious, dangling in the front and back window.  Back then not every family of means had a car.  Those who did had an Ambassador and, along with it, a dedicated driver who tended to it as if it were a living thing: washing it down each morning before it hit the road, keeping it perpetually fueled and oiled, and, often, sleeping in the back seat at night. My father’s family in Trivandrum had an Ambassador, and each time we visited as children we met our grandfather waiting outside the airport standing beside the car with the driver.  Three generations piled into it, like a clown car, and our enormous pigeon blue hardside suitcases were stacked in the boot and on the roof.  The car didn’t have air conditioning so the windows were perpetually rolled-down, though the ones in back could only go half-way.  The driver was cautious but, to accommodate two others in the passenger seat, drove with his head, right arm, and shoulders out the window.  The seats, upholstered in a thin vinyl, were springy, so we bounced around with every dip and turn in the road. The Ambassador dominated the market because it was a strong, flexible car, and because it was one of the few cars available.  Importing a foreign car at that time required considerable wealth and influence; it was an opulence.  Today, with more liberalized trade policies, the market is flooded with foreign cars.  More and more Indians have more and more money, and want a different kind of ride.  The best-selling cars in the country last year have the same big, glossy, Transformer-type stylings as the minivans and suburbans that can be spotted on the road in any American suburb.  And in the past five years Bentley, Lamborghini and Ferrari have all opened showrooms in India. It’s telling that Indians, who have a passion for over-embellishment, were happy for so long with the dowdy white Ambassador.  Why didn’t Hindustan Motors introduce the car in fuchsia, saffron, and electric green, or plaids and paisleys?  Decades ago India wasn’t a materialistic culture, and it wasn’t an individualistic culture either.  Just having a car and driver – which freed one from walking long distances, riding teeming buses, and hauling packages – was a luxury.  Car owners were less interested in exhibiting their wealth or asserting their individuality than in convenience.  Maybe I’m less unsettled about the loss of this car than the loss of that India. Photograph courtesy of Scoop Whoop. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/macbeth-branagh-armory monthly 0.5 2014-06-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515060927-DZQCW4QEWJK70P7R3XY7/tumblr_n7biyxSTyj1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MAKE IT LOUDER Confession: when I bought tickets to see  Macbeth at the Armory it was with little interest in the Tragedie of Macbeth, its contemporary retelling, Shakespeare in general, or immersive theater.  It was to witness Kenneth Branagh fill the Drill Hall with his voice.  I will listen to him perform under just about any circumstances ( bizarre, goofy, politically dubious).  His voice gives great pleasure.  When he speaks I’m reminded how beautiful English can be, and how expressive male voices can be. This production gives us a lot of Branagh, who wears his rough red stubble, tartan shawl and leather breeches well.  But the sound mix seems to hold his voice lower than that of the other actors.  And he rushes through his words, glossing over the language and also the drama.  When, at the end, he’s told that Lady Macbeth is gone, he starts right into the famous “Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow” soliloquy and then, suddenly, the speech, and his grief, are done. This production doesn’t value language.  The play has been squashed to two hours, cutting out chunks of dialogue including “Eye of newt, and toe of frog/Wool of bat, and tongue of dog."  The transitions between scenes are brisk, and several other actors also rush through their words.  Though they speak clearly it’s too quickly for the sounds, and the meanings, to stick.  Without pauses Shakespeare’s language, for someone like me, who has no special literary knowledge, is a finely-wrought and pointless lyric. One voice breaks through.  Richard Coyle, who plays MacDuff, has a clear, direct voice whose rhythms sound authentically Scottish.  It’s the voice of a good, strong man; when we hear it we believe that he is a natural soldier and that he himself would make a good king.  When MacDuff receives news that his wife and child have been taken he stops in mid-step, and this small rupture expresses grief more fully than even his words do.  It’s exciting each time he appears, and moving each time he speaks.  Why don’t I feel this way about Macbeth? Photograph by Stephanie Berger, courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.  https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/charles-james-met-museum-ladies monthly 0.5 2014-06-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515061509-4HP1ZRDPEULR7XYNLUSV/tumblr_n6oh1zrfej1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ANIMAL ATTRACTION For someone who devoted his life to the female form, making dresses that slithered over their hips and caressed the back of their necks, and dipped down around the valleys of their collarbones, the Met’s exhibit honoring Charles James is curiously bodiless.  We see some archival photographs of women in the dresses.  But we don’t see film or video of women in the dresses as they enter the room on an escort’s arm, curtsy before a dance partner, or collapse into a chaise lounge, as we imagine women wearing them would. The garments are draped stiffly on headless, limbless dress forms that are lifted off the ground on platforms, and lit sparingly with pinpoint LED lights.  Undoubtedly this is to highlight their sculptural richness, and their elaborate draping and construction.  Displayed this way, in the dimly lit basement gallery, James’ day dresses and coats are gorgeous relics.  The lights have a cool bluish cast that drains the reds and yellows, and all of the softness, from the fabrics.   These clothes look like they’re carved out of stone. But something different happens in the ground floor gallery, where the ball gowns are displayed.  These garments have rigid vertical symmetries and profiles that, typically, pull tight at the waist and swell extravagantly at the hips and hem.  They look like living things.  Not like women, really, but like fragile and exotic creatures who live short, brilliant lives.  From a distance, when seen all at once, the array of dresses feels like an exhibit at a natural history museum .  These lustrous shells could be prehistoric insects recovered from a dig, blossoms brought back from an Amazonian expedition, or deep sea crustaceans that cannot survive the light of day.  The dresses have a strong biological charge.  Not in the way that they reshape women into what will make them attractive to men, although they might do that, subtly.  Rather they transform the women who wear them into another species altogether, giving them a fantastic, superhuman armature to put on over her own.  That transformation would be wondrous to see. Image of Beyond Fashion courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/charles-james-beyond-fashion-tailoring monthly 0.5 2014-06-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515061868-WNAFYAPUTJAXWYEITTWG/tumblr_n6ohlxf3mn1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY PATTERN LANGUAGE A wall text at the Met’s Charles James exhibit, Beyond Fashion, uses the word “Jamesian” to describe his work.  It startled me because the word typically refers to author Henry James, whose legendary, novella-long sentences are crafted with an arch, meticulous prose, in which each comma, clause and conjunction inflects meaning importantly.  But even when taking this literary meaning, “Jamesian"  rings true.  In another wall text, just a few feet away, Charles James makes the connection himself: "Cut in dressmaking is like grammar in language.  A good design should be like a well-made sentence, and it should only express one idea."  This formal clarity – where each small element of a design contributes essentially to its overall effect  – is true of his garments. There is no fat, no unnecessary seam or line, in any of the clothes on display.  They have no obvious embellishments or extravagances: no visible fasteners, no floral patterns, no checks or stripes.  And only one piece here (a ballgown) uses embroidery.  Instead, the garments really on piecing – on the placement of seams – for effect.  This, and this alone, gives the garments structure and character.  If tailoring is a language, then James is working with a distilled vocabulary.  In any one of his ball gowns the placement of a shoulder seam, the slope of a lower bodice, the curve of a princess seam, are subtly and powerfully expressive. The awesome clarity in the tailoring – its language-like order – is clearest in those garments that are asymmetrical.  Most of James’ ballgowns are rigidly symmetrical, following the line of the human body.  But some of his day dresses have symmetrical skirts and asymmetrical bodices, as if they’ve been twisted at the waist.  Their tops, like a sari or shawl, are made with a stretch of fabric that’s been thrown over the shoulder and pinned down on the other side.  In relation to their severe silhouettes, these measured, cautious asymmetries are disruptive.  They give a special life to these garments, acknowledging the character – a streak of eccentricity, a disruptive inner force – of the designer, and also the woman who might wear them.  Here a hem that dips lower on one side, a collar that stands in front of the other, or a lapel cut wider than its partner, becomes high drama.  Now that’s Jamesian. Image from Beyond Fashion courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/http-www-metmuseum-org-exhibitions-listings-2014-charles monthly 0.5 2014-06-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515061915-02FPQEF8LIKZBR91R1UL/tumblr_n6oiltwau11qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY SHOWTIME The Met Costume Institute’s blockbusters are, typically, hot stuff.  They lead visitors through a maze of small chambers tricked out with theatrical sound and light effects, luring them in another world: the streets of 70’s London, Nan Kempner’s closets, or the dreams of Alexander McQueen.  Stepping back out into the museum at the end is a bit like stepping out of a movie matinee, a bit disorienting and sad. In contrast this year’s show, Beyond Fashion, devoted to the work of Charles James, remains super-cool.  The exhibit was designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS +R), who are best known for their high-concept work, and for the Highline in Chelsea. DS +R break the display into two large galleries, one in the basement with day dresses and coats, and one on the ground floor with evening gowns.  The garments are displayed conventionally, on raised platforms and pedestals.  Small video cameras on robotic arms buzz and whir about them and broadcast real-time details to giant screens along the perimeter of the basement gallery, and monitors on the pedestals in the ground floor gallery. The exhibit is a handsome one.  The organization of the rooms is generous and lucid.  Display stands and cases have been crafted subtly, so that they don’t distract from the garments, and meticulously, to honor James’ dressmaking ethos.  There’s a gorgeous, cube-shaped, clear acrylic vitrine that holds a quilted white silk bolero.  Its sides are fitted with jewel-like precision, held together by tiny embedded silver screws. But when I saw the exhibit, early on a Sunday morning, visitors were gathering around the screens rather than the dresses.  If the seam at the lower back of a gown is divine, then why not draw attention to that seam, instead of sending a live video stream of it to a screen just below it?  The whole experience is a bit a little like going to Yankee Stadium and watching the game on the Jumbotron.  Sometimes the videos shows us things about the dresses that we can’t see.  There are dazzling animations to explain how these complexly constructed garments are pieced together, and x-rays showing the layers of materials they are assembled from.  But video technology is so central to this exhibit that it holds us one step away.  Why can’t we turn off the screens and look at the dresses? Image of Beyond Fashion courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/bling-ring-house-fashion-identity monthly 0.5 2014-06-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515062716-TUZZDKVUPR2JHEBW7JXF/tumblr_n4aciv0I3l1qdm8ato2_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY IDENTITY THEFT Bling Ring tells the true story of a group of California high school students who rob luxury clothing and jewelry from Hollywood celebrities.  The kids never really understand that what they’re doing is immoral, as well as illegal.  And the movie, though it satirizes them gently, especially at the end, when they’re caught and brought to trial, doesn’t really make a judgment.  Instead it looks more deeply at the way they use their loot (a black asymmetrical Lanvin cocktail dress, a quilted leather Chanel clutch, glossy pink Loboutin heels, a cookie-sized mens gold Rolex) to craft identities for themselves. Their leader, Rebecca, says she wants to go to design school and have an accessories line, and her sidekick Brad says he wants to manage his own lifestyle brand.  And all of them take turns styling one another before they step out together socially.  But they’re not deeply interested in fashion, or even in celebrity.  What they’re really interested in is crafting identities for themselves, as all teenagers are, both in social media and in the world.  Their parents and teachers are absent and distant and monotonous, and the only cohesive, appealing identities they see are those of celebrities. There’s a lovely, long view of Rebecca inside Lindsey Lohan’s home during one of the robberies.  She’s dressed in one of the starlet’s dress and some of her jewels, gazing at herself in the dressing room mirror.  The mirror is festooned with bright apple-sized bulbs, a vulgarization of a stage actor’s mirror.  As Rebecca looks at herself we look at her, in pure profile, with tenderness and objectivity, not so differently the way we look at Vermeer’s Woman in a Pearl Necklace.  What we’re seeing is a young woman constructing and discovering an image of herself, and, finally, accepting it.  It’s something that, in American life, as adults, we do and redo, every day. Image from The Bling RIng courtesy of A24Films. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/bling-ring-hollywood-hills-architecture monthly 0.5 2014-06-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515062136-R6J9XCCHCE7YSPLOLQ07/tumblr_n4aefxC8kR1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MODERN HOUSE WITH DOLLHOUSE VIEWS I watched the Bling Ring, about a group of high school students who rob the homes of Hollywood celebrities, with little interest in their exploits.  What I really wanted to see was the landscape of Los Angeles, where I spent a blissful sabbatical four years ago.  But the movie unfolds mostly inside – of the sun-filled suburban houses where the kids live, the compact cars they drive around in, and the opulently appointed mansions they plunder at night.  We see more of Paris Hilton’s dressing rooms, a maze of gaudy, gilded, chandelier-lit chambers, than we do of the city’s skyline. But there’s one heart-stopping cityscape, of a modern house in the Hollywood Hills at night.  It’s meant to be Audrina Patridge’s house, where the group’s robbery was captured on security camera video and came to the attention of the police.  We see the drama unfold as a bird would, from a point high behind one corner of the house, with the hills spilling down around.  The view resembles an axonometric, a type of architectural drawing that shows an object  without distorting its vertical or horizontal dimensions.  It’s a view that feels, somehow, more objective, cooler, than a perspective, which distorts the scale of objects that are very close and very far. The house’s skin is opened with glass and balconies on all sides, and its rooms are flushed with cool white light, so that, like a dollhouse, all its insides are revealed.  (Its architecture, anchored by two floating concrete floor slabs, is a splendid homage to Le Corbusier’s Maison Domino.)  The camera remains still for several minutes and we watch, silently, as the kids enter the house from below, survey the first floor, arrive at the second floor, and then, slowly, wander back downstairs and leave.  After they drive away we’re left looking for about half a minute more, far longer than the story demands.  The house remains empty, and the city pulsates around it like a tissue of light. Image from The Bling RIng courtesy of A24Films. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/her-the-movie-architecture-design monthly 0.5 2014-05-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515062218-4HU3W23VFZMUDS6O5DMQ/tumblr_n6au3wy6jm1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY LESS AS MORE The movie Her is set in the “slight future” of Los Angeles.  It’s the story of a young man, Theodore Twombly, who falls in love with his smartphone’s operating system, Samantha.  The film’s set designers have imagined the city as one free of noise, crowds and character.  People live and work in high rises floating free from any landscape, that could be just about anywhere: Singapore, Barcelona or Lagos.  (These exteriors were filmed in Pudong, China.)  The clusters of glass towers are connected by wide, raised walkways that seem to float in the air.  From this vantage the city has no cars, trees, or billboards, no dirt or clutter, and no music, conflict or conversation either.  People don’t look at or talk to one another; they are always, seemingly contendedly, interacting with their phones. Theodore lives alone downtown in a big modern apartment with ribbon windows, a glass box in the sky.  (These interiors were filmed at WaterMarke Tower in LA.)  There are no curtains, no carpets and no artwork, and there’s no sofa or coffee table either.  The home feels barren, as if it’s been just recently abandoned, or just recently rented.  What furniture there is, chairs and a desk, are pushed to the walls and corners.  These pieces are contemporary, crafted simply from wood, steel and leather, and reference mid-century modern designs.  But none are iconic, precious or beautiful; they are all small, dark and worn, sadly pragmatic. Like Theodore’s wardrobe of sexless button-down shirts, chinos and desert boots, the furniture suggests an intelligently simplified lifestyle that’s been drained of fashion and glamor, as if they are frivolous.  What matters most for Theodore, it suggests, is his inner life, as it’s given expression in his conversations with Samantha and the letters he pens for strangers at his job at BeautifulHandcraftedLetters.com.  While the depleted physical environment is sad, there’s something bold about it too.  It points to a way of living that’s resolutely anti-material. Image from Her courtesy of Annapurna Studios. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/icff-2014-led-light-fixtures-lamps monthly 0.5 2014-05-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515063017-ONXBSHJNDKOSIQTXXLV5/tumblr_n5sk93hFPm1qdm8ato2_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY BURNING BRIGHT This year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) has its share of charming hand-blocked wallpapers, embroidered throw pillows, and driftwood end tables, but what shines most brightly are the LED light fixtures.  LED technology is advancing so rapidly that each year brings lights that are more energy-efficient, longer lasting, less costly, and with improved light quality.  LED’s are so much more smarter and smaller (about an eighth of an inch in diameter) than incandescent, halogen and fluorescent bulbs, that they might do for lighting what steel did for construction – bring about an entirely new model for design. And just as the first wave of steel-frame buildings were clad in stone panels to give the sound appearance of a building, most LED light fixtures are designed with shades and baffles that, primarily, give the sound appearance of a lamp.  Vendors at ICFF are cloaking LED diodes in nostalgic fittings, with shades made in warm materials (dark woods, textured metals, cardboards, felt), as if trying to soften the technology before permitting it into our living rooms.  One Swedish company even sells an LED pendant that looks like a bare incandescent bulb. Only a few designers seem interested in exploiting the tiny size of the bulbs.  Unsentimental designers tend to line the diodes up in lines, like a tape, or add a long, cylindrical lens to them, turning the brilliant pinpoints into light sabers.  But there are hints of what lies ahead.  One English fabricator is showing wallpapers that have LED diodes integrated within their baroque patterns, and one artist is showing lamps made of clouds of them, that resemble models of the atom more than chandeliers.  They get at the potentially revolutionary question: what does an LED light fixture look like? Image of “Bubble Chandelier” courtesy of Pelle Designs. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/pussy-riot-balaclava-fashion monthly 0.5 2014-04-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515063215-JF8TZXQMWBDRORFDVDOB/tumblr_n0qy9apRRO1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY FACE TIME This winter’s Polar Vortex turned our city into a festival of silly hats.  People ran around dressed conventionally from foot to forehead, and then topped themselves off with extravagant, irrational headware.  I saw fur-trimmed hunters’ hats, lacy cashmere skull caps, mink pillboxes, extravagantly twisted turbans, and even balaclavas.  There’s something essentially menacing about the balaclava.  This mask, that only leaves a person’s eyes and mouth open, always conjures for me the famous photograph of a rooftop terrorist at the Munich Olympics in 1972.  In the context of face-burning cold, the balaclava might be acceptable city headware.  But it’s a sinister fashion; it evokes violence and fear. So Pussy Riot, the all-female Russian punk/art collective who disguise themselves in crayon-colored balaclavas, seized a ripe symbol.  They took the balaclava and charged it further, with justice politics and female rage.  Two former Pussy Riot members, Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, appeared this winter at an Amnesty International concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.  They’d been imprisoned for performing, while masked, an anti-Putin rant in a Moscow church.  Here they were without their masks, in hipsterish street clothes, tasteful makeup, and long, loose hair.  Though they’d lost the assaultive impact of the balaclava, they gained a different kind of power by showing their faces.  They are stunning, radiant young women.  To see them plainly makes their politics personal, and drives home powerfully the price they paid for their actions. Maria and Nadezhda addressed the audience that night in a feverish Russian that was translated sentence-by-sentence, moments afterward, into placid English by an American translator.  But their intentions shone through.  They shouted in barely-controlled bursts, held their microphones like knives, and paced the stage like wild cats.  I was sitting in the stadium’s highest tier, and even from there the spectacle of this – two attractive young women lit by pure fury – was transfixing.  As both performance artists and political activists they possess monstrous charisma.  They might not need the masks. Photo by Igor Mukhin. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/barclays-center-architecture-brooklyn monthly 0.5 2014-04-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515063637-4KXSZTTVA0WN5VVPMOFG/tumblr_n0qzhfVyL81qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ASTRONOMIES The first time I saw the Barclays Center, the controversial new stadium in Brooklyn by SHoP, it was peripherally, as I was rushing from the Atlantic Avenue subway station to meet friends for dinner.  At that moment it looked like an enormous spaceship.  It’s not an instantly likable structure.  Its low, swirling, swollen, turtle-like shell has no perceptible symmetries, front and back, or roofline.  Its entrance canopy – a gigantic, cantilevered loop – offers no protection from the elements.  And its skin, a lattice of rusting steel tiles the size of pizza boxes, gives it the desolate aspect of an abandoned parking garage.  As I ran by the stadium seemed unmoored: to Atlantic Avenue, to Brooklyn, and to earth. Then, months later, on a lazy, sunny summer afternoon, as I walked through the plaza on my to the subway station, I got a different feeling altogether. When I reached the center of the canopy and looked up I stopped in my tracks.  The big loop circled the cloudless sky and pulled it down around me.  It was if the sun had fallen right through to my feet.  The web of LED lights that line the inside of the canopy flickered happily, signs  of the building’s inner life.  Standing there, I felt rooted in that place, under the skies and inside the city.  The building was like an astronomical instrument that called the sky down to the street. Photograph by Magda Biernat, courtesy of SHoP. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/architecture-herb-greene-prairie monthly 0.5 2014-04-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515064019-GO6XSD0KO2SJG187JA8B/tumblr_n3xjt1cers1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I recently interviewed nine well-known American architects to find out what house has made the biggest impact on them, and why, for a piece in AIArchitect.  I’d expected them to name family houses, fictional houses, or houses they’d built.  Instead they all named modern houses in the United States and Europe, most of them canonical.  But Brian Phillips, who leads Philadelphia office ISA, made a bold choice: the 1960 Prairie House in Norman, Oklahoma by Herb Greene. This sloping, funnel-shaped, two-story, wood-frame house, clad with fans of cedar shingles and strips of aluminum, dominates its flat, grassy plot like a wild animal.  And this is exactly the idea.  Phillips says that the house “needed to show its aggressive plume to stand against the relentless minimalism of the prairie landscape."  And Greene, on his website, writes, "The aim is to introduce a reference frame of feeling usually reserved for sentient creatures. Pathos, vulnerability and pain are juxtaposed with the more familiar house-meanings of sheltering, protection and comfort.” What I love most about the house is its joyous, raucous formal freedom, and its contrarian, macho style.  This house was built at the height of the international style, when less was more, and prominent architects were building houses with glass walls, flat roofs, and marble floors.  Greene is one of a strain of energetic, unmannered, individualistic American architects – let’s call them Wild Men – who follow the visions in their heads rather than the demands of good taste, or their clients.  He trained with Bruce Goff, who had trained with Frank Lloyd Wright, whom the name of this house, deliberately I think, conjures.  If the heart of Wild Man Architecture is in the midwest, where these three men hail from, there is also another healthy strain of it today in Los Angeles, where architects like Eric Owen Moss and Thom Mayne are going at it, and Frank Gehry has become elder statesman.  I hope they never stop. Photograph by Julius Shulman, courtesy of Herb Greene. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/top-of-the-lake-ideals-beauty monthly 0.5 2014-03-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515064860-HD8O6JQLOIEVUD1T530A/tumblr_mz93pzH6h01qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY ASSORTED BEAUTIES As a police procedural, following an ambitious female detective as she tries to protect a pregnant pre-teen girl, the miniseries Top of the Lake falls flat.  There are too many artfully placed red herrings, and the mystery is resolved unconvincingly and all-at-once during the final minutes of the final show.  But as an essay in different kinds of loveliness – in the natural landscape, in house interiors, and in types of people – the shows is richly satisfying.  The series was filmed in remote parts of New Zealand, and the views of the lake there, the surrounding mountains, and the disturbed luminous skies, are breathtaking.  The people at the lake live in cottages with blank white walls, drenched in natural light, and decorated sparingly, with roughly finished wood furniture and stuffed animal heads.  The insides of the rooms feel modern and also ominous, as if danger could erupt from within.  The whole setting of the story feels unearthly.  I doubt the country’s tourist board could have crafted a finer fantasy. Most  memorably, Top of the Lake shows us people we don’t see very often in movies and television.  There is the detective’s cancer-stricken mother, and a cultish new age leader named CJ, and CJ’s band of followers, who are all women in their 50’s and 60’s.  The actresses portraying them aren’t starved and botoxed and waxed, but naturally sagging and sluggish and greying.  It’s shocking to see them, and so many of them, again and again, at the center of the narrative.  That’s not only because they don’t conform to the dominant ideal of what we think women should look like, but also because we don’t often see women this age in movies and television, at all.  The detective’s mother, who wears her white hair in an untamed mane, is shockingly graceful.  There’s also her lover, Tarangi, a maori with bronze skin, dark hair and a placid, unfathomable expression.  He wears traditional ink-black markings across his forehead, like the ones Mike Tyson has.  On Tarangi they’re less martial than romanticizing, emphasizing his outsider status in this rural white community.  Despite that he, like the middle-aged women in the cast, are fascinating to watch.  They possess a  physical beauty that’s all the more powerful because we don’t see it so often, at least not on TV. Photograph courtesy of Sundance Channel. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/gaultier-brooklyn-museum-mcqueen monthly 0.5 2014-02-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515064925-SM6E7ZZ2I55NLCJX011V/tumblr_myw1yxFZxY1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY DRESS SENSE As I walked through the sumptuous Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, I couldn’t help but remember the blockbuster 2011 Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met.  The Gaultier show suffers by comparison.  Though the clothes are exquisitely crafted (many are haute couture), and the installation is vivid (with the filmed facial expressions of live models projected on blank mannequin heads), the experience lacks the emotional intensity of the McQueen show.  That show was charged by the fantasy in McQueen’s work, which fused archetypical female characters (maiden, fairy, princess, witch) with archetypical cultural narratives (rape, drowning, mutation, revolution).  And the presentation, chronological, was seared by the tragic fact of his death.  What we saw at the Met was the complete ouevre of an artist; what we see at the Brooklyn Museum is a retrospective of an immensely skilled professional.  Both designers are showmen, who pair technical mastery with visual flamboyance.  They flout conventional styles while executing their clothing with the highest traditional standards of fitting, draping and embellishment.  At the Brooklyn Museum it’s starry and also instructive to see the corsets that Gaultier designed for Madonna’s stage shows.  They’re kitschy, made of sparkling lurex, with cartoonishly cinched waists and pointed cups.  And they are as finely wrought as jewelry, with miles of angelic, millimeter-long stitches holding strips of ribbon, elastic and boning in place.  Even garments with simple profiles – a strapless gown with princess seams, flowing sailor paints with a button front – have an overwrought, byzantine quality.  They’re shaped with abundant piecing and puckering. And yet they’re not innovative in form; they’re rich renditions of standard garments.  More than a dreamer, Gaultier is an intellectual, able to infuse a garment – dress, suit, jacket – with a single idea to devastating effect.  At the Brooklyn show there is a black cocktail dress constructed like a skeleton, a gauzy white wedding gown that takes the shape of a West African mask, and a slithering satin evening gown modelled after a Renaissance Madonna.  If McQueen’s works are fantasies erupting into form, Gaultier’s works are garments lit with ideas.  They aren’t artworks, they’re clothes. Virgins dress, by Jean Paul Gaultier, Spring/Summer 2007.  Courtesy of Jean Paul Gaultier. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/oma-rotterdam-tower-world-trade-center monthly 0.5 2014-01-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515065038-S0O1FVML1L1HF7Q048SF/tumblr_mxvqheUIvX1qdm8ato1_r1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY TEN TOWERS FOR THE TWIN TOWERS I had to laugh when I got an email blast last week from a design magazine with the subject line “Koolhaas Comes Home, Completes Holland’s Largest Building."  That kind of big, dumb pride in big, dumb buildings is antithetical to what Rem Koolhaas and his Amsterdam-based office OMA stood for.  If OMA have designed buildings recently, like the CCTV Tower in Shanghai, that seem big and dumb, it’s because their programs and sites (and clients) demanded it. The email refers to De Rotterdam, the multi-use complex OMA just completed in that city.  It’s big, with over 1.7 million square feet of new commercial space.  (By comparison, each of the Twin Towers contained 3.8 million square foot of office space.)  But it’s not dumb.  Rather than a single super-high volume, the structure has been imagined as ten smaller volumes, bundled together, staggered in their heights above the ground and footprints on the ground.  These towers touch one another only cautiously, strategically, at certain corners, so that they’re tied together structurally, and so that inhabitants can move between them.  But each tower maintains its own volume, with windows along all of its open sides.  This arrangement makes for a building that is both massive and porous, with light, air and views rushing through it.  It’s a fine contemporary office building. But when I look at photos of De Rotterdam what I see more than anything else is a tribute to the Twin Towers, though the project was not intended as such.  Each of its small towers is, like each of the Twin Towers, a square in plan.  Their full-height runs of window frame and window glass resemble the signature black-and-white striped skin of the Twin Towers.  And they have a similar starkness as the Twin Towers; their shapes are so restrained that they remain platonic. The new building looks terribly handsome on the port in Rotterdam, but I think it would sit just as comfortably at the World Trade Center site in downtown Manhattan.  To include a structure like this in the new complex there – a big but not super-big building whose forms echo and reinvent those of the Twin Towers – would be a gorgeous response to their destruction.  De Rotterdam is like the Twin Towers but slighter, shattered, shifted, dancing.  It’s quietly heroic. Photograph courtesy OMA © Michel van de Kar https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/frances-ha-streetscape-dance monthly 0.5 2014-01-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515065597-G6TYEIRZD97R5IEAFNZ2/tumblr_mz93zyFE9G1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Frances Ha is kind of a prequel to Sex and the City.  The movie follows a twenty-seven year old dancer in New York City as she tries to straighten our her personal and professional lives.  It was instant nostalgia for me, conjuring a time when my friends and I lived in apartments with stacks of ratty paperbacks, postcards taped to the walls, and furniture rescued from the sidewalk.  We heated water for tea in sauce pots, tossed our clothes on the floor, and smoked inside.  In his review critic Armond White pointed out that the movie’s demographic of young urban creatives is a highly privileged one.  But the movie’s details are so exquisitely and honestly rendered that they’re touching.  Frances arrives late at a loft party and searches fearfully in the dark for her friends, Frances throws herself enthusiastically and awkwardly into a dinner party conversation, and Frances suffers gamely through a date knowing all the while that the handsome young man isn’t attracted to her.  The only false note is a bright, abrupt Hollywood ending that leaves her with a promising career, a beautiful apartment, and a supportive partner.  While I want her to have all these things I know they won’t fall into place so easily, or all at once. The most satisfying element of the movie is the rich, unfussy black and white photography by Sam Levy.  The feeling is looser than that of Manhattan, which unfolds like a series of still photographs, and closer to the eccentric storytelling in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise.  Frances Ha, like that movie, is set in a cloistered hipster underworld (unnamed bars, walk-up apartments, black box theaters) where characters communicate in an argot of slow spare sentences.  The most expressive scenes in the movie are the ones that show us Frances running through the streets from one place to the next, which are used as transitions.  The frame is fixed tightly on her figure and the streetscape, barely legible, streams behind her.  There’s nothing pretty about the views; they’re raw and energetic.  Yet they get perfectly at what it felt like living in New York City when I was young, rushing around passionately and myopically, unaware of the worlds outside my own.  Life felt like an endless string of epiphanies, and it passed in a dazzling, exhilerating blur. Photograph courtesy of IFC Films. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/marina-abramovic-park-avenue-armory monthly 0.5 2014-01-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515065510-AK624Z2LN37FUXJIP864/tumblr_mxvpr7V5yG1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY STAGING STRANGENESS I’ve probably seen a hundred plays in New York City – Broadway, off-Broadway, and amateur.  But I’ve never seen a level of stagecraft as high as at that in Robert Wilson’s opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramowic at the Armory.  This piece is essentially a vanity production that stars the artist as herself.  It’s more biographical than philosophical, and locates the roots of her complex body-centric art in predictable traumas including a wicked mother, a feeling of not being pretty enough, and a lover’s abandonment.  The show mixes forms: music, film, fashion, poetry and dance.  But it’s most remarkable for its stage sets and lighting, which plunge us into a series of worlds that are, as my friend described, “painfully gorgeous."  The narrative recreates episodes from the artist’s life, and each unfolds onstage in a tableau as cunningly crafted as a fashion editorial.  Actors are positioned on the broad, high black stage with geometric clarity, and brushed with cool white neon light that accentuates their acrid-colored costumes and stark kabuki-like make-up. I’ve never seen scenes as archly beautiful as these.  There is a man in yellow pajamas in bed under a sky full of pie-sized foil stars.  There is a lady in a red feather-tipped gown on a chaise lounge who floats, carelessly, to sea.  And there is, most thrillingly, a kind of surrealist playground, with four isolated, mime-type figures on stage at once: a man perched a swing, a lady spinning from a rope clenched in her mouth, a naked girl rolling down a staircase, and a clown anxiously dancing in place.  Each scene in the play is brilliantly composed and, ultimately, empty, because it conveys no narrative or emotion.  A whole lot of strange things happen on stage (figures run back and forth at back, drop down on harnesses, and join up in a parade to march away) and we don’t ask ourselves why.  This strangeness isn’t like that in a David Lynch movie, which, similarly ravishing visually, erupts from puckers in ordinary life.  And this strangeness isn’t like that in a Pina Bausch dance, which emerges from fevered concentration on a single action.  Wilson here seems to be to producing strangeness for its own sake.  Nothing in this production really gets at life and death of Marina Abramowic, or at the deep themes in her art.  It’s all very pretty decoration. Photograph © Lucie Jansch, courtesy of The Armory. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/aldo-van-eyck-playground-geometry monthly 0.5 2013-12-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515065619-92CWZG330U40UFYECRFU/tumblr_mwso3bKQeJ1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A story in last month's Metropolis, Modernists at Play, featured designs for children by noted twentieth century architects.  These playrooms and pieces of furniture are sweet because they’re so small and because they're mostly personal, intended for the designer’s own children.  But Aldo Van Eyck’s drawing for an array of playground equipment made my heart leap.  Van Eyck pictures each plaything – sandbox, jungle gym, swingset – as a platonic figure, built from geometries of circle, square, and line.  Spread evenly across the blank page, these figures have a bright, musical energy.  It’s as if Van Eyck intends to set children within a field of cartesian space, one filled with adventure and pleasure. Working for the city of Amsterdam as a young architect in the 1950’s, Van Eyck designed about 700 playgrounds in the city.  Most are gone.  The ones that we have photographs of seem both elegant and audacious because they are so simply composed, with a handful of play pieces set strategically within a flat, open plot.  These toys, because they’re idealized in form, are ripe with possibility.  They aren’t proscriptive; they're generic objects for children to climb on and jump from and run in between.  Are children happy in this sort of playground?  It’s hard to know.  But it must take an imaginative leap for a child to enter and make the landscape their own.  Maybe they invent nicknames for the elements, and games for each one too.  Today we give children entertainments that are, whether educational (Reading Rainbow) or escapist (Mulan), structured and predictable.  Van Eyck gives children a lot of credit.  He doesn't set them in a scaled-down version of the city, or on courts for games with readymade rules.  He lets them play. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/jackie-kennedy-pink-chanel-suit monthly 0.5 2013-12-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515066328-HEU7TZ633MD8B55BOBJJ/tumblr_mwq1af3Vfx1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Most media commemorations of the fifty year anniversary of the Kennedy assassination were ripe with sentimentality.  Cathy Horyn’s essay in the Times about the skirt suit Jacqueline Kennedy was wearing that day stood out because it was both dispassionate and poignant.  Why is the suit such a brilliant icon?  Photos of the striped button-down JPress shirt the president was wearing when he died have been published repeatedly.  It’s a gruesome artifact, caked with blood and clipped neatly where the bullet entered and exited his chest.  But this garment lacks the mythological charge, both the glamor and the horror, of the First Lady’s pink wool boucle suit.  In the iconic black and white AP photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One, we see see her only from the side and only from the waist up.  But we know that she’s wearing bubble gum pink, and that the front of her skirt is stained with blood. Much is made about Jackie’s White House fashions, but what she wore was conventional, not so different from what other women of her station were wearing.  The pink suit isn’t even a real Chanel, but an authorized knock-off from a Park Avenue dress shop called Chez Ninon.  Perhaps Mrs. Kennedy’s conservatism is what’s most remarkable about her presence in photographs of the assassination; she dresses and behaves absolutely appropriately right through the tragedy.  It’s as if her style is guided by a deep unchanging sense of order, and that this is what holds her together. Mrs. Kennedy never cleaned the suit.  Eight months after the assassination she had it sent, along with her shirt, stockings and handbag, to the National Archives in Potomac.  The items are still there today, sealed in an airtight container, available only to researchers.  At the request of her daughter Caroline Kennedy the suit won’t be displayed publicly until 2103.  Besides being tasteless, a bit of assassination porn, showing it isn’t necessary.  We all already know it. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/as-i-stepped-out-of-grand-central monthly 0.5 2013-11-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515066716-BKLVOZPTB2G3DKM5Z56T/tumblr_mu5x8j1NyW1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY As I stepped out of Grand Central Station yesterday I saw one of the city’s new prototype taxis — a Taxi of Tomorrow — roll by, carrying passengers west on Forty-Second Street. This new taxi design is part of Mayor Bloomberg’s scheme to standardize the city’s fleet. His opponents have noted that the vehicle is not hybrid and not handicapped accessible, and that city hall doesn’t have authority over the Taxi and Limousine Commission to specify what vehicles they use. What’s critical to the entire project but never really discussed is the new taxi’s image. The Taxi of Tomorrow is a big boxy tangerine-colored van. More than a machine of deisel and steel, it looks like a mobile storage shed. Stopped on Forty-Second Street behind a red light, squeezed between city buses and black towncars, the taxi looked ungainly. Of course there’s nothing essentially glamorous about the Nissan sedans that make up the bulk of the taxi fleet now.  But at least they look like cars, like instruments of motion, with a compact low-to-the-ground profile.  These vehicles offer independence from the sidewalks and the subways, and they offer transport, both literal and imaginative, to some other place: to a party, to a job interview, to a rendezvous, to a mysterious unexplored corner of the city.  The Taxi of Tomorrow has a sadly utilitarian profile.  Rather than speed or transport, it offers space inside for stretching and storage, though not enough, apparently, to accommodate a wheelchair. From the outside the van looks like a beast of burden, a mule with which to cart old furniture to the dump, to shop for groceries, or to take small children to school.  These vehicles need to be useful, but they also need a little panache.  Why should our taxis, such an integral part of city life, be clunkers like this? For anyone who has, late at night, after dinner and drinks, hailed a cab in a half-dream state, and hurtled down Park Avenue, when there’s no traffic and noise, through the dazzle of light thrown from empty glass towers, a cab feels like a chariot.  Why can’t a cab look like one too? Photograph by Nalina Moses. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/james-perse-madison-avenue-sign monthly 0.5 2013-10-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515066813-BKEAFPSOVHLSENORHVQ8/tumblr_mu5yz4frIb1qdm8ato1_r3_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY There’s a big black bear on Madison Avenue, presiding over the private school kids, museum-goers, ladies who lunch, and stroller-pushing nannies who pack the sidewalks there. He’s perched twenty feet above street level, on the giant, L-shaped billboard at the northeast corner of 84th Street, and he’s in town to announce the new outpost of LA-based designer James Perse.  The sign, about twenty-five feet tall, wraps the top three floors of a small four-story building. It’s constructed from translucent white fabric that’s pulled tight over a steel frame.  And it's entirely blank except for the stark black profiles of a grizzly bear and a five-point star, both icons lifted directly from the California state flag. The bear is about twenty feet high and lumbers left, on all fours, across the corner of the billboard, from the side street onto Madison Avenue. The star, five feet high, floats in front of him, right off the top of the sign. There are trendy new boutiques popping up all over this neighborhood, just above and below 86th Street, but the sidewalk experience here remains stubbornly uninspired. The small storefronts, tucked along the bottom of limestone apartment blocks, have ladylike window displays and hand-painted signboards that cultivate a cloying, small-town feeling. So this bear lights up the place like an explosion.  The immense black-on-white sign is graphically arresting, visible from over two blocks away, and builds excitement for the brand without flashing lights, bright colors or sexed-up imagery. The sign also makes an alluring dress for its building, a slim, postmodern steel and glass block.  In daylight, from across the street, both the building and the screen’s delicate metal skeleton are visible behind the graphic in ghostly profile, and the tarp shimmers as if it’s taking breaths.  It’s an eruption of life into the streetscape. Photograph by Nalina Moses. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/new-school-university-building-som monthly 0.5 2013-10-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515067320-2LI2UYVALRG7HDQTOSUF/tumblr_mscxoxBrbR1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY In 1960 artist Robert Smithson noted, all too correctly, that contemporary buildings “rise into ruin before they are built.”  Today, in addition to that, we can complain that new buildings rise into image before they are built.  Massive, dense, and complex, they're built with truckloads of steel, glass and gravel, yet look like photographs.  This is true of the New School University Building, that fills the half-block at the southeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue.  Its facades are wrapped with horizontal bands of brass panels that cant in and out like accordion folds, and take on a plastic, purplish sheen in the sun.  It has two stairwells pushing up against the facades, slicing through them diagonally, but their interiors remain hidden in shadow.  The building’s shell has a bold contemporary presence on the street but feels illusory, empty, like a symbol for the building it was supposed to be. But then I saw the building very late late one night, walking west on Fourteenth Street.  Coming across it like this, in darkness and stillness, without expectation, the New School Building looked like a natural formation, like it was meant to be there, a cliff in Greenwich Village.  The night sky softened the facade so that only its gently zig-zagging profile was legible.  The staircases, lit brightly from within, thrummed, as if the structure supported an ecstatic inner life.  The building, monstrous in daylight, now held the corner proudly, addressing both west and north, presiding over the neighborhood like a fortress, summoning visitors like a beacon.  Unexpectedly, the building bested its own image. Photograph by James Ewing, 2013. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/james-turell-aten-reign-guggenheim monthly 0.5 2013-10-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515068131-YBNMIUBMGJC0IRV9TMU3/tumblr_msm93pKVCu1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Many artists (most famously Daniel Buren and most recently Maurizio Catellan) have challenged the iconic architecture of the Guggenheim Museum. But James Turrell, with his immersive, cinematic light installation Aten Reign, succeeded. He turned our city’s most elegant space into a peepshow, and everyone inside seemed to be enjoying the show. The artist blocked off the museum’s signature spiraling balconies and installed a low ceiling, about twenty feet above the ground floor. He cut an elliptical opening at the center, evocatively egg-shaped, and set four higher, stepped ceilings above that, with successively smaller openings. He washed these ceilings with programmed fields of light so that the whole environment morphed, almost imperceptibly, on a one-minute cycle, from color to color: from cupric blue to screaming magenta to ice white to mossy green, and then on and on, rhythmically, relentlessly. These shifts evoked dusk and dawn. And they created illusions of depth and compression, as if the ceilings were closing and opening like a camera aperture, or rising and falling like a telescope.  For full effect, a visitor had to stare straight upwards for about half an hour.  The darkened gallery, lit only by the installation, was packed tight with visitors lying on mats in the middle of the floor, leaning against the walls, and standing in a ring between them, all surrendered to the spectacle overhead.  The rotunda, a soaring space, was dark, cluttered and compressed. Turrell had, with just a few elements, disguised the architecture of the museum and undone its modern allure. I overheard one visitor say that the scene reminded him of an ashram, with everyone mindlessly tuned-in and blissed-out. It felt less innocent than that to me. Dim and damp, washed in oily pools of color, the place had the claustrophobic, illicit feeling of an adult movie theater. We’d gathered in this majestic place to lose ourselves in unthinking private reverie. It was unseemly. Aten Reign, 2013, by James Turrell.  Photo courtesy of James Turrell. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/massive-attack-adam-curtis-armory monthly 0.5 2013-09-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515068314-5IHMLQ8ZY87H1V9SCIJX/tumblr_mtw65gFWNP1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY There is no finer delivery system for pleasure than a good pop song.  Sadly, this power is left mostly unexploited in Massive Attack’s multi-media concert/collaboration with documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis at the Armory.  The Drill Hall is majestically transformed, with a small stage for the musicians at the center, wrapped with a giant U-shaped field of video screens.  Curtis’ film, which traces, compellingly, western social culture from the 1960’s to the present by laying critical speech and text over archival news footage, flickers across them simultaneously.  And Massive Attack becomes, for the evening, a cover band, performing songs relevant to moments in the film’s narration, most of them written by other artists.  In following along so literally the band don’t do justice to their own dense, textured, enveloping sound, or to the film’s political verve.  The show becomes another pop video, serving up music alongside imagery without engaging it incisively. The film gives moments of astounding political clarity, as when clips from Jane Fonda’s iconic exercise tape, unnervingly glossy, illustrate how American culture collapsed in the 1980’s from shaping the world to shaping its body.  There are moments of pop magic too, like when the growling vocals to Karmacona start up and the band breaks into its signature hypnotic torrents.  But nothing is as enthusiastically received as their cover of Sugar Sugar, which is meant to illustrate the enforced jolliness of postwar, pre-Beatles pop culture.  The accompanying film shows us minstrel shows, dog shows, dance contests, and other inanities, but we don’t feel them ironically; instead we surrender to the sweet, stupid power of the song.  Throughout the 90-minute show the music and film move at different paces, overlapping at moments literally but rarely viscerally.  What if the sonic and visual forces, both potent, were fully fused, the entire show choreographed thematically with original music from the band, so that it became charged with the sting of the film’s righteous, deeply troubling politics?  We would accept both, ecstatically. Image courtesy of Massive Attack. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ric-owens-spring-2014-step-danceing monthly 0.5 2013-09-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515068416-1M9YQB6BG9TWP6LCUV53/tumblr_mtunturHVc1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I’ve been reeling, happily, all day after seeing Rick Owens’ Womens Spring 2014 Paris runway show.  He recruited American college step dancing teams to wear his clothes, and the young women do it while strutting, jumping, and stomping across the stage en masse like possessed tribal warriors.  The media focused on Owen’s enlightened casting, since the women are, by industry standards, heavy and muscular, and almost all are African American.  But what’s most exciting is how the presentation, called Vicious, deftly reimagines the runway show, turning a rarified formal presentation into a full-on kinetic assault. Rather than stare beatifically into the mid-distance, as models do, these ladies grimace and bare their teeth.  Many of them wear their hair naturally, with Afros stuttering dramatically a half-second behind their strong, compact frames.  Rather than sauntering down a catwalk one-by-one, the dancers, each one dressed uniquely, appear in teams of twenty-four grouped by color: first black, then beige, and then white.  So instead of a single ensemble appraised in stasis we have a storm of them at once, stretched across flaring limbs and torsos.  The spectacle is especially thrilling in the final dance, when dancers bump against each other, swallow each other in a throbbing huddle, and then – each woman crouching to grab the hips of the woman before her – join in a long pulsating chain that turns and marches off stage like a giant prehistoric insect.  There’s is a blunt, thundering beauty in this that doesn’t often find its way onto the runway. Image courtesy of Rick Owens, 2013. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/bishakh-som-comics-graphic-novel monthly 0.5 2013-09-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515068822-YD1QQJ7QTF65VBZJPLLC/tumblr_mscz4mwYa21qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Graphic artist Bishakh Som presented his work last week at the New School in conjunction with the New York Comics Symposium.  Som’s drawing style is dreamy and lyrical and his stories are biting (sometimes literally) and contemporary.  He was trained as an architect and his backdrops (spaceships, follies, cars, suburban subdivisions, apartments) are fully alive, rendered with the same detail and complexity that his characters are.  His storytelling is gentle and elliptical, and he sometimes leaves frames empty – without action and dialogue – and these frames have surprising emotional force.  This, the power of a place, is something that most architects don’t understand.  They're typically too concerned with composition and joinery, perspective and procession, to recognize the primal, visceral force of a low ceiling, a high window, an empty stretch of road, or the light spilling across the kitchen floor early in the morning. After discussing his comic influences (including TinTin, Archie, and Love and Rockets) and his technique (black ink brushwork, watercolors, and Photoshop) Som read a story called Come Back To Me, about a young married woman who lives in a secluded beach house. She’s not asking her husband, who frequently travels, to come back to her, but a young man she met during one of her husband’s absences who, unexpectedly, swept her away.  To convey that movement, a falling, Som shows the lovers pulled into the ocean by violent undercurrents, clinging tightly to one another as if they are the same person, simultaneously fearful and thrilled.  The water is rendered as a dense, grey field with knife-like folds.  We see the woman in the midst of an experience that she will never, fully, come back from. Artwork from Come Back to Me by Bishakh Som.  Published in Blurred Books.   https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/led-zeppelin-starship-rock-70s monthly 0.5 2013-08-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515069135-G144Y74RQS129UOF4NR1/tumblr_mrp192iT5m1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Whether or not it’s the greatest rock and roll photograph ever taken, Bob Gruen’s famous 1973 portrait of Led Zeppelin in front of their plane is pretty great.  It’s richly composed, with the lilting horizontals of the fuselage and wings in the background, the Cyclops-eye of the engine in the foreground, the four band members in the middle, and the mirrored clippings of the band’s logo at the top and their legs below.  The scene gets so many 70’s rock cliches right: the private plane, the shaggy hair, the open shirts, the super-tight flares.  While the goings-on inside the plane, an old United Airlines Boeing 720 fitted out with sectional furniture and rechristened the Starship, were not innocent, this photograph is.  It’s lovely. A large part of the loveliness is Robert Plant.  Cover him up and what we have are three sour-faced lads huddled under a plane.  Led Zeppelin did a massive amount of posturing, both musically and theatrically, but Plant’s gesture here (hair tossed, hips cocked, arms outstretched) feels genuine.  With his left hand he tames the plane like a circus elephant, and with his right hand, raised behind him, he reaches for the sky.  The thick gold chain over his bare chest is macho, but softened by his repose.  There’s nothing apologetic and nothing ironic about his position.  He’s a rock star, and happy to be one. Led Zeppelin, 1973.  Photograph by Bob Gruen. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/narcopolis-zombie-book-cover monthly 0.5 2013-08-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515069317-5W9GKTZIZDN4SJFEZVY7/tumblr_mrt5t8fWGG1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY As much as I enjoyed reading Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis from the US hardcover, with its tidy black jacket, I would have liked reading it from the UK hardcover much more.  That version has got gorgeous cover art by illustrator Jimmy Zombie, in a semi-abstract street-smart graphic style reminiscent of 1960’s psychedelic album and poster art.  The book tracks the lives of a transvestite prostitute, an over-the-hill poet, a Chinese soldier, a serial killer, a college-age burn-out, and a boy, as their paths cross in an Bombay opium den in the 1970’s.  Thayil uses water imagery (floods, rains, pools, oceans) to get at the encompassing, all-over, force of the drug, which suspends users inside seductive, restful hallucinations.  Then, as the characters begin to experiment with heroin, their drug-induced fantasies darken, and ghosts and demons emerge from the waters to pull them below. Iovine’s dense, decentered composition (which leaves broad blank pools of black) and strange, acrid palette (bruise pink and mold green) conjure the airless, sunless Shuklaji Street rooms where the story unfolds.  And the wavering lines and lettering are, at once, the smoke from the pipe and the abstract, shifting, see-in-it-what-you-wish visions fueled by the drugs.  The American publishers remade this cover with banal, formal graphics, so it looks like the marketing prospectus for a new cough syrup.  Unlike most contemporary novels set in India, whose covers celebrate subcontinental cliches (mangoes, sari borders, hennaed hands) Narcopolis, in both its story and language, is deeply exotic, describing a small, hidden, ruinous world.  Zombie’s cover art moves to the pulse of it. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ookie-doll monthly 0.5 2013-08-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515069663-1UEG9TC4V4HHOX0NPL66/tumblr_mrnazimyZ31qdm8ato2_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A friend just had a baby and the Little Guy, underweight, spent a few days in the neonatal intensive care unit.  Another friend suggested that she get him an Ookie Doll, a little ribbon-trimmed cotton blanket that’s tied at the corners to shape a head and hands.  A mother sleeps with it and then sets it in her baby’s crib so that he’ll have her scent.  It’s the loveliest idea, a simple, natural way to connect mothers and babies who can’t be together.  But the doll couldn’t have a more sinister aspect.  With its hooded face and cloaked body it looks like a little klansman.  Even its name, derived from the Dutch word for “little one,” is troubling; it sounds like baby-speak for the letter “K.” In the 1950’s psychologist Harry Harlow carried out now-famous attachment experiments with baby monkeys, taking them away from their mothers and setting them in cages with surrogate mother dolls, some made from wire and some from towels.  Those macaques with the towel “mothers” cuddled with them frequently and turned to them when frightened.  These dolls were made simply, from rolled bath towels and golf-ball-sized plastic heads.  Their eyes, mouth and nose were rendered so crudely, with buttons, it’s hard to believe the monkeys recognized them as faces.  What, apparently, gave comfort was the soft bundle for them to cling to.  So there has got to be a better way to make a bonding device for babies than the Ookie Doll.  Give them a doll that looks likes like a real person, or just give them a scrap of cloth. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/cadbury-99-flake-ice-cream monthly 0.5 2013-08-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515069805-CQS2RO4OB8MVZR71ZUGY/tumblr_mrbgvckQst1qdm8ato1_r2_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Watching the first episode of BBC's Broadchurch, it was a bit of let-down to see the citizens of this English seaside town living just like Americans: driving around in the same cars, using the same kitchen appliances, and carrying the same smartphones.  Only the characters’ accents, and the dramatic (and perilous) cliffside beaches give the setting away.  That and the sight of two detectives walking along the boardwalk eating soft-serve vanilla cones with chocolate bars sticking out of them like swizzle sticks.  Their conversation ends when one tosses his in the rubbish bin and stomps away, shouting, “Thanks for the 99.” A “99” is a vanilla ice-cream cone that’s adorned with a special, shorter version of the Cadbury Flake bar, and can also refer to that special Flake bar itself.  There’s something a little goofy about sticking a candy bar into a cone instead of sprinkling its crumbs (or flakes) on top, or blending it all together.  But the 99 can be executed in some stylish variations, like setting the chocolate at a rakish angle, or tucking it straight up-and-down just below the ice cream’s top swirl.  It’s a charming eccentricity. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/amor-pacaco-brasil-candy monthly 0.5 2013-08-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515070869-R6L3H5TUXF7CY7UOGXI6/tumblr_mrbif17AZu1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY In a startling episode of last season’s Mad Men, ad executive Don Draper sabotages a pitch to Hersheys by explaining that their chocolate bar is so deeply linked to everyone’s idea of childhood that there’s really no need to advertise.  For a Brasilian friend it’s Amor pacoca candies that remind her of childhood.  They’re made from a mixture of ground peanuts and sugar that’s pressed into a block the size of a matchbox and wrapped in wax paper.  The candy stays firm until it’s handled, when it crumbles like sawdust.  It’s especially nice with vanilla ice cream and stays gritty and flavorful even after the ice cream melts, a little like the chocolate crumb filling in Carvel cakes. The Amor colors (stop-sign-red, egg-yolk-yellow and bright white) remind me of two of my own best-loved childhood treats, Parle-G biscuits and McDonalds.  But the Amor logo is super-modern, with the A-M-O-R in groovy, blockish letters, and the lowercase s-i-n-g-’-s below bouncing happily up and down.  There’s a red A-M-O-R on each side of the block too, emphasizing its thickness.  This candy can be handled like a board game piece, hidden in a fist, or slipped into a pocket.  It might be the perfect size for a childhood treat. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/charlotte-perriand-refuge-tonneau monthly 0.5 2013-08-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515070608-FJ8QKLQSU6G85QXED579/tumblr_mqxcfn6bzu1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY When talking about the clever new micro-home he designed for Vitra, architect Renzo Piano cited designer Charlotte Perriand’s Refuge Tonneau as an inspiration.  She developed the mass-producable mountain cabin in 1938, in collaboration with architect Charles Jeanneret, but couldn’t secure funds to get it built.  Then in 2012 Cassina built a single unit from her original design for display at that year’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile.  It’s an impressive contraption, a tin hut with room to sleep six adults, that can be assembled on any stable terrain in four days.  The form is clunkily utilitarian, a ten-sided white metal drum with high porthole windows, a ship’s ladder, and a peaked roof a little like the Tin Man’s hat. Inside it’s lined with soft, yellowy pine flooring, panels and furnishings. Still, I’m more smitten with Perriand’s photo-collage rendering of the Refuge than the actual thing.  Look at how she stages the cabin, perched in the Swiss Alps.  There’s a gentleman on skis about to step out the door and down the steps, where he’ll greet a lass who’s sunning herself on a stone.  The snow looks like a blanket draped over the rock face, with some clumps sprinkled near the structure’s feet like powdered sugar.  The Tonneau looks less like a mountain retreat than an Apollo lunar module.  The bouquet of mechanical elements at its top, flues to regulate airflow, looks like a newfangled radar tracking device.  Perriand’s vision is bold and sweet. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/renzo-piano-building-workshop-architecture-construction monthly 0.5 2013-08-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515071224-LKAJK4HV0U2X3AH5TKMP/tumblr_mqx6fcnDzS1qdm8ato1_r4_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The Renzo Piano show (Fragments) at the Gagosian gives us one table piled with things (books, drawings, sketches, photographs, prototypes, models) for each of twenty-four of the architect's projects.  So there’s a table for the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in New Caledonia, another for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and another for the New York Times Building.  More models and prototypes hang from the ceiling on wires, twitching like helium-filled balloons, while the walls of the gallery remain entirely empty.  If the curators wanted to steer clear of a conventional installation, they’ve succeeded, but the tables don’t serve Piano’s work well, giving a confetti-like blast of information (fragments) for each building rather than a sense of what it is.  It’s especially disconcerting because Piano has a gift for synthesizing various building components (image, skin, structure, mechanics) in a single form.  Many of his buildings are skeletal; they take their origin in a frame (interior or exterior), and all their workings cling to it. The best parts of the displays are the large-scale mockups and prototypes for individual building parts.  Ceramic blocks (glazed in sun-drenched yellow, orange and green) from the Central Saint Giles office blocks in London have a high class kookiness.  A wood cladding prototype for the new addition to the Fogg Museum, with boards nestled snugly over one another like a row of sleeping animals, promises that the project will be beautifully crafted.  And an arm-long structural rib from a 1983 IBM Traveling Pavilion, a delicately cambered redwood arch with a worn aluminum Celtic-cross-shaped connector, has the presence of a relic.  These and the other large-scale models get at the constructedness of Piano's buildings.  While they’re pragmatic things – like machine parts – they’re supremely elegant, designed with care but little fuss.  (Compare that to the parts of Santiago Calatrava’s building, which embody a lot of fuss.)  We can find all sorts of things (drawings, photographs and narratives) about Piano’s buildings online.  Why didn’t the curators just pack the gallery with those things we can’t? Studio at Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa.  Photo by Fregoso & Basal.  Courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ws-armory-paul-mccarthy monthly 0.5 2013-08-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515071374-F1KVOI3MUTLOMDTVFG5I/tumblr_mr1785XYXD1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY WS, Paul McCarthy’s multimedia installation at the Armory, fills the Drill Hall with spectral howls and lighting, thick-limbed artificial trees, a ravaged suburban house, and a three-screen seven-hour movie that’s projected simultaneously at each end of the space.  The film is a dark, dirty retelling of the Snow White story.  The house, a recreation of the artist’s childhood home in suburban Utah, is actually the stage set where it was filmed.  That filming has left it wrecked, with soiled rugs, spoiled foods, overturned furniture, and naked, mutilated corpses.  The whole experience might be shocking but instead it’s tedious; so over-the-top that it has little emotional punch.  The most powerful view is from the Mezzanine, from where all the systems sustaining the fantasy (scaffolding, lights, wiring, security) can be seen.  I visited on a beautiful summer afternoon, and after surveying the installation and watching the film for about ten minutes, waiting for the narrative to take hold, I was itching to step back outside.  The Times hyped the show with a review that compared McCarthy to Jonathan Swift and Heironymous Bosch.  I liked the review on Culturebot better, Paul McCarthy’s ‘WS’ is BS. WS takes aim at the aesthetic and moral emptiness of middle class Americans, living in the suburbs and vulnerable to Disneyesque fantasies.  It’s an easy critique for city-dwelling art world types, and one everyone is familiar with.  But the show left me wondering why it’s so hard to be clear-eyed about the suburban house.  When we see this loaded architectural form in the media it’s either sanitized (like the spreads in Living and Dwell) or trashed (like in WS).  McCarthy vision of middle America is clear, but lacks the ravishing precision of David Lynch’s, which narrows in on common sounds, sights and juxtapositions – a poetics of the everyday– to expose latent strangeness and violence.  WS adds little to our understanding of suburban life or the Snow White story.  In fact its super-sized scale only highlights the emptiness of the artwork itself.  It’s this installation, really, that has issues. WS, by Paul McCarthy, Park Avenue Armory, 2013.  Photograph by James Ewing. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-yellow-birds-maps-iraq monthly 0.5 2013-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515071529-TUQCF1F7MSPXQH1VIAN4/tumblr_mqdb7p0vFx1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The most lyrical passages in The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers' novel about a United States soldier who served in Iraq, are those that describe the geography: of Virginia, from where he hails and to where he returns, and of Nineveh Province, where he fights.  With brief stops at the barracks in Fort Bragg, New Jersey and a whorehouse in Kaiserslautern, Germany, the story shifts between Richmond and Al Tafar, building drama by overlaying the landscapes of America and the Middle East, forest and desert, tradition and modernity, violence and sterility.  The narrator has a keen memory for the spread of earth around him (the plants, the sounds, the light, the air) and relates them to us exquisitely.  Of the rising sun he says, "… a light the color of unripe oranges fell…“  Of the night sky he says, ” …  a few stars like handfuls of salt thrown out.“  And he understands how deeply the landscape shapes identity and memory.  Of an orchard he says, ”… the trees planted in rows so orderly we thought we’d have views from one world to another.“ While the themes of the book are timely, stirring up discussion about parts of our current national policy we don't really like thinking about, it’s its description of Iraq that haunts.  The Iraq in the book is a real place, with hyacinth gardens and sewage ditches, with three-legged donkeys and beautiful old women.  It’s a landscape that is being devastated, without clear reason, by gunshot, explosions and fire.  The soldier’s memories of this place, which stay with him, are his memories of the war.  At the end of the book, after he’s back in the States, a visitor gives him a map of Iraq and he thinks, "That map, like every other, would soon be out of date, if it was not already… the map would become less and less a picture of a fact and more a poor translation of memory in two dimensions."  There’s a way in which every story is a map, and every map is exactly that, an attempt to put a world we know on paper. A Map of the New Continent, by J.Gibson, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1758. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/el-anatsui-sculpture-metal monthly 0.5 2013-07-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515071882-UZ5BL1DK1E6D3E4GRNYT/tumblr_mpxppkWZzT1qdm8ato1_r2_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Gravity and Grace, the show of sculpture by El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum, is well named.  The artworks, giant nets made from scraps salvaged from discarded bottlecaps, cans, and printing plates, have an imposing scale and complexity and a light, fluid presence.  They’re evocative: of fishing nets, molecular structures, chain mail, Navajo blankets, and pixellated imagery.  They feel more like fabrics than like artworks, and I wanted nothing more than to get a piece and make a gown with it, in which I could parade triumphantly through the museum as the waves of metal bits glittered and swished around me.  One friend I was with warned, “That dress is going to be scratchy.” While all the sculptures are engaging, I’m confused by their presentation.  Some are pinned to the wall with deep folds and bumps, and have tendrils that spill onto the floor.  Some have internal frames and stand on their own  And some are draped from wires like bedsheets hanging to dry.  El Anatsui’s works fall somewhere between painting and sculpture – field and figure – but I can only see them as textiles.  And I wanted the works to be displayed very simply, squared-off and pinned flat against a blank wall.  Some of the freestanding sculptures have great power.  A field of knee-high mounds constructed from gold soup can lids rises from the floor like a swarm of sea creatures.  But the most sophisticated pieces are those fashioned from bottlecap scraps.  These metal bits are hammered flat like ribbon, folded into squares, or puckered like flowers, and then tied together, one by one, by the thousands, with thin twists of wire.  The contrast in the sizes and colors of these scraps, and between the larger fields in which they’re laid, give the panels rich overlapping rhythms.  One looks and gets lost inside.  These pieces don’t need to be shaped sculpturally or flooded with sunlight or blown with fans (as one piece in the show is).  They are magical surfaces; they have life. El Anatsui (Ghanaian, b. 1944). Amemo (Mask of Humankind) (detail), 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photograph by Andrew McAllister, courtesy of the Akron Art Museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/india-africa-art-shomburg-center monthly 0.5 2013-07-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515071930-K3HJ1XJ3ZA4SAG9226E1/tumblr_mpxnooEq7x1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A little exhibit at the Schomburg Center in Harlem tracks the history of Africans who were brought to India as slaves, focusing loosely on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  It’s not much of an installation: about two dozen large printed boards with texts that relate, in a matter-of-fact tone, the stories of some of the most accomplished Africans in India, illustrated with some not-so-great reproductions of paintings and photographs.  But the content of the exhibit – slavery in India, the assimilation (and acceptance) of Africans into Mughal culture, the against-all-odds success stories of some brilliant men and women – is dazzling.  I went to the exhibit with my parents, who were raised and educated in India, and none of us had any idea that Indians participated in the slave trade.  A staff members at the Center told us that many Indian-Americans arrived excited to see the show, and then left protesting that none of it was really true.  But it is. One particular painting in the exhibit, Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah and Ikhlas Khan riding an Elephant, from 1650, is particularly shaming.  I know this miniature well.  It was the key image of an 1985 exhibit about Indian art at the Met that my parents took me to.  I bought a notecard of it which I still have and keep at the very bottom of my stationery bin, because I don’t want to part with it.  It shows the two men and the beast in bold graphic profile against a thick, midnight blue sky.  The Sultan, with gold robes and a halo, rides cross-legged at the top of the bedecked and bejeweled elephant.  Khan, a smaller and darker man, sits in back, on the elephant’s rear, and fans the Sultan with a white towel.  I’ve looked at this image about a hundred times without really seeing the second man and wondering who he is.  He is, in fact, a freed Abyssinian slave, formerly named Malik Raihan Habshi, who, through ambition and hard work and at least one murder, was anointed Ikhlas Khan and rose to the position of ‘Adil Shah’s chief minister.  He was a decision-maker who ran the Bijapur sultanate which 'Adil Shah, in title, led.  The refusal to see this man in this painting, and in the history of India, is telling.   https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/corbusier-moma-landscape-modernism monthly 0.5 2013-07-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515072210-GQKRZZDQZ4YFOJLWSUD5/tumblr_mp7rikq0cN1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY This summer’s big, unwieldy architecture show at MoMa, Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, has it that the architect “observed and imagined landscapes throughout his career."  It’s an idea that challenges our conventional understanding of Corb, who favored frill-free, machine-inspired forms, and who rendered them, both sculpturally and scenographically, with unparalleled power.  There are, on display, small watercolors Corb completed as a young man that capture landscapes with a lyrical economy.  There are three recreations of rooms from his buildings, which all address the landscape through windows.  And there are many, many drawings in which the architect renders landscapes and cityscaps as vigorous horizontal doodles, in the distance, visible above a roofline or through a window.  But none of this suggests a deep connection to the landscape.  Le Corbusier used windows to capture views, and landmarks to orient buildings and plans.  But I can’t shake the received wisdom that Corb understood the landscape as a static field for buildings, which were its primary characters.  When I visited Chandigarh, India I saw that the each of the main buildings, awesome in its sculptural gravity, stood apart from the walkways and pools of water that framed them, the broad roads that linked them, and the low-lying landscape all around.  They were singular objects. The great strength, and pleasure, of Le Corbusier’s buildings is their compositional mastery, the way they shape a dynamic interior landscape.  The two Le Corbusier buildings I’ve visited that made the deepest impression – the Carpenter Center at Harvard and the ATMA Building in Ahmedabad, India – are essentially cinematic.  These buildings lure a visitor inside and sweep her through with a sweet, practically supernatural power.  The "modern landscape” Le Corbusier explored most deeply was an internal pictorial one, of the mind and the imagination, of platonic space and surface.  The shadowed insides of the ATMA Building are enchanting, but arriving at the roof and wandering through its playground of forms is the climax.  From here one can see the city and its river beyond, but also feel entirely liberated from them.  As a friend of mine, an architect, noted, what are pilotis (the thin, unadorned round columns Corb advocated to lift buildings off the ground) but a refusal of the landscape?  In his review of the exhibit Times critic Michael Kimmelman, who endorses its premise as a “provocation,” adds, “… Le Corbusier is too contradictory and controlling a genius to confirm to nature or any curator’s thesis."  I agree. ATMA Building, Ahmedabad, India.  By Le Corbusier, 1956.  Photograph by Nalina Moses https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/girls-hbo-lena-dunham-title monthly 0.5 2013-07-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515072914-841ZOLPOUVSLU4PR4DFX/tumblr_movnckK00P1qdm8ato1_1280.png DROWN ME IN BEAUTY There is no graphic that makes me as happy as the title screen for the HBO show Girls.  After each episode's raunchy/funny opening scene, the title, which spells out G-I-R-L-S and nothing more in giant Sans Serif letters, fills the screen for about five seconds… and then the show goes on.  Each week the letters are rendered in a different color across a different background, sometimes solid and sometimes patterned.  For special episodes there are special graphics.  For a first season show set at a buzzy, druggy party in a Bushwick garage, the letters were drawn in little light bulbs that blinked crazily like an old-fashioned Las Vegas casino marquee. The graphics are crafted by Los Angeles design office Grand Jet'e, following Girls writer and creator Lena Dunham’s request for an elegant, Art Deco-like font.  The simple forms are reminiscent of the iconic modern alphabet Helvetica, but with swelling eccentricities.  The thickness of line in each letter remains consistent but takes odd turns.  Look how low the return on the G dips, and how the big, proud belly of the R squashes its legs.  And look at the swan-like poise of the S, perfectly balanced on its perfectly round base.  The most powerful feature of the graphic is the way the letters crowd the screen so that there’s nothing else to contemplate when it appears; there’s no escape from G-I-R-L-S.  Like the show’s four protagonists, its title is innocent, brassy and bright, and awfully hard to look away from. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/brutalism-architecture-national-theatre-london monthly 0.5 2013-07-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515072756-I6EJAO8JLGJQC7NYA5KG/tumblr_mokkdgjD8x1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY In London newspapers they’re debating who’ll take over directorship of the National Theatre next year, when Nicholas Hynter leaves, the same way New Yorkers might talk about who’d take over the Yankees if Joe Girardi left.  The fuss brought my attention to the National’s remarkable facilities, a sprawling, Brutalist complex at the south end of Waterloo Bridge designed by architect Denys Lasdun that opened in 1973, just a few months after the Theatre’s founding director, Laurence Olivier, retired.  For a structure housing a revered national cultural institution, the building is deeply aggressive, modern, and discordant, not stereotypically British.  When it opened Prince Charles observed, smartly, “The National Theatre seems like a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting."  Of course today, after the success of the Tate Modern, we’re all tremendously fond of power stations. Yet I can’t get over how unattractive the National Theatre comes across in photographs.  The structure is an immense one that encompasses three individual theaters, as if the three central theaters at Lincoln Center had been built under one roof.  It’s composed as a jumble of skewed square towers and street-length floor balconies, all in poured concrete, unrelieved by openings or plantings, as if two cruise ships had collided with the aforementioned power plant.  The National is too much building, broken into too many bits.  Brutalism isn’t about being pretty, but this building doesn’t hold up well when compared with other monuments imagined in the same style.  Its forms lack the the compressed sculptural drama of  Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale, the hippiesh elan of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ‘67, and the hopeful, idealizing geometries of Peter and Alison Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens.  I can’t help but believe that the British theater is indebted to its language, one of precision, lyricism and economy.  What a shame that this building doesn’t reach for any of that. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/skeuomorphs-analog-digital-graphic-design monthly 0.5 2013-06-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515073225-NGY4J3EX8BZMFQ7G9HIZ/tumblr_mokgbiDWHz1qdm8ato1_r2_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY In a short piece in Wired Clive Thompson laments the persistence of skeuomorphs in digital design.  He uses that word, achingly classical, to describe the way software applications often depict analog objects to describe digital functions.  He is thinking of the way our calculator app looks like a handheld battery-operated calculator, our calendar app looks like a sheet-a-day calendar, and our note-taking app looks like a legal pad, with yellow lined sheets, brown binding, and ragged tendrils of paper along the top edge.  Thompson argues that clinging to skeuomorphs, which can initially facilitate communication, ultimately holds back innovation in digital design. I don’t mind skeuomorphs because they’re relatively superficial, and leave plenty of room for innovation and improvement.  As people become more familiar with their devices and applications, they ultimately migrate to apps with fewer graphic distractions.  That’s one reason Google is the leading search engine; it’s mostly-white landing page presents little graphic noise – no skeuomorphs here – to wade through.  But skeuomorphs sadden me because they highlight the loss of pungent physical realities.  My digital phone is set to ring like a conventional telephone, but this sound doesn’t bring back the weight of a traditional handset, the important feeling of picking it up when it rang and setting it down when a conversation ended, and the way one could get tangled up in the cord during a lengthy call and accidentally pull out the wall jack.  We’re losing the physical memory of all kinds of ordinary objects to our smartphones and tablets: books, journals, scrapbooks, notes, letters, photographs, calculators, alarm clocks, business cards, radios, televisions.  Do we remember what it was like to refold a blanket-sized road map so that our destination sat right at the center of it, to align photos in an album with cellophane corners, to cry into the pages of a diary?  We carry fewer tactile memories with us and more images and messages.  Before experience reaches us physically, we turn it into information. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/labrouste-moma-architecture-drawing monthly 0.5 2013-06-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515073919-V8XM8NUWVC4YBVM0Z3VQ/tumblr_mmr7tiyU5J1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The impressive Henri Labrouste exhibit at MoMA is called Structure Brought to Light, to celebrate the architect's pioneering use of exposed structural steel, most famously at the Bibliothèques Sainte-Geneviève and nationale in Paris.  Here slender steel posts lift roofs high and open walls to great expanses of glass.  Much of the exhibit is devoted to drawings, models and photographs of these two buildings, and to historical artifacts from their construction.  We even see the architect’s cloth-bound construction journals, filled with his lean, leaning script.  But the real treasures are Labrouste’s student drawings, which fill the first gallery.  They’re huge, yellowing sheets with renderings in black ink and soft, sepia-toned washes.  The drawings depict classical monuments Labrouste visited while traveling through southern Europe on the Prix de Rome, and some of his early speculative designs, like a bridge connecting France with Italy, and a tomb for Napoleon, all in conventional neoclassical styles.  Despite the fidelity with which these drawings depict masonry (and all of these structures are masonry), they are entirely weightless.  The heaviest ink lines are finer than hairs, and the colored washes, laid with exquisite evenness, feel as if they might evaporate from the page. Labrouste’s student drawings are faithful, cataloging every crevice between stone blocks in a wall, and every millimeters-wide turn in the profile of a corinthian column capital,  and also dreamy, unrooted in time and place.  The images float on the page, cushioned by empty space, unmoored from landscape and geography.  We know precisely what this  memorial looks like, how it was built, how to enter it, and what it might look like inside, but we have no idea where it is.  Is it off the coast of Elba, at the center of a park in London, or in a back yard in Beverly Hills?  In the way the drawing highlights symmetries and geometries of the monument it’s highly rational, and yet it's tempered with romanticism, a yearning for the faraway time and place where the building stands. There has always been, for architects, a seductive freedom in drawings, where vision is given free reign, unchecked by realities of construction.  One of my architecture teachers used to say, “All that’s needed to do architecture is a pencil and paper."  Labrouste’s student drawings are a compelling argument for the fullness of paper architecture.  They have the geometric clarity of drawings by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée, the shadowy melodrama of renderings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and the unsettling emptiness of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico.  Labrouste’s position within modern architectural history is that of an enlightened pragmatist; a man working at the cusp of Modernism, pushing contemporary construction one small, bold step away from Medieval masonry traditions.  From the evidence of these drawings, he is also a dreamer. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/punk-chaos-couture-siouxsie-sioux monthly 0.5 2013-06-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515074120-9GEG291J2ODNVF5QZKGC/tumblr_mn476dmPxn1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Punk fashion is hard to do.  Fashion exists to make boys and girls look pretty, and punk requires a fundamental not-wanting-to-be-pretty.  No figure illustrates this better than singer Siouxsie Sioux.  In black-and-white photographs of her from the 1970’s and 80’s, before she started working with professional stylists and makeup artists, it's clear that she’s a classic English beauty, slender-hipped and fine-boned, and also that she’s willing to throw that beauty, and the privilege it confers, away.  She dyes her hair ink black, then shears it close to her skull or teases it freakishly high.  She paints her eyes with great black bat wings.  She wears trashy slip dresses that expose her breasts, and slim leather trousers and squarish t-shirts that make her look like an adolescent boy.  There’s something about her willingness during these years to make herself conventionally unattractive in order to make a statement (I’m not like you, I’m not a lady, I’m pissed-off) that is punk. Because womens’ identities are, traditionally, so wound up in their looks, punk fashion might be harder for women to do than for men.  Courtney Love did it, thrillingly, in the beginning, with bad skin, bad makeup, bad dye jobs, and bad clothes.  Debbie Harry never did it but has always carried herself with an artsy disdain, an unattainability, that is, if not punk, impressively defiant.  Madonna has wanted to do it all along, very badly, but has, really, never done it.  At this year's Costume Institute gala, the night before Punk opened to the public, Madge walked the red carpet pantless, in a studded plaid jacket over fishnets, with black leather gloves, a bobbed black wig, and silent movie star makeup.  She was trying to be punk but she was, still, pretty. Siouxsie Sioux, 1976.  By Sheila Rock. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/punk-fashion-met-chaos-couture monthly 0.5 2013-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515074320-X3Y7UDG50KUHITC2D5MM/tumblr_mncykwBRgl1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Punk: Chaos to Couture is smaller sized and scaled than previous Met Costume Institute exhibits like Anglomania and Savage Beauty, and also less richly contextualized than those shows, which positioned punk as an eruption of eccentric personal vision through the elaborate stratifications of British culture.  Instead Chaos to Couture shows us exactly what it promises, how fashion rises in the street and works its way onto the runways.  The first gallery holds racks of t-shirts and trousers from Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s legendary 1970’s London boutique Sex, all obliterated (“deconstructed” is too gentle a word) with rips, cuts, safety pins, and comically tasteless sexual and anti-royalist graphics.  The following galleries show proper fashion, including a tweed Chanel suit embellished with hand-trimmed holes, a Versace gown whose whiplash panels are held together by over-sized gold safety pins, and a sagging, striped, open-weave, knit dress from Rodarte.  The “chaos” to “couture” comparison doesn’t serve the couture well.  Next to the real things – unwashed, ill-fitting, falling-to-threads, off-the-rack clothing – the legitimate fashions feel lifeless. Part of this might be the displays, which show all the clothes on the Met’s standard, white, Cristy-Turlington-faced mannequins, in ladylike poses lifted high on platforms.  One of the galleries is decorated to resemble the bowels of a Lower East Side club, with simulated cracked cement block walls painted matte black.  Why didn’t the curators blow holes through the walls?  Or dismember the mannequins?  Or pump stale cigarette smoke through the rooms?  Another part of it is curatorial.  Most of high fashions have been selected for punk motifs rather than aesthetic kinship.  Of the "couture" on display, only the Junya Watanabe and Commes des Garcons garments feel authentically punk, undoing the body’s natural graces with monstrous appendages and asymmetries that are just as arresting and convulsive as multiple piercings, black-and-white face makeup, gravity-defying hairdos, and all-over tattoos.  The trio of black Alexander McQueen dresses on display, tailored, exquisitely, from synthetics that emulate bubble wrap and garbage bags, are not punk; they are classical in their proportions and repose.  Why didn’t the Met include dresses from McQueen’s Highland Rape collection, which obscured the face with feathers and veils while uncovering the stomach, breast and thigh, giving the women wearing them a disfiguring, disquieting power?  It’s this unease that’s deeply punk. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tutankhamun-archaeology-burton-photographs monthly 0.5 2013-05-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515075223-NW00H8JKHVQFPE5WX0YH/tumblr_mmowh0OAaX1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY There were several compelling stories in Vanity Fair’s remembrance of the Met’s landmark 1978 Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit: the fragile collaboration between Met head Thomas P. F. Hoving and National Gallery head J. Carter Brown, the international political intrigues that inspired and then complicated execution, and the way this modestly scaled show, with just fifty-five artifacts and a catalog the size of a comic book, became the first stand-in-line museum blockbuster.  But the finest story is how Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922.  The moment he located its entrance, Carter stopped work and summoned his patron, Lord Carnarvon, from England, and photographer Harry Burton, who was in the country working for National Geographic.  Only after Carnarvon arrived, two and a half weeks later, did Carter open the tomb.  Burton photographed progress systematically, on that momentous day and then over the next eight years, as the team moved deeper into the mortuary.  There are, in his collection of 1,847 photographs, archived at the Ashmoleon Museum, a record of the mortuary’s architecture, of all the objects recovered, and of the archaeologists at work. The photographs have a romantic soft, silvery glow that many early twentieth-century photographs, with long exposure times, have, as well as a stunning formal directness.  A photograph was a precious thing then, and each shot is composed deliberately by setting one or more very important things at the center of the frame.  We see the slender stone passage at the entrance to the crypt, which has no apparent end.  We see the the suburban-basement clutter of the antechamber, piled high with wooden chests, chariot wheels, alabaster vases, gilded furniture, and statues.  We see the king’s tomb resting alone in the burial chamber, a stone monolith wrapped in clouds of cuneiform.  We see, inside the tomb, a garland of tiny, pill-sized blossoms, which crumbled when Carter reached to remove it.  And we see a peon – one of the boys that might have fixed tea for Carter and his team – modeling the king’s necklace.  Tutankhamun ascended to the throne when he was nine years old and died when he was eighteen.  The boy in the photograph, who looks as if he is nine or ten, wears a white cotton gown and turban that set off his dark skin dramatically, and a gentle, solemn expression, as if he’s reluctantly but obligingly making believe.  This photograph brings to life more vividly than all the treasures that Tutankhamun was a boy, an African, and a king. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/rock-the-shack-house monthly 0.5 2013-05-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515074719-W48QUHHC9Y3LS5DV9T51/tumblr_mmtiqm0Odg1qdm8ato1_r4_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY As I was reviewing a book about contemporary micro-houses (Rock the Shack: Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs) I realized that our homes are no longer refuges, retreats from work and society.  Instead our houses and apartments are highly sophisticated instruments: exquisitely furnished, mechanically conditioned, audio-visually equipped, pulsating with streams of electronic data.  They shape vibrant micro-environments that allow us to keep working, consuming and communicating when we’re supposed to be resting.  Country houses aren’t much different, just finished with a slightly lower level of complexity. As the book suggests, we might want to run away and live in a “shack,” a primitive hut, the kind of small building that hearkens back to the first manmade structures.  Their architecture is primarily about shelter from the elements, and does little to serve identity, status and place-making.  These are structures that stand lightly, that barely disturb the ground, that can be simply dismantled and replaced, that can be washed away by rains or blown to bits by a storm.  When left inside a building like this with nothing to do, what would we do?  What dreams and stories would we find? Bridge Studio, Saunders Architecture, Newfoundland, Canada.  Photography: Bent Rene Synnevag. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/moma-folk-art-museum monthly 0.5 2013-05-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515075117-QNRGLLGEA0ME0539D8Z0/tumblr_mmcn38EQJG1qdm8ato1_r5_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Six weeks ago MoMA announced that it would raze the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed building on West 53rd Street that originally housed the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM).  In its place MoMA wanted to build one to properly connect its existing building, just to the east, with the new Jean Nouvel-designed tower it's building, just to the west.  Then last week MoMA announced that it was reconsidering.  Many had opposed the proposed demolition, including AFAM’s architects, architecture critics, and even MoMA’s Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll.  But, if art critic Jerry Saltz’s commentary in New York Magazine is any indication, the art world is less concerned about it.  Saltz argues that the building served architecture far better than it served art, and supports its removal with a directness that approaches zeal. It’s sad to see any building razed, especially one as architecturally ambitious and distinctive and AFAM, and one that’s only twelve years old.  Yet I’m unmoved about seeing it go.  AFAM sold the building to MoMA and left, and it occupies a key property within the MoMA campus.  From the outside the AFAM building has never felt like a part of midtown Manhattan.  Its signature super-tall bronze facade panels are uncomfortably overscaled – unrelated to the scale of surrounding facades – and, when seen from the sidewalk, have a dull, mottled surface that feels unfinished.  On an isolated site in the woods the building might cut a dramatic figure, a post-Brutalist megalith, but on a dense block in Midtown, rubbing shoulders with towers dressed in limestone and glass, it feels overly rugged, like a cocktail party guest in a parka.  Inside, the museum is spatially and sculpturally dynamic, but doesn’t carve out substantial spaces and surfaces for display.  Nearly half of each floor plate is given over to three staircases and an elevator.  Artworks are scattered all over the inner skin of the building, in corners and nooks and along stairwells, giving the place an eccentric, unorganized feeling.  My lack of sentimentality about razing AFAM is linked directly to my persistent nostalgia for the original, intimate MoMA building, which I remember, along with the installations of many of the individual artworks housed inside, from childhood.  After that building was swallowed up inside Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 expansion, I have little ardor left to preserve museum buildings, especially on this block.  MoMA has evolved as a corporate entity, amassing properties in midtown the way New York University does in Greenwich Village.  I didn’t flinch as I read in the Times that the AFAM building might be gone before the end of the year, but I did when I read that the MoMA board is currently chaired by Tishman Speyer head Jerry I. Speyer.  Museum leadership is running the place with a developer’s eye, designing a signature property rather than a temple for art.  It’s this same mentality that led to the construction of the AFAM building in the first place.  Let’s see if MoMA, in its upcoming expansion, can hit both marks. Credit: © Peter Mauss | Esto https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tarantino-django-twain-huckleberry-fin monthly 0.5 2013-05-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515076442-WIZ7BWS2D7WA6O3RWB3B/tumblr_mm0yk7RUAM1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Django Unchained stirs up memories of dozens of other movies (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, Lawrence of Arabia, Taxi Driver, Gladiator), but what it reminds me of most is Huckleberry Finn.  In his consideration (it’s certainly not a review) of Django in the New York Press, critic Armond White makes the same comparison, although derogatively, saying that, like the book, the movie “gratifies some people’s entrenched racial prejudices."  The first half of the movie, which is lyrical, tender and hilarious, follows the slave Django and his owner, the German-born dentist Dr. King Schultz, as they meet in the ante-bellum West and travel to the South on horseback.  Along the way they learn how to talk to one another, how to work together, and something about who the other is.  And while there is, as in Huckleberry Finn, an obscene imbalance between the men in their status, security, and means of expression (Django remains uncomfortably silent most of the time, while King never shuts up), the men become like best friends, like teammates, like father and son.  This, the first part of the movie, is a love story. It is also an ecstatic vision of the American landscape.  Interspersed with the comedy and action set pieces there are wide, distant views of Django and King riding their horses, across prairies dotted with wildflowers, beneath ranges of stony, snow-capped mountain, and down allees of knarled, centuries-old, kudzu-draped trees.  These views are cliched (probably deliberately so), over-familiar from landscape paintings, westerns and car commercials, but it's stunning to see these different American landscapes depicted so simply and expansively.  The images aren’t prettified; they’re raw and shadowed, alive with motion.  They give a feeling for the horizon, and for the vastness and wildness of the terrain.  In one passage the two men, after a snowfall, on their horses, approach a herd of grazing bison.  It’s part of a lighthearted montage, with an old, worn pop song playing on the soundtrack, that’s meant to express that time is passing but nothing important is going on.  But as I watched I felt that image, which is very loosely composed, as if looking on from a ladder’s height about twenty feet away, fall straight into my subconscious.  The men move slowly, like the animals, comfortable on the land and in the presence of one another, without speech and without purpose.  They might each never belong anywhere in American but they both, at this moment, belong right here.  At the end the movie turns into exactly what one expects, a profane and comic bloodbath.  But when Django and King are traveling alone together across forest and field the story is splendid.  Just as it was following Huck and Jim drift down the Mississippi, I wanted these men to keep going. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ruscha-art-books-photography monthly 0.5 2013-05-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515075518-65VUETOTZ470TYIMHXYC/tumblr_ml7lerBblf1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Books & Co, a show at the Gagosian uptown, kicks off with a framed typewritten letter to Ed Ruscha from 1963 that states, “I am, herewith, returning this copy of Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, which the Library of Congress does not wish to add to its collections."  It’s hilarious because the book, along with others Ruscha published in that decade, is a now-canonical work that impressed a generation of photo and print artists, whose books are featured in this exhibit right alongside Ruscha’s.  (Also, those first editions are now worth a small fortune.)  Ruscha’s books are simple things, Playbill-sized volumes with glued binding and blunt graphics: white paper, modern black type face, a picture on every page, blank pages to separate sections.  His method is to choose one type of thing (gas stations, apartment buildings, parking lots, palm trees), photograph it over and over again, and collect the photographs in a book.  In the 1960’s, before digital photography and home printing, the acts of photography and publishing conferred authority.  The things Ruscha selected to photograph were rooted in the landscape of Los Angeles, where he spent his teenage years and continues to live and work.  There’s a bit of a scientific impulse in his method, similar to the those of August Sander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, who use photography to classify and record what they see.  Ruscha’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, that documents that street in two long, linear collages of black and white photos along a single, unfolding, horizontal page, seems particularly so.  But that book also has the feeling of a scrapbook, softened by memories. Ruscha isn’t too concerned with being comprehensive, or even faithful.  He gives his books names that are literal and funny without being sarcastic.  Some Los Angeles Apartments, Various Small Fires and Milk, and Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, are all each exactly what they say they are.  Ruscha’s original photographs now hang in MoMA and the Whitney, but these same images are more powerful when framed within the books.  They don’t easily mythologize the American landscape (like Robert Frank’s) or satirize it (like Gary Winogrand’s).  His intentions aren't political or provocative.  One of Rushca’s book is called Colored People but contains photos of small cacti, and another book called Hard Light contains photographs, entirely chaste, of an attractive young female couple as they pass they day together.  Like Warhol, who also exploited photography for its impersonal emotional and graphic power, Ruscha uses the medium to mirror vernacular American culture.  He's content to show us what’s out there and what it's like, which is hard to see when we’re standing inside of it. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/basquiat-warhol-gagosian-painting monthly 0.5 2013-04-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515075776-S8NCWVW97VPEFNETSG9H/tumblr_mku2k3nv0k1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat light up the cavernous Gagosian Gallery on far West 25th Street like a carnival.  At each turn they offer up big noisy characters and splashes of crayon-box color and snatches of street slang.  Basquiat, like Warhol, is a brilliant graphic designer, and paints to charge each square inch of surface with a bristling kinetic energy.  It’s as if every figure, phrase and mark we see could burst forward at any moment, but has been pinned in place with scientific precision.  These canvases are full but aren’t overwrought.  In Italian is packed with all sorts of things (faces, quotes, splotches, scribbles, two quarters, one gorilla) and yet remains remarkably poised, with swatches of primer and raw canvas showing through, giving the scene, below its lush, funky texture, space and depth. Seeing these paintings expunges Basquiat’s personal mythology of a boy genius dying young.  These are substantial works that stir up recollections of Jackson Pollock (in their deep swirling motions) and Willem De Kooning (in their scary, funny monsters).  They also, seemingly effortlessly, capture rhythms of cartoon art, graffiti, advertising, and video games.  Two paintings here stand out for their brute, experimental simplicity.  Each of these was shaped by stretching canvas over a wood pallet, overpainting it in a single color, and embellishing it with a single face and name.  One, red, commemorates Jersey Joe Walcott and the other, black, commemorates Sugar Ray Robinson.  These two pieces have an unique sculptural charisma that sets them apart from the other canvases.  They’re more powerful as talismans than as paintings, and start to chart a different course.  It’s hard not to wonder what more Basquiat would have done if he had lived.  There is in these canvases an iconography not yet fully developed. Jean-Michel Basquiat, In Italian, 1983. Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris, ARS, New York 2013. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/eureka-street-book-library monthly 0.5 2013-04-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515076016-875T9UD18F9SCIWYE5XG/tumblr_mku5i3qDzE1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY After singing the praises of the electronic tablet, I’m having serious doubts.  I just finished reading the novel Eureka Street from a worn New York Public Library (NYPL) paperback, and much of the pleasure of that was having the soft saggy thing with me all week.  Feeling its weight at the bottom of my handbag as I crossed the street, and laying it across my lap on the subway each morning gave great comfort.  Acquired by the library in 1999, shortly after it was published, this book is handsomely worn.  Its pages have darkened around the edges, as if tea-stained, and remain luminous along the spine.  Its glued binding is so supple that it lies open to any page it’s set down at.  The book bears witness to the transition from the old mechanical NYPL check-out system to the new computerized one; there’s a manilla pocket fixed to the inside cover where librarians used to stick a card stamped with the book’s due date.  Now librarians tuck a curling silvery receipt somewhere inside, from where it falls the moment the book is cracked open, leading almost inevitably to overdue fines. This is an old but clean book: there are no markings or food stains inside, which are things I can’t bear in library books.  But page 62 is dog-eared to mark a previous reader’s place just before he fell asleep and tossed the book to the ground, and a computerized check-out slip, its print gone ghostly pale, was left lying face-up on page 127 to mark where another reader gave up late in the summer of 2002.  It’s too bad, because I’m sure that if she had reached Chapter 10, the heart of the novel, which breaks out into a heartfelt, lyrical ode to the city of Belfast, she would have read on until the end.  And this is another pleasure of reading from a library book – the feeling of reading along with others, with those countless anonymous library patrons who have moved through the same pages before.  Perhaps they chose it for the same reasons I did (a romantic interest in Ireland and a literary interest in the comic novel).  Perhaps they laughed out loud at the same places I did (the satire of an old-school country poet who writes endlessly about hedges and spades, and names his new collection Rejected Poems, 1965-1995).  And perhaps they paused to soak in the same turn of phrase that I did (“The city sounded like an old record that fizzled and scratched.”)  Eureka Street is an eccentric book, with passages of comedy, romance, lad-lit, action and reverie mixed up in one another, all of it stuffed inside a ragged pile of newsprint. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/thorne-miniature-rooms-aic monthly 0.5 2013-04-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515076316-T1FEWFULO0336ZDJ49FV/tumblr_mk59teMNOS1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The Thorne Miniature Rooms the Art Institute of Chicago are a collection of 46 historically accurate models of various European, American and East Asian interiors.  They were imagined and commissioned by Mrs. James Ward Thorne in the 1930’s to house her collection of miniature furniture, and donated to the museum in 1940.  Today they’re installed in a basement gallery, within the walls, behind glass, at chest level, so that small children can peer right into them, and with a carpeted ledge running around the entire room so that very small children can do the same.  The rooms certainly have a dollhouse appeal.  They’re built at 1:12 scale, each about the size of a breadbox, and capture the places they represent in mesmerizing fidelity. One takes in their period furnishings first (elaborately turned matchstick-sized legs on tables and chairs, hand-threaded carpets, plaster mouldings as fine as lace) but ends up transfixed by the ordinary objects with which the rooms are furnished to give them a sense of scale and warmth: a pair of eyeglasses on the kitchen table, a folded newspaper in the living room, the electrical cord on a lamp, a dinner fork.  While the rooms faithfully render the proportions and splendor of a Tudor hall, a mid-century modern living room, and a traditional Japanese house, they trade less in architecture than a kind of special effects, conjuring other worlds. The Thorne Miniature Rooms aren’t really individual rooms; most incorporate a cluster of rooms, one central space and also the rooms and passages branching off of them, as wells as the stretches of outdoor space beyond their doors and windows.  Each model is lit from within, from various hidden sources, that establish a specific time of day and time of year.  We see the morning sun spill over the slate floor of a Cape Cod kitchen, and the setting sun graze the curtains of a Charleston drawing room.  It’s easy to look at each room and imagine what kind of life unfolds inside.  There’s a fancy feathered hat on a stand in the dressing room of the Biedermeier apartment, as if the lady of the house is preparing to meet later with a gentleman friend.  There’s a clarin trumpet lying on the window seat in an eighteenth-century English study, as if the lord of the estate has just unburdened his heart in a letter, in pen and ink, and summoned a servant to deliver it on foot.  There’s a bronze statue of Shiva presiding over the desk of a prim eighteenth-century Virginia drawing room, as if the wealthy merchant who lives here has ties to the East, as well as a hankering to leave his life here behind and explore the far corners of the world. In the end the Thorne rooms, historically faithful, are less evocative architecturally — in their expression of space through forms and structure — than novelistically  — in their expression of character through a cloud of details.  Each period room is set in the dramatic present, where anything can happen.  Image courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ragnar-kjartansson-narrative-film-interiors monthly 0.5 2013-04-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515076809-LTKDEOFM2R5WJNJIRSNI/tumblr_mk4yujscuB1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY To see Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation The Visitors, at Luhring Augustine, gallery-goers duck behind a black velvet curtain and enter a small, squarish room lined with ten large-format monitors.  By the time they’ve become accustomed to the dark, and to the other viewers shifting around inside, they understand that there are nine monitors showing nine different musicians performing in nine different spaces inside the same richly appointed, gorgeously decaying old country house.  (The tenth monitor shows the house’s wood-columned front porch.) And they understand that each of these musicians is contributing a track to the folksy, slow-moving lament on the soundtrack, and that their performances are synced chronologically and spatially.  So as the chorus ends and the wan, bird-boned singer in the parlor removes her headphones and collapses into her highback chair, we turn our attention to the muscular young pianist, who’s playing at the other end of the parlor, and can be seen on the monitor to her left. And when we hear feedback we turn around to see, on another monitor, a guitarist in an upstairs bedroom, whose face remains hidden behind long unkempt bangs, tuning his instrument and then sweeping his hands across its body with studied bravado.  The 64-minute video moves at a pace far slower than commercial television and movies, so that even though there are ten monitors and ten different stories, there is plenty of time to take in everything seriously, properly. This sort of video array is a magnificent way to describe orchestral music, as well as the interior architecture of a house.  Viewers can inhabit each room, gripped by details like the uncommonly large square panes of glass on the dilapidated kitchen cabinets, the steely blue tint of paint on the bathroom walls, and an ornate gilded picture frame in the parlor that looks like it might have belonged to Peter the Great.  The music moves in lulling, dirge-like pulses.  Nothing seems to happen but the song plays on.  Viewers, entranced, float from monitor to monitor, following the movement of the video but also their own desires.  Each of the video cameras is still but slightly splayed, looking into a corner rather than directly at a wall or into an opening, so that even when standing directly in front of a screen viewers feel as if they’re sliding out of its space. The musicians emerge as full-blooded characters.  It’s hard to look away from the acoustic guitarist in the bathroom, who has a comically disgruntled appearance and, at one point, looks as if he might drown himself in the claw foot tub.  Things happen on various screens, intermittently: violence and nudity, drinking and smoking.  But nothing in the video breaks the spell until, finally, as the song winds down, the musicians leave their seats, gather in the living room, and stream out of the house and into the surrounding countryside while the remaining monitors transmit still, empty rooms.  Then Kjartansson himself appears on screen as he enters each room to switch off the video cameras.  The monitors go blank, one by one, and the gallery-goers, who have been watching and waiting, are left standing in darkness, silence, and sadness.  The Visitors notes the regretful, inevitable passage of time, the secret spaces inside a large house, and the fractured spirit of the people living inside it.  These performers come together to play a song, and when the song is over they leave. Image courtesy of Luhring Ugustine Gallery. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/princess-cadance-girls-toys monthly 0.5 2013-03-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515077311-MJ90519Z7DZNZ0WUP5I5/tumblr_mk4wrg6mwr1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I was honored when my two young nieces shared their favorite toy with me, a figurine of Princess Cadance (a unicorn from the My Little Pony stories) that flaps her wings and talks.  And I was horrified when I heard the three things that she says in an endless loop: “I’m happy because I’m getting married today!”,  “My dress is soooo pretty!”, and, finally, after a giggle fit, “Everybody, it’s time to dance now!”, at which point she plays a disco song and flashes bright lights.  Each time the music started my nieces squealed and bounced around her.  This figure is a cunning mash-up of all the things that little girls love: horses, unicorns, princesses, tiaras, pink, purple, rainbows and sparkles.  Its less like a toy than a sociologically engineered composite. The unicorn’s chatter is mindlessly girlish, and I wondered how this was shaping my nieces’ unformed, agile young minds.  I remember when I was young my mother, to her great credit and my great annoyance, refused to buy me a Barbie doll, not because she was a feminist, but because she thought the doll was ridiculous.  Princess Cadence, a six-inch-high electrified pink plastic unicorn, is also ridiculous.  She has none of the surreal animal grace of a unicorn; she’s a cartoon.  I ended up acquiring a hand-me-down Barbie doll, and also a banged-up blonde Barbie styling head, from a sympathetic babysitter.  I can reveal here that I enjoyed them heartily, and also that they did nothing to shape my ideas about what a woman should look like and how a woman should behave.  Similarly, I’m confident that when my two nieces finally grow tired of playing with Princess Cadance, they will remember little of what she said. Image courtesy of Hasbro. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/luck-of-the-irish-play-set-design monthly 0.5 2013-03-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515077420-8MQTL26HTEJMC4NQOM0J/tumblr_mk55dyTBkJ1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Kirsten Greenidge’s play Luck of the Irish at LCT3 takes the single family house as a lens through which to examine race and class.  Its story begins in the 1950’s, when an Irish American handyman “ghost buys" a house for an African American doctor and his family in a posh suburb of Boston.  The play’s writing is admirably even-handed, exploring each character’s point of view.  The play's set, designed by Mimi Lien, is at once incredibly suggestive and incredibly elegant.  It gives us the house itself, a clapboard colonial with a pitched roof and brick chimney, as a full-size clear plexiglass cut-out at the back of the stage, tethered to the ceiling with wires.  This ghost-bought house is appropriately spectral, more of an idea than a thing.  The house’s back yard is expressed as a stretch of artificial turf that covers the entire stage, spilling over its front edge to the floor below.  Its sumptuous texture and crazy green color are indelible; they overwhelm the house itself and all the other furniture on stage. None of the characters seems entirely happy about the house.  The handyman’s wife is resentful she can’t live in a home this grand ("This is not the order of things – I got passed over.”) and the doctor is disappointed that the house doesn’t bring him satisfaction (“I don’t feel lifted.)  The handyman and the doctor’s wife, however, kindred spirits, are drawn more powerfully to the land than the house.  The doctor’s wife rushes through her chores each morning to spend her afternoons lounging dreamily in the back yard.  One day the handyman meets her here and observes that the grass "curls up to your toes like the sea."  The house promises stability and status while the lawn promises freedom, both physical and imaginative.  It’s a tribute to the play that, at the end, we’re not sure what matters most. Image courtesy of Rose Brand. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/berlin-sun-theater-kyle-bukhari monthly 0.5 2013-03-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515077711-O3W3SR5U7TM6R08BRQIK/tumblr_mj0dgzZXn31qdm8ato1_r2_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The most vivid element of anthropologist Mick Taussig’s multi-media happening Berlin Sun Theater, performed at the Whitney Museum last month, were the dances by Kyle Bukhari.  Taussig’s goal was "the re-enchantment of nature in the age of global meltdown.“  Specifically, he examined ways our diminished experience of the sun has ruptured elemental physical and mythological connections.  The piece unfolded around a personal, poetic text that Taussig read out loud on stage.  Enriching the narrative were musical passages, film clips, project images from Taussig’s notebooks, and Bukhari’s dances.  Cutting through the shadowy, ground-floor atrium of the Museum, Bukhari enacted routes, rotations and repetitions that recalled planetary motion.  At certain moments, moments explosive with feeling, the dancer illustrated specific details from Taussig’s stories.  He became, fleetingly, a tree wrestling upwards from the ground, a cloud of fireflies interrupting the darkness, and, in a big bubble-headed mask, the moon. I had always thought that dance was inevitably tied to human stories because of its dependence on the body, that it was, essentially, about a person moving through the world.  But Bukhari’s remarkable transformations showed otherwise.  The ease with which he made himself a moon, spooking and enchanting audience members as he emerged among them, got at the majesty of that celestial body.  It made clear that a dancer isn’t limited to human actions – he can be anything he imagines. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/matisse-painting-abstraction-stylization monthly 0.5 2013-03-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515078108-PEG2DNLIZGLGY9PJA9DY/tumblr_mj0akp7vV21qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting takes a close look at the painter’s process.  In the 1900’s, when he was still painting in ways that seem, now, amusingly conventional, he began making paintings in pairs, depicting the same subject (a still life, the view from a window, or a woman sitting in a chair) in two different styles.  By the 1910’s, when he was working in ways that are more recognizably his own, he often made paintings in series of three or more, depicting the same subject in shifted styles and perspectives.  Then, in the 1940’s, he began photographing a single painting at key stages in its development, as many as ten or twenty times, and examining these photographs as he finished the canvas. In each of these methods, which are all illustrated at the show, Matisse began by drafting a scene from observation and then depicting it with more and more stylization; he moved from naturalism to symbolism.  And yet he remained primarily concerned with the brute physical presence of things: the rootedness of figures in a room, in the landscape, or on a table.  In each series of paintings in the exhibit the final depiction, which is achieved with the fewest number of elements (brushstrokes, colors, and shapes), communicates more swiftly and powerfully the presence of things.  In one series from 1918, of the inside of a room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice, the artist begins by depicting things in great detail, showing us pieces of furniture and the view through the window, and even the pattern on the rug and the scalloped edges of the curtain.   In a later painting from this series he narrows his focus to the scene around the window, showing figures sculpted in light and shadow, broken into brazen blocks of flat paint.  Matisse’s method emphasizes the irreducibility of the chair, the violin and the window, of the space inside the room and the space outside the window.  It makes a poetry of the concrete. Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage), 1918.  Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/wallander-sets-scandinavian-design monthly 0.5 2013-03-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515078613-4Y5KQ4R98KA61MTK4VGU/tumblr_midihg3UCx1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The richest, most expressive element of the BBC detective series Wallander might be the Scandinavian-modern style sets, which were designed by Anders Olin.  They set the scene with precision, and offer deep sensual pleasure.  The centerpiece is the police station in Ystad, the small city in southern Sweden where the drama unfolds, which was constructed in its entirety in a studio there.  The floor where the homicide detectives work is spacious, with low ceilings and limited views to the outside.  The open central space, where they gather, is lined with wood planks and furnished with gently-worn, generic (that is, non-iconic) pieces of Scandinavian modern furniture.  Lit dimly, and propped with flurries of paper, stuffed birds, rusting metal desk lamps, and dying potted plants, the room evokes the strangeness and sadness of the work the detectives carry out, and that seeps into their personal lives. The Wallander sets are a terrific contrast to the Mad Men sets, which fetishize mid-century modern design by recreating pristine, museum-like environments, including Rogers Sterling’s office and Don Draper’s apartment.  In those sets every object is gleaming, unused, and bathed in brilliant white light.  Compare them to the dark hardwood walls, bare concrete floor, and austere tables and chairs that furnish the Wallander police station, which suggest that these rooms have been around for a while, and that the detectives who work here have been around for a while too.  Everything inside it them has a lyrical battered feeling.  While open office spaces have become a design cliche, particularly for companies that want to project a socially progressive image, the set for Wallander is not about that at all.  These detectives work to unearth secrets, purposefully and painfully.  The common room, where everyone’s mutterings and moods spill over into everyone else’s, shows us the tumult. Image courtesty of Ouno Design https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/googles-glass-integrates-smartphone-applications monthly 0.5 2013-02-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515078716-R93EF9PVJ27I8GCIWRCH/tumblr_mhyv7wHLFS1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Google’s Glass integrates smartphone applications with an eyeglass-like frame so that one can see commands (there's a tiny screen attached to one side of the frame) without looking away from the world, and activate them by voice alone.  What’s most impressive is that Glass isn’t science fiction; it’s almost here.  Google announced a 2014 product release with a retail price of $1,500.  It’s just a matter of time, I think, before the screen image is realized as a hologram floating in front of our faces, and then a tissue embedded right within our eyes. A happy two-minute marketing video, One day…, follows a young man as he moves through his day using Glass.  He uses the new technology to arrange to meet a friend, to make a voice memo to buy concert tickets, to navigate his way from East 23rd Street to the Strand bookstore, to locate the music section inside the store, to post photos of graffiti online, and, finally, to broadcast a song he performs on his ukelele to a girl named Jessica.  Glass Man is a downtown hipster dream boy, free from work and personal (and even pet) obligations, who only plans things an hour or so in advance, and who spends the day roaming around the city with his buddy.  He doesn’t use Glass to do anything vital, and doesn’t use it to do anything an ordinary smartphone can’t do.  The video diminishes the most astonishing features of Glass –its almost seamless interface – to spotlight a laddish lifestyle. The video brought to mind the SNL short Lazy Sunday, where two young men (played by Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell) wake up late, plan to see a matinee of The Chronicles of Narnia, get cupcakes from Magnolia, catch a cab to the Upper West Side, and pick up snacks and drinks at a deli before the show, all the while rapping about their exploits with mock gravity.  One day… comes dangerously close to that kind of parody. Image courtesy of Google Project Glass. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/cardigan-mens-fashion-thom-browne monthly 0.5 2013-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515079024-NAIUULK5LH78UYYWF8D9/tumblr_mh97k0wufq1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Is the cardigan the new jacket?  Last I week I heard two award-winning up-and-coming creatives, an architect and a web designer, present their work at a design industry event.  For the auspicious occasion both men (who were meeting for the first time) came dressed practically identically, in white dress shirts, dark cuffed jeans, beautifully crafted shoe-boots, and fanciful sweaters.  One wore a striped V-neck cardigan and the other a color-blocked pullover with a shawl color.  Both of them seemed fresh energetic, and serious.  The look wasn’t casual at all, but supremely polished. This new type of sweater is worn more purposefully than the way Mister Rogers wore his cardigan to kick around at home.  And it’s worn with less ostentation than the way Bill Cosby wore his crazily-patterned Missoni pullovers.  Sweaters like the ones these two young men were wearing aren’t to be thrown on thoughtlessly: they’re to be coordinated carefully with (potentially contrasting) trousers and dress shirts, and to be fitted as meticulously as a suit jacket.  The trend owes a great deal to Thom Browne, who has raised the level of detail and fit in mens knits.  He’s made the sweater formidable. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/nina-simone-zoe-saldana monthly 0.5 2013-01-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515079216-8N8OT5L35D1FZ9BNEAKM/tumblr_mgs9h5xISE1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY There was a controversy when it was announced that actress Zoe Saldana would portray legendary songstress Nina Simone in a movie biography, and then another when photos of Saldana in costume as Simone, with pancake makeup and a prosthetic nose, were leaked.  Simone’s daughter, Simone Kelly, responded obliquely, and others launched a petition to recast the role.  Some of the fuss was because Saldana isn’t a singer, but the fiercest of it was because she doesn’t look like Simone; she’s lighter-skinned and slimmer-nosed than Simone is.  Why not, some have asked, simply cast an actress who looks like Simone? The controversy might have less to do with principles of open casting than with notions of what we collectively find beautiful in women – including light skin and slim noses – and our reluctance to acknowledge how persistent, and persuasive, these notions are.  In Argo Ben Afflek plays real-life CIA agent Tony Mendez, a gentleman far less conventionally attractive than himself, and no one seems bothered by the incongruity.  Affleck doesn’t wear prosthetics to look more like Mendez or crouch to diminish his stature.  He doesn’t look like Mendez but the story comes out right.  Yet Saldana is remaking her complexion and bone structure to play Simone.  For women appearances are considered, still, today, somehow, essential; they define who are and fix our place in the world.  In all the discussion about Saldana’s casting, it’s Simone’s skin and nose, rather than her voice and vision, that are considered essential to who she is.  It’s as if her appearance, which is singular, was a hindrance, something she needed to overcome before she became an artist, and something that only another woman who looks like her can understand. Portrait by Charles “Teenie” Harris, 1965. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/street-art-graffiti-ben-eine monthly 0.5 2013-01-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515079667-J1SNOYFROHCEFSSKS7GF/tumblr_mgu57yYtlw1qdm8ato1_r1_500.png DROWN ME IN BEAUTY What happens to graffiti when it’s hung inside a gallery and sold, besides losing a great deal of its cool?  Is it fine art, and is it good art?  An exhibit at one elegant Lower East Side Gallery gathers saleable pieces from several prominent street artists.  Most of the pieces look like they’re samples – smaller segments cut out from works the artist might have completed on the side of a building somewhere.  They feel unnaturally reigned in, like zoo animals, drained of their natural elan. Only the pieces by Ben Eine sit comfortably within the gallery.  This English artist stencils letters across buildings, and is best-known for painting the entire alphabet on storefronts along Middlesex Street in London.  Like Shepard Fairey, his work is linked to Barack Obama: Prime Minister David Cameron presented Obama with an Eine canvas on a state visit.  And, like Shepard Fairey, Eine is a skillful graphic designer.  His work relies less on scale, site and bravado for its power – as so much street art does – than on composition and color.  There’s a strong tension between figure an field in his paintings; he doesn’t like empty space, and inflates letters to fill the void.  The lettering styles he uses resemble nineteenth-century type faces, so that, both in process and feeling, his stencils feel more mechanical than free-form.  And his texts are becoming increasingly complicated, especially when he stencils streams of letters.  He’s not writing poetry, not yet, but his format slows the act of reading, so that one stops and thinks rather than taking in the words all at once, seamlessly and mindlessly, as happens with so much advertising, signage and media.  Eine's letters have a bracing physicality that alerts us to how powerful and subversive text can be.  Sentences are always written for us with a reason. I know…, 2012.  Ben Eine.  Couretesy of Charles Bank Gallery. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/new-york-times-sandy-hook monthly 0.5 2013-01-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515080113-P2K6CPWO36UNXSGF4AVD/tumblr_mh1dslCfsC1qdm8ato1_r4_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY How do we represent something too horrible to represent?  When 27 people, 20 of them young children, were shot and killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connectictut last month, many news outlets showed a photo of a police officer and a teacher leading a line of children to safety.  Each child held her arms out around the shoulders of the child in front of her, as if it were some kind of playground game.  There is fear on the children’s faces and one girl is shrieking.  Yet the image doesn’t convey the extraordinary facts of the tragedy: that people are shooting at small children, and that twenty of them are dead.  Except for a photo of the bloodshed, what could have conveyed that? Six days later, after the victims' bodies had been identified and their families notified, The New York Times listed their names on the front page, in white letters, across a black field three-columns-wide and half-a-page high.  Since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC was unveiled in 1982, the act of listing victims’ names in memorial architecture has become standard practice, almost a design cliche.  But the listing in the newspaper is especially powerful.  It exploits the traditional broadsheet format: words on paper, black and white graphics, and the authoritative Times type face.  The big black box, uncomfortably off-center, is severe.  The italicized letters are stately, like those on a formal invitation, or a gravestone.  Reading the list is wrenching.  These children have the kind of enchanted first names (Chase, Grace, Aviella) we give children now, and last names (Irish, Italian, Chinese, hyphenated) that conjure something of their family life.  Beside each victim's name the Times lists her age.  All of the children were 6 or 7, and reading these numbers again and again is staggering.  Even the ages of the adult victims, from 25 to 52, are irrationally young.  The list capures a gravity and complexity that most photographs of the event just don’t. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/riita-ikonen-postcards monthly 0.5 2013-01-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515080527-FZKL0PSOZ8OIIHNJW72D/tumblr_mgkm85ftsa1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Time, and life, stream by, without a moment for contemplation.  It’s hard to recall what happened yesterday, or in this morning’s dreams.  It’s as if we're lost within our own stories or, sometimes, as if there is no story at all.  I’ve tried in various ways to capture the relentless assault of experience, including photo-taking, memento-collecting, and journal-writing.  But even when carried out diligently these methods are inadequate.  They can’t always capture the shocking, disruptive impact of small moments, and the deeper shifts in mood that underline the weeks.  They don’t get it. Riitta Ikonen’s warm and rigorous conceptual art project Mail Art, gets a great deal of it.  Over the past several years, once every week, she has mailed an A5 format “postcard” to a professor at an art school she attended in Brighton, England.  They’re dispatched from wherever she happens to be that week, and crafted from whatever materials she has on hand.  She’s sent over two hundred of them so far, all of which her professor has saved and returned to her.  Ikonen has a liberated graphic sensibility: she has mailed, among other things: a stone, the sole of a boot, a stack of MetroCards, and a chunk of little fish sealed in glue.  Each missive is packaged, titled, addressed and stamped distinctively yet unfussily.  When taken together, as they were at an exhibit last year, the postcards make up a vibrant personal, physical and psychic history.  They’re alive with the tactility and pungency of everyday experience. “Found paper clips” from Mail Art, by Riita Ikonen. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ganesh-and-the-third-reich monthly 0.5 2013-01-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515080856-EFYAZEXOMQ5HU1QL5NPD/tumblr_mgqoayu3zc1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The play Ganesh and the Third Reich is sort of like the Wizard of Oz, with Ganesh (instead of Dorothy) seeking an audience with Hitler (instead of the Wizard) to reclaim the swastika (instead of trying to get back home).  It’s a lot of things: a play within a play, a tonal essay, and an exploration of cultural iconography. The Public Theater, where the Back to Back Theatre company is performing it, issued a warning to ticket-buyers that the production "contains coarse language, adult themes and a portrayal of Lord Ganesh which some may find troubling.“  What was far more troubling to me than seeing the Hindu god portrayed by a dour, overweight Australian actor, as well as all the swastikas, was something else.  Three of the five actors in the ensemble are mentally disabled, which shocked me. Why was it shocking?  These three actors are, simply, playing characters who are mentally disabled.  Mental disability isn’t one of the play’s themes; it’s not explored structurally or poetically here, to discover how a differently-minded individual uses language and imagines the world, as it has been in some of Robert Wilson’s collaborations with autistic poet Christopher Knowles.  The play contains dramatic tonal shifts, with lyrical scenes (there’s a train travel sequence that might be the most captivating thing I’ve ever seen on a stage) undercut by brutally naturalistic ones (like a a scrum of the five actors rolling around the bare stage).  In one memorable passage, a displaced, mentally disabled, German Jew running from the Nazis remembers that he had been different since he was a child, saying "I heard stories differently."  What unsettled me about watching the mentally disabled actors was the fear that they were, somehow, making themselves especially vulnerable to the audience without entirely understanding these vulnerabilities.  Yet they performed with such clarity and alacrity that this might not be true. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/juan-de-pareja monthly 0.5 2013-01-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515081167-7C2LNKH2IU9IWP31P9NA/tumblr_mgiuithpXA1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY As LCT3's production of Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced opens, we see an artist completing a portrait of her husband in their Upper East Side apartment.  He poses stiffly for her, and she compares him, admirably, to Juan de Pareja, the subject of the magnificent Velazquez portrait at the Met.  Both men are defiant, she says, and resist the artist’s gaze to emerge as authoritative personalities. What’s most remarkable to me about the painting she references is the discordance between the subject and the medium: the presence of a black man in a seventeenth-century oil painting.  De Pareja, as depicted here, appears not only defiant but complex, in a way that black men aren't typically depicted in any media, not even today.  De Pareja is sometimes described as the artist's servant or apprentice but he was actually a slave Velazques inherited from his aunt.  Velazquez taught De Pareja to paint (the Prado has two de Pareja canvases in its collection), brought him along when he visited Italy, and finally freed him in 1650, around the time this painting was completed.  Velazquez could be a merciless portraitist, describing individuals with a lacerating optical fidelity that was streaked with contempt.  He was particularly critical of royal subjects, whose flesh often seems lifeless and faces often seem witless.  But one senses in de Pareja's face alertness, directness, wariness and pride, as if he is a man of the world.  The gentle light and soft-as-breath brushstrokes are ennobling.  The compassion Velazquez extends to his slave in this portrait is one he extended similarly to many of the commoners, children and dwarves he painted.  Perhaps it was simpler for him, somehow, to see humanity in those less powerful than himself. Velazquez, Portrait of Juan de Pareja, 1650. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sheer-nude-pantyhose-stockings monthly 0.5 2013-01-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515080813-OV09D0XGPQ513A5LDGVH/tumblr_mgivmp05WS1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY This New Year’s Eve was mild, so the spirited young women who stepped out that night in sparkling mini-dresses and high heels, and little else, weren’t too cold.  But I was surprised, as I headed home from a party, to see so many of them wearing sheer, flesh-colored pantyhose.  New York City ladies aren’t shy about showing off their legs, even in the winter.  If they do don hose it’s typically colored or opaque, and for warmth or graphic impact rather modesty.  Now, with Michelle Obama attending state events bare-legged, and gentlemen beginning to experiment with the medium (mantyhouse, guylons), it’s a bit old-fashioned for a woman to wear nude pantyhose.  Even the word itself – pantyhose - seems outdated. Kate Middleton, who is required to wear stockings in public by Buckingham Palace, and usually chooses to wear sheer, nude hose, might be responsible for the resurgence.  I can remember getting my first pair of pantyhose in the seventh grade, and how impossibly grown up they made me feel.  But in college, as I became vaguely politicized, I realized that no shade of nylon could mimic my flesh and abandoned them for opaque black tights.  Sheer hose can hide blemishes, but in smoothing over a woman’s legs they also disguise some of the finest, most expressive parts of them, like the tendons at her ankles and knees.  They give women eerily shiny, smoothed-over limbs.  Sheer pantyhose offer little protection in cold weather and are insufferable in warm weather.  Some years ago a group of California artists started a Giant Bra Ball, a collection of women’s most uncomfortable, unflattering and ugliest bras.  Isn’t it time to toss the flesh-colored hose too? Vintage pantyhose package, 1970’s. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sharp-microwave-half-pint-30-rock monthly 0.5 2013-01-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515081863-CFEZB5A5CSP2C19HKLST/tumblr_mfv1a97HUY1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Should a microwave oven look like a microwave oven, and, if so, what exactly is that?  My graciously appointed office pantry has a Sharp Half Pint, a smaller-than-average microwave, about the size of a bowling ball, that’s perfect for dorm rooms, small apartments, and office pantries.  But the oven mechanism – the bright white box where we set our leftovers and stale coffee to be irradiated – is wrapped in curved plastic panels that are trying very hard to make the appliance look like more than just a microwave. There’s a recurring joke on 30 Rock about Jack’s half-cooked marketing schemes for GE microwaves.  (In one episode his team makes the case really big and puts four wheels, four doors, and a steering wheel on it.)  There must have been similar brainstorming sessions at Sharp.  The earliest Half Pints have a simple, rectangular white plastic case that echoes the inner box.  Then, in 2000, Sharp released a series with curved translucent cases in rainbow hues, similar to the colored iMacs.  Today the oven is only available in opaque black.  Our office Half Pint is a pretty, see-through, cornflower blue.  Each time I open it I have to wonder what a microwave oven was meant to look like, because I doubt that this is it.  Unlike the iMac, with its freely curving case, the Half Pint case remains squished and cubish; it sticks close to the contours of the oven inside.  It’s nice to be able to see through the front panel to the sleek metal box within.  Perhaps Sharp can engineer a microwave with a clear, orthogonal case, unsoftened by curves and color.  That would be honest and also, maybe, unappetizing. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/flares-jeans-fashion-argo monthly 0.5 2013-01-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515081517-07Q8GND2MUESQRAASFRI/tumblr_mfv3p6ctnH1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The best part of Argo, a based-on-fact political thriller set in 1980, is its historically accurate stylings.  The people we see have CRT televisions, corded phones, avacado-colored refrigerators, bushy haircuts and hippyish clothes.  Ben Affleck looks great in his streaked-with-grey mop cut and droopy moustache, though the meticulously buffed torso he exposes at one point is decidedly anachronistic.  I don’t think people back then, without trainers and pilates, had bodies like that. Now that it’s standard practice, for both men and women, to wear one’s jeans low-slung, tight, and long, it’s particularly hilarious to see everyone in high-waisted flares.  My companion laughed out loud when one gentleman appeared on screen sporting light blue bellbottoms with heavy topstitching that made a giant, upside-down “U” on his bottom.  They overwhelmed any grace there was in his figure, swallowing his legs and midsection.  What made men wear these kinds of trousers, that seem to us today so obviously unmanly?  Was it androgyny?  Or was the Carter era a less complicated, less conventional age, when both men and women felt free to wear anything they felt like, however unpretty it was? Vintage Landlubber corduroy flares, 1970’s. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/united-architects-twin-towers-model monthly 0.5 2012-12-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515082120-278C1CQ21B9E1R4PC9CL/tumblr_medgllgfQ01qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Architecture doesn’t need words; it stands on its own.  So when I saw the title of the current architecture show at MoMA posted outside the gallery, 9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design, I wanted to turn around and leave.  It sounded more like a PhD dissertation than a show, and promised little delight. The exhibit, culled from artifacts in the musem's permanent collection, is text heavy, like an exploded book.  Most of what’s on display describes speculative constructions and consists of drawings, collages, posters and pamphlets.  But those things on display – those actual, tactile, three-dimensional objects – are enchanting.  There’s a facade panel from the Ricola headquarters by Herzog & de Meuron, printed with the image of a single wildflower, that magically fuses elegance with kitsch.  And there are models that bring projects to life in a way that renderings and photographs simply cannot.  Foremost among these is a foot-high, laser-cut, clear acrylic massing model for a proposal to rebuild the World Trade Center by United Architects.  It’s a group of narrow towers, in staggered heights, that are becoming gently tangled up in one another.  Someone I know, a poet, says that the Twin Towers were lovers.  This model makes this notion that buildings harbor desire perfectly real. World Trade Center Proposal, 2002, United Architects. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/any-day-now-kinky-boots-drag-queen monthly 0.5 2012-12-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515082011-VI09VX4DMKU50J00M9TB/tumblr_medgmt08vq1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The drag queen heroines of Kinky Boots and Any Day Now, two movies I just saw back-to-back, couldn’t be more different from one another.  In the first Chiwetel Eliofor plays a majestic amazon who inspires those around him with physical and moral courage.  In the second Alan Cummings plays a slight, emotional train wreck who struggles to piece together his professional and romantic lives.  While the first queen is dazzling, it’s the the second that breaks your heart. It’s a platitude to note that drag is an exaggeration of a woman’s traditional role, a heightened expression of femininity.  But there’s a more universal appeal to it too.  Drag performers turn themselves into a fantasy of who they want to be, which is something most of us are doing a lot of the time.  We make and remake ourselves continuously to meet an idea we have about what is beautiful or good or strong, an image that isn’t always within reach.  There’s something deeply human in the striving.  This might be why the Alan Cummings character is so moving.  He’s expressive about who he wants to be (artist, father, lover) and fights all-out to get it.  His high heels, makeup, and glittery dresses are more than fashion; they’re combat dress. Unknown French model, Burt Glinn, 1960. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/frank-gehry-signature-theater monthly 0.5 2012-12-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515082512-BAN3KJDH47OCVGAK5QV9/tumblr_metzd8ynaH1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Has Frank Gehry become a classicist?  His interiors for the Signature Theater, a year-old off-Broadway venue on far west Forty-second Street, have a remarkable repose.  Which isn’t to say the place isn't recognizably Gehry; everything is finished in plywood, aluminum and concrete, and there are stretches adorned with his (signature) complex, faceted geometries.  But the forms are more resolutely composed than those in his well-known buildings like the Guggenheim Bilbao; the place is calm. The Signature is tucked inside the second and third floors of a new condominium tower by Arquitectonica.  The twisting, freestanding, wood-clad staircase that pulls visitors up from street level is the only major expressed volume.  Two of the theaters, reached through long ramps on the second floor, are box-shaped, trimmed inside with puzzle-piece-shaped plywood panels to dampen acoustics.  The open lounge area on the second floor, a kind of public plaza (it’s open to all), might be the most uninspiring part of the place. The floor is only about ten feet high, which doesn’t leave room for big sculptural moves. Though the ceiling is animated with floating plywood panels and clouded acrylic lamp shades, the space seems, quite literally, flat.  But those moments within the complex where Gehry has a free hand (the staircase, the theater interiors) are energetic and finely composed.  This architect, known as a free spirit, is just as skillfull in restraint. Photography by James Ewing/OTTO. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ivy-style-preppy-fashion-f-i-t monthly 0.5 2012-12-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515083015-Q4IM9R57KU579EFD8GCM/tumblr_meu1aeFs7s1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Ivy Style, the new clothing exhibit at F.I.T., hits close to home because so many of the pieces on display (khakis, oxford shirts, pullover sweaters, duffle coats) are things that even those of us who don’t identify ourselves as preppy have hanging in our closets and don’t consider to be particularly fashionable or innovative.  There are some smart stories about the origins of particular garments.  Blazers were originally red jackets for rowers, Weejuns are an adapatation of Norwegian fishing shoes, and saddle shoes began as gym shoes at Princeton.  (In decades past Princeton, it seems, was a hotbed for fashion innovation.)  While there’s plenty of ivy clothing on display there isn’t a whole lot of bracing ivy style.  Most of the mannequins were dressed not-so-differently from real people you might see at the mall.  My companion observed that we take this kind of clothing for granted, and don’t appreciate how innovative it really is to dress in unprecious, unironed, mix-and-match pieces.  But preppy clothing, with its enthusiastic layering and color-mixing, might lend itself to its own kind of high fashion.  There are some sophisticated ensembles by Thomas Browne on display, like a woman’s stewart plaid jacket work over a contrasting campbell plaid shirtdress.  But there’s not much of the pizzazz that's evident in the joyously multicolored madras jacket on the catalog cover.  I wanted more of this; I wanted to see how preppy could turn its old-fashioned image inside out. Chipp, madras jacket, circa 1970. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sherlock-holmes-yellow-face-mystery monthly 0.5 2012-12-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515083606-Y0IUWWL550EGGV1HNXU0/tumblr_mefcbzgfTn1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY After a string of Scandinavian crime novels (Jar City, The Pyramid, Nemesis) I’m reading Arthur Conan Doyle, and what a relief it is from the futility and gloom of those other books.  Every chapter in Jar City opens with a description of pounding rains.  Kurt Wallander, the misanthropic detective-hero of Pyramid, selects dinner by standing over a menu, closing his eyes, and ordering whatever his finger lands on first.  Even if the detectives in these novels solve something, they resolve nothing.  The conclusion just clears the floor for fresh tragedy. Sherlock Holmes doesn’t always solve his cases, but each of his case histories offers the conventional narrative pleasures of beginning, middle and end.  While grouped together now as novels, the stories were first published individually and can be read randomly, one at a time.  The narrative structure in each is clear but complex.  We hear the detective’s sidekick Watson as he recounts the story a client told them, then the story Holmes offered in explanation, and, finally, the story that revealed itself afterwards.  Holmes’ explanations, while often masterful, are just as often incorrect or incomplete.  While the mythology of Sherlock Homes is one of observation, examination and deduction, the mystery in question is typically fuelled by raw emotion.  My favorite is a simple one, The Yellow Face, about an unsettling figure hovering in the window of a neighbor's house.  Holmes shows little interest in the evidence (a death certificate, a house, a portrait) and arrives at the wrong conclusion.  It matters little, however, when we find out that what’s at the heart of the matter is a deception one person carried out in order to protect another.  In the end it’s not a mystery; it’s a love story. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/moma-garage-sale-martha-rosler monthly 0.5 2012-12-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515083809-VFUL4YNXXXPP628ROLO7/tumblr_mefb709udp1qdm8ato1_r4_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Since its expansion in 2004 MoMA has come to feel more like an international departures lounge than a museum, with dull acoustics, not-bright-enough lighting, and escalators that funnel you from level to level without showing you where you’re headed.  But the hangar-like central atrium offers surprising perspectives and respite, even when there’s no artwork there.  Right now there’s an installation by artist Martha Rosler called Meta-Monumental Garage Sale, which is exactly that.  The atrium’s floor and walls are packed with used goods for sale.  There are signs and banners, a cash register, and stanchions to herd visitors in and out. We all know that a museum is not a church, that art is big business, and that almost all museums rely on corporate sponsorship.  There’s nothing philosophically dispiriting about having a garage sale inside the museum; that’s not so different than the big gift shop near the entrance.  But there’s something physically dispiriting about seeing the atrium, a special place within the city, this singular void, clogged with worn clothes and  tchotchkes.  Whatever Rosler’s intention is (according to the wall text it's "creating a lively space for exchange"), the event falls flat.  Rosler might be striking down ideas about high, low culture and the pricelessness of art, but she’s doing it through shopping, and I would like to keep the museum for art.  I fought my way through thick crowds along Fifth Avenue to get to MoMA, brushing back tourists who were toting shopping bags on each arm and gawking at holiday lights.  The commercialism on the street was robust, but it was easier to take than the garage sale inside the museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/history-architecture-banister-fletcher monthly 0.5 2012-11-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515084033-XF0086CTD3ZDK7RIRJ47/tumblr_mduwmmJL5L1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY At an astonishing lecture at the Institute for Classical Architecture last week, historian Nancy Steinhardt traced the influence of the École des beaux-arts through Chinese architecture.  To illustrate how marginally Chinese traditional architecture was positioned within the canon, she showed the frontispiece of Banister Fletcher’s 1924 book The History of Architecture, a drawing called “The Tree of Architecture."  Embedded in this diagram are some not-so-certain notions that still have purchase today: that ancient Greece is the primary origin, that Asia is a minor source, that contemporary American and European forms are the highest expression, and that the Middle East, South America, and Africa beyond Egypt don’t exist. Though the interpretation is single-minded (progress is symmetrical and vertical) and the representation is kitschy (robed  figures posed beneath the branches embody virtues of Geography, Geology, Climate, Religion, Society and History), it’s hard to resist the charms of this illustration.  The tree and figures are rendered naturalistically but composed melodramatically, like scenes in Puvis de Chavannes.  What tree in real life is shaped like this, with a dense, high crown and strangely criss-crossing lower branches?  More deeply, there’s something touching about Fletcher's desire to fit a subject as expansive and as complex as the world history of architecture in a single diagram.  In middle school I had an English teacher who taught us how to diagram a sentence graphically, to draw a horizontal, fallen-tree structure and set each word on its own limb.  It gave immense satisfaction to tease language into its most basic components like this, but at the same time it was always understood that any sentence, once uttered, surpassed its spindly diagram.  As he was imagining "The Tree of Architecture,” Fletcher might have felt something similar.  https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/hamsa-ornament-hand-iconography monthly 0.5 2012-11-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515084322-JWZDHG5PX7B6DGH8Z3CY/tumblr_mdpxrkqSgR1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The last time I was in Paris I stopped at Tati to pick up an Eiffel Tower charm to bring back, ironically, as a souvenir.  I came back instead with a delicate filigree ornament of an open hand, of which I knew nothing except that it was “eastern” and that it carried some sort of blessing.  I wore it on those days when I felt the need to be protected with forces greater than normal, and felt protected. It wasn’t until I read Dare Me by Megan Abbott, a crime story set in the emotionally-charged world of high school cheerleading, that I learned that it was a hamsa.  The amulet is resonant in Islamic, Jewish and Christian traditions.  Depending on one’s beliefs, the flat palm depicted is that of Fatima daughter of Mohammed, Miriam sister of Moses, of Mary mother of God.  The charm has been secularized and popularized in friendship bracelets exchanged by teenage girls.  It’s often paired with a small, round glass bead that represents the evil eye, which the hamsa can ward off.  In Dare Me a hamsa friendship bracelet becomes a crucial plot point when it’s gifted by a cheerleader to her coach and then spotted by that girl’s best friend, who acts out.  The design of most hamsas – sort of symmetrical but not really, sort of naturalistic but not really, sometimes up and sometimes down – lends itself to inspired graphic design.  My own charm is smaller than a penny and astonishingly thin, with equal parts gold and open space so that it feels like a scrap of lace.  It’s hard to find an expression of this icon that isn’t lovely.  Even the clumsiest ones convey its essential goodness. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/lincoln-top-hat-facial-hair monthly 0.5 2012-11-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515084621-0YS7C478Z0KKZXVNYKL8/tumblr_mdpv5hmICs1qdm8ato1_r3_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY At the beginning of Lincoln we see the president addressing a small crowd at the opening of a new business.  After he’s introduced he steps forward, lifts his top hat, pulls a paper out from under it, reads a short speech from it, and then folds the paper and puts it back inside his hat.  It’s hilarious and humanizing, and gives the big hat a sense of usefulness. The movie focuses on the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and depicts the House of Representatives, where it’s reviewed and just barely approved, as one big frat party.  Men laugh, jeer, applaud, thump tables, talk over one another, and shout down any designated speaker.  It’s a clear-eyed vision of the “noisy and messy and complicated” (as our current president put it on the night of his reelection) process of democracy.  These men, stymied by personal and regional interests, might not be so different from those who currently represent us in DC.  What distinguishes them is their extravagant dress and hair.  The gentlemen's  fitted waistcoats and frock coats, high collars, and silk dressing gowns are as ostentatious as the ladies’ dresses.  And their sideburns and moustaches are teased into outlandish puffs that make them look like talking animals from Dr. Seuss.  Lincoln’s top hat, an icon of rustic simplicity, is also a theatrical piece of headwear that adds about a foot to the president’s already imposing frame.  Could he, like his contemporaries, have been something of a peacock? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/facebook-mourning-social-media-emotions monthly 0.5 2012-11-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515084520-BQQ5GAGE3RRG5LMCRMJ6/tumblr_mdl656HTis1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY If the medium really the message?  This month I received a robocall from Bill Clinton, was invited to join LinkedIn by my younger brother, and learned that one of my freshman year college roommates had died on facebook.  In each instance I felt that the person involved and the emotions they stirred up were far larger than the manner in which we were connecting. A facebook friendship is something different from friendship.  When someone tells me that they haven’t joined yet (won’t we all, eventually, join?) I note that it’s a great way to keep in touch with people we don’t keep in touch with.  But what facebook friends post on their walls can be informative, entertaining and even moving.  I had been following my college roommate track her illness on facebook for a year, and was looking forward to the day she announced its remission.  She posted weekly about her treatments, her tiredness, and the moments of peace she found in between, all with bracing honesty.  In the days after her death her facebook page become a living, shifting tribute as family, friends and colleagues posted photos, remembrances, and songs, while others pored over them and added comments.  Many of the tributes, like this one, were self-involved, more about the contributor’s inability to express grief fully than about the person who died.  The most meaningful ones revealed some small new thing about her: an anecdote, a card she made, a favorite expression. On my college roommate’s facebook wall family photos just weeks-old were mixed up with others from high school and professional events, and terse, formal platitudes were followed by skittish, lyrical rants. Each slight, random expression contributed to a portrait of her that’s fittingly vivid. Calla Lily by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1984. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/andy-warhol-sigmar-polke-met monthly 0.5 2012-11-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515085005-45PE5SEH3G0T6D46WZEB/tumblr_mcz2upMih51qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY What revelations there are at the Met’s show Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years aren’t about Warhol.  They’re about the other fifty-nine artists, all Warhol-inspired, who’s work is featured.  There are three Gerhard Richter paintings from the 1960’s that have the same superfine handling of paint and dreamy, blurred finish as the photo-realist work from the 90’s he's  famous for.  There are also some recent paintings by Luc Tuymans, whose spectral brushwork and coloring blunt their acrid politics.  One 2005 portrait of Condoleeza Rice is rendered in a web of translucent, tissue-like layers that convey tenderness more than satire.  These men paint magnificently. But the most impressive of the other fifty-nine might be Sigmar Polke.  From the handful of works collected here, dispersed in different galleries, he emerges as a singular voice.  There’s a quilt on which the artist’s drawings and doodlings run against the patterns and piecing of fabric.  It’s a rich, clotted surface that trumps both the pictorial and compositional pleasures of traditional painting.  And there’s Plastic Tubs, which shows the things to us in workmanlike strokes and candy colors on a canvas that’s left largely, strangely blank.  Polke’s quilt paintings prefigure the 80’s assemblages of David Salle and Julian Schnabel, which also combine discordant materials and images, but lack their all-out sensuality.  Polke’s more conventional paintings, like Plastic Tubs, while fine, lack the ravishing surfaces of Richters’ and Tuymans’.  Regardless of the medium Polke, like Warhol, remains supremely cool.  He overturns expectations with wit and without winking. Plastik-Wannen [Plastic Tubs], 1964, by  Sigmar Polke. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/zaha-hadid-425-madison-new-york monthly 0.5 2012-11-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515085407-WUFF3SMHGDO6SDGQ1C56/tumblr_mco8hn6n7G1qdm8ato1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY At the closing reception for the 2012 Summit for New York City  there was, set out right beside the bar, a site model showing a stretch of midtown Manhattan.  One cartoonishly futuristic structure, stepped at the base and capped with four vertical fins, rose high above the fray of anonymous office buildings.  “What is that?," a woman scowled as she walked by, heading for a refill.  That, I found out later, was Norman Foster’s winning competition entry for a new office tower at 425 Park Avenue, which he’d unveiled just a few days earlier.  The other architects invited to submit their designs for the plot, just a block north of the stately Villard Houses, were Rem Koolhaas, Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid. Their entries are hearteningly different from one another.  Rogers proposed a structure with open, intermediate floors planted with pine forests.  Koolhaas proposed an enigmatic, worm-like tower that twists forty-five degrees as it rises.  Hadid proposed a square, metal-clad tower that swells outward at the bottom to meet the street, like an upside-down mushroom cloud.  It’s the slickest and most sophisticated of the entries, and also the most fitting.  The tower, symmetrical on four sides, merges her personal, idiosyncratic formal vocabulary with that of a conventional office tower.  It’s distinctive – a building that looks like no other building – without being aggressively avant-garde.  It has a molten, organic feeling and yet it’s constructed from standard elements.  In one simple volume, Hadid has shaped a structure that projects the modern, moneyed gloss of midtown Manhattan. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/print-fair-ifpda-andersson-nordstrom monthly 0.5 2012-11-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515085816-HRXX2AJPV51QLJVP6I9G/tumblr_mcvpbtTpy61qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY As I strode through the Armory at this year’s Print Fair I wondered what it is that makes a print a print, or what it is that only prints can do.  It could be the memory of engraving, of scratching into the plates.  It could be the sense of reversal, the way images are mirrored horizontally when printed.  What I saw at the show only addled me further.  Each print reminded me of some other thing: illustration, poster, painting, blueprint, and photograph.  In fact the exhibitors themselves might have been confused.  Several showed photographic “prints,” and one even showed a formica-and-wood construction by Richard Artschwager that was most certainly not a print. Lots of the prints were made by painters, moonlighting because they wanted to investigate a different process, because they wanted to produce variations on a single image, because they wanted to reach a different market, or because they just felt like it.  (The array of Picasso prints at one booth was so joyous that one believes he just felt like it.)  While I think of prints as a graphic medium, of a web of black marks, many are built from broad fields of layered, porous tints that leave tantalizing swatches of paper exposed.  The peopled landscapes of Isca Greenfield-Sanders have the freshness of wet watercolors.  Prints by Swedish duo Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordstrom, both painters by vocation, fill the frame with strong shapes in eccentric, earthy hues.  The scenes have a jittery, improvisatory quality, as if they only came together at the moment the ink hit the paper.  That might be something that’s very print-like. Hunter by Mamma Andersson and Jockum Nordström https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/andy-warhol-met-disaster monthly 0.5 2012-11-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515086120-YVLNIYF6CQ5UBZHN37UK/tumblr_mcz1auNHhw1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY If you head to the Met’s exhibit Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years searching for the ways Warhol provoked and liberated other artists, you’ll find it.  But the show might be most compelling as a summation of Warhol’s own work.  It includes pieces from all phases of his career, and it’s far more compact and energetic than a blockbuster.  There are, in a string of small second-floor galleries beside the museum’s European master paintings, some of the artist’s Greatest Hits: a soup can,  Brillo boxes, Coke bottles, two Marilyns, an Elvis, portraits, and cow wallpaper.  Each one displays Warhol’s graphic virtuosity, and seems to be orchestrated for maximum optical impact.  There’s a small, square Marilyn, the size of an album cover, whose colors and shades are rendered with such pristine concentration that it’s like a piece of jewelry. There are also, by Warhol, two Jackies, a car crash, and two electric chairs.  These works have the same formal power as the happier ones.  In fact Orange Disaster #5, a 3x5 grid of electric chairs against a burn-colored field, might be the finest piece in the show.  Its scale (it’s the size of a double door), severe composition, and lush gradations stop you as you walk by.  It’s majestic.  These pieces tap a rich, darker strain, one the artist abandoned later to take on more deliberately superficial subjects like flowers and celebrity portraits.  (When I asked a friend what might have caused this shift she deadpanned, “Drugs.”)  The exhibit highlights these darker pieces by juxtaposing them with the work of contemporary artists who engaged political subjects.  But Warhol’s fascination with death and violence seems entirely personal.  These canvases are like emotional maps, looking into the head and the heart.  While they’re brilliantly composed they’re gruesome and could not have been uncomplicated to execute.  Did Warhol numb himself in order to silkscreen this image of a man dying in an ambulance accident, twice?  I doubt he was interested in the irony of the circumstances, but in the man’s spectacular physical vulnerability.  The artist completed most of these darker works in the early 1960’s, before the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK.  What would have happened if he’d kept on with it?  Would we think of him today the way we think of Goya? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sandy-weather-beasts-of-the-southern-wild monthly 0.5 2012-11-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515086521-UD9H6SNNO92TQDKT99EV/tumblr_mctgi1zkVl1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY What’s your favorite New York City-centric Sandy meme: the Fallen Tree, the Flooded Platform, or the Dangling Crane?  (I’m going with the Dangling Crane.)  I rode through the storm unscathed, without even losing power, and watched it unfold on television and online.  In general, still images of the storm are more powerful and communicative than video footage, maybe because the gravity of the situation isn’t undermined by the self-serving narration and heroics of local newscasters.  The damage in coastal Queens and New Jersey is devastating, and images of ruined homes there remind me of press photos coming out of war-torn regions in Libya.  There’s incredible violence in them.  But this is nature perpetuating the violence, and we can probably expect more, and more frequent, anomalous “weather events” like this.  As I heard one caller on a local radio show last week plead, we can’t continue to occupy “land that nature wants back.” The storm brought back scenes from Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I saw several months ago, on a gentle summer afternoon.  I liked the way the movie used light and sound to shape a particular physical world (damp, overstuffed, aphasic) in a way that regular movies don’t.  And I liked the way the movie examined the unadorned, expressive faces of its actors, many of them black, which regular movies don’t.  Beasts takes us to the Bathtub in New Orleans, a low-lying land that became an island after Hurricane Katrina.  As another major storm approaches, a band of Bathtub residents defy a forced evacuation and return to their homes.  It’s a highly romantic position and, as narrated by Hushpuppie, the gritty five-year-old at the center of the story, understandable.  What this movie shows clearly, and the Sandy media coverage does not, is that nature has the awesome power to rewrite geography and obliterate culture.  Maybe it’s something we can’t think straight about right now, as we aid the displaced and evaluate the damage.  It’s much simpler to think about the Dangling Crane. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/claire-tow-lincoln-center-lct3 monthly 0.5 2012-11-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515086808-DOQG5152NU6PLT60HJ25/tumblr_mcobksaFc81qdm8ato1_r1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Just a few years later, the surgical-like strikes carried out by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro at Lincoln Center have healed.  Now the LED banners on the steps to the main courtyard, the covered ramps at each side, the wooded garden and green-roofed restaurant pavilion in the north courtyard, and even the clipped southeast corner at the Julliard School, all seem entirely natural, as if they’ve been there forever.  There’s been one less noticeable intervention after that: the new 112-seat Claire Tow Theater by H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, led by Hugh Hardy. It was built right on top of the existing Lincoln Center Theater, which houses the larger Vivian Beaumont and Newhouse Theaters. The Tow is remarkable for its restraint on both the outside and the inside.  So often when I walk into a new building I sense immediately that a professional designer has been there.  The place is overcrowded with gestures and even if all of them been executed judiciously there’s simply too much going on, too much to consider, and it weighs down the experience.  The Tow isn’t like that.  It’s a simple, wood-lined, shoebox-shaped room with rows of fold-down seats and a U-shaped catwalk above.  I watched a 90-minute one-act play there seated comfortably in the last row, from where I could see every corner of the stage and hear every word clearly.  The new theater, which was built along with support spaces for the other theaters below, is set back on the old theater’s roof so that it’s barely visible from street level.  In front there’s an open wood deck where theater-goers can collect before and after performances and observe the fray below, and all around are native plantings.  The Tow is planned and finished simply; its refined proportions and one-of-a-kind setting are what bring it to life.  Perhaps because Hardy has worked on prominent civic projects like this for four decades, he doesn’t feel the need, as another architect would, to raise his voice or confront the existing building, a beloved one by Eero Saarinen.  His discretion is impressive. Photo by H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/waclawiak-twin-palms-cz-stochowa monthly 0.5 2012-11-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515086920-Z4X0U4HHJ6O8IJGZPEMK/tumblr_mco3z9cCG71qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The first time I visited the Vatican, I saw a very tall, very frail old man in a wheelchair toss himself to the floor at the entrance to St. Peter’s and drag himself all the way to the altar on his elbows.  He was wearing a fine pin-striped grey wool suit that must have been tailored for him years earlier, when he had been more muscular and more mobile.  It was the most powerful act of religious devotion I’ve ever seen.  Zosia, the Polish-American narrator of Karolina Waclawiak’s novel How to Get Into the Twin Palms, once visited the Black Madonna in Częstochowa, and can remember crawling around the icon in the church, the pebbles on the floor bruising her knees.  Now Zosia lives in Los Angeles, collects unemployment, crashes motel swimming pools, plays with fire, and obsesses about getting into a nightclub near her home that’s populated by small-time Russian gangsters.  Every so often she remembers the Black Madonna and the person she used to be. The Black Madonna of Częstochowa isn’t black.  She’s dark-skinned because the pigments used to paint her flesh were darkened, legend has it, during a church fire the painting miraculously survived.  She has a profoundly sad, inward expression, and two disfiguring scars across her right cheek.  The wounds give the portrait a tinge of violence and sadism, which might be one reason Zosia recalls it.  It’s said that the scars were made by thieves during a robbery, and that they dropped the picture when it began to bleed.  Twin Palms, in its setting and incantory tone, reminded me of Joan Didion’s California novels, which are narrated by women preternaturally sensitive, physically and psychologically, to their surroundings.  The world rushes in and wounds them.  Zosia wounds herself.  She rubs her hands raw in the sand, nicks herself shaving, gets sunburn on the back of her neck, and then a rash on her arms.  Everything that she experiences registers on her skin.  Like the Black Madonna, she wears the scars heavily. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/rose-hall-jazz-lincoln-center monthly 0.5 2012-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515087406-JEQQDT00SUI2G7YBF9J1/tumblr_mcod9qMycb1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I grew up in a leafy suburb about an hour outside of New York City.  When I was a kid my parents sometimes brought us into the city on Saturdays, to shop Canal Street (back in the 1970’s it was an important source for appliances and gifts) or attend the seasonal movie-and-a-show spectacular at Radio City Music Hall.  We would arrive early in the morning and leave after dark, driving home along the FDR Drive, with views of the Pepsi Cola sign lit up across the river in Queens to send us on our way.  From the back seat of the family station wagon the city was magical, a gentle stream of noise and light.  It’s precisely that dream of New York City that brought me here, and the one that’s captured at the Frederick P. Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The space, designed by Rafael Vinoly, sits on the fifth floor of the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle and faces east through an immense stretch of curtain wall.  The auditorium is hi-tech.  On its website Jazz claims it was “[d]esigned acoustically to be the premier jazz performance hall in the world."  There are adjustable curtains, video monitors, stage platforms, and banks of seating to suit different music and performance styles.  The night I was there, for a rather sedate awards ceremony, the hall was arranged in tiered, semi-circular rows that overlooked the stage and, beyond it, the southwest corner of Central Park, the statue of Christopher Columbus (which is temporarily enclosed), and West Fifty-Seventh Street.  It was a spectacle that rendered the goings-on all but irrelevant.  The walls, stairs and steps inside are all finished simply in blonde wood.  Though the layout is pragmatic it reminded me of the auditorium at Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, where every seat seems to be perched on a balcony, as if there’s no main space and no main floor.During the ceremony there was a large, and largely unnecessary, video monitor hanging right in the center of the glass.  The organizers could have set smaller screens at each side instead.  Surely they knew we weren’t there for the ceremony, but for the view. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/richard-meier-perry-street-towers monthly 0.5 2012-10-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515087521-V298944HWGIR5GIC3RFH/tumblr_mc9tvuTCEF1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I first saw the Richard Meier-designed twin glass condominium towers at 173 and 176 Perry Street one evening in 2002, just after they’d been enclosed.  The lots were still filled with construction rubble.  Lit gently by the sunset, the small, tall buildings had an elegant presence.  It was hard to understand why West Villagers were up in arms about them.  The towers became better known as a “celebrity dormitory” than starchitecture.  They’ve housed, at various times, Calvin Klein, Natalie Portman, Nicole Kidman, Martha Stewart and Vincent Gallo.  (Does the thought of Stewart riding the elevator with Gallo make you smile too?)  Because of maintenance and administrative challenges, there’s been considerable tenant turnover.  When Meier constructed a third (larger, glassier and pricier) condominium tower in 2010, just one block south at 165 Charles Street, the Perry Street buildings lost what little cachet they had left. Now that every neighborhood in Manhattan is studded with tawdry, absurdly tall, mirror-glass condo buildings, the ten-story Perry Street towers seem terrifically restrained.  And after a decade these two buildings have assumed a quiet authority on the street and in the skyline.  From up close one doesn’t see expanses of glass, but a dense, gridded layering of metal and glass panels.  The facades have collected a fine layer of grime, which lends them, like wrinkles and grey hair on a handsome man, a certain gravitas.  Like all of Meier’s buildings, the towers have been conceived with ideal geometries and slightly stodgy volumes.  And that’s what saves them – they’re solid.  They sit comfortably on the ground, and feel as if they’d be comfortable to live inside of too.  They’re no longer spectacles; they’re apartment buildings. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/mad-men-roosevelt-hotel monthly 0.5 2012-10-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515087711-Z4P4IKUU4Y9AE7JI401J/tumblr_mccq4unRYc1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I watched the first seasons of Mad Men fitfully; I was definitely not on board.  The characters and their settings, though allegedly historical accurate, were chilling.  And I couldn’t understand the popular fascination with this time period, the early 1960’s, when men were men and women were there for their delectation.  But I watched the latest season (the fifth) breathlessly, caught up in every story line.  The characters were stirring, and their unnaturally stiff composure and surroundings underscored the explosive distance between their inner and outer lives.  People that had been grotesque caricatures to me (Roger Sterling, Joan Harris) were suddenly sympathetic, and I fell especially hard for Peter Campbell, the upstart ad agent and Connecticut family man, as he fell, swiftly and simply, in love with a neighbor.  Their romance, played out in daytime trysts at the Roosevelt Hotel, was tremendously moving.  The show’s designers did a splendid job recreating a room from the Roosevelt.  (Ironically, the real Roosevelt Hotel boasts that they’ve just remodeled all their rooms.)  There’s something about this generic, tasteful midtown hotel room that’s especially forgiving.  Because it’s not-home and not-work, it gives the characters a space where they can suspend their official identities and unfold their real selves.  The room is simple, spacious and squarish, furnished with neo-colonial pieces that look downright dowdy compared with the ones in Don Draper’s Scandinavian-modern living room and Roger’s white-and-chrome office.  There’s an arched upholstered headboard, a high full-size bed, a butler, and a desk.  The space is flooded with the kind of soft white daylight found in Dutch paintings.  It makes the scenes feel, at the same moment they’re unfolding, as if they’re being remembered.  And we know that they’ll be remembered, just this way, forever, by Pete. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/airblade-dyson-hand-dryer monthly 0.5 2012-10-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515087816-86FZZE737OFJAAZO9EV5/tumblr_mc9o30MY4v1qdm8ato1_r3_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I had a revelation inside one of the very hip (and very dark) lobby restrooms at the Ace Hotel.  It was at the moment I dropped my hands into the narrow slot at the top of the Airblade hand dryer as if they were pieces of bread to be toasted.  It felt vaguely humiliating, the same way opening your mouth super-wide for the dentist does.  (My dinner companion said that this peculiar motion reminded him of the way women in the old Palmolive commercials dipped their hands into small bowls of the green fluid.)  I wondered why the dryer wasn’t simply designed so that the slot is horizontal.  This way it could be accessed in a more relaxed way, especially by those who are especially tall or short or in wheelchairs.  A horizontal machine would stick out further from the wall, but could be tucked next to the sink and reached by swinging one’s hands over from under the faucet.  It all seemed terribly obvious. But Dyson, who design and sell the Airblade, care little about ergonomics or common sense.  They’re interested in peddling products that look like they’re revolutionary rather than products whose operations are so seamless that they might have a chance to actually be revolutionary.  I’ve never used a Dyson vacuum cleaner or fan.  Like the Airblade, these products have a high-tech contemporary gloss, with strong shapes, clean lines, and a silvery finish.  The vacuum cleaner turns dramatically on a big, visible ball pivot and the fan is a perfect circle.  The Airblade doesn’t have those alluring geometries, but it certainly looks a lot smarter than a conventional metal enamel hand dryer, that kind that gets scratched and dented and wheezes and heaves and never really gets your hands dry enough.  But is it?  It might require less time and energy to dry one’s hands in an Airblade, but it requires a highly unnatural motion.  This machine takes the mindless act of drying one’s hands and makes it onerous. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/christopher-columbus-tatzu-nishi-howard-zinn monthly 0.5 2012-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515088010-42KNLV42NM4649ERIPF9/tumblr_mc5c1mIPbv1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Berlin-based conceptual artist and prankster Tatzu Nishi has encased the statue of Christopher Columbus that stands on a seventy-five-foot-high pillar at the southwest corner of Central Park in a living room.  The installation, Discovering Columbus, will be in place through mid-November.  Visitors can climb up six flights of stairs through a web of construction scaffolding, as I did last week, to a lordly panorama of Central Park and a closer look at the statue, which has got a swagger in its stance and a faraway look in its eyes.  The play in scales is striking.  The statue is about fifteen feet tall and the room enclosing it just a few feet higher and bears down uncomfortably.  And while the statue is naturally-proportioned, its feet seem stupendously large while its head seems not quite big enough. The installation is a great, simple idea.  But I wish Nishi had thought a bit harder about the architecture of the space and the character of the man.  The living room has the blank proportions of a double-wide.  The walls are wrapped in a custom-designed wallpaper featuring American icons like Michael Jackson and Elvis, but that cheekiness doesn’t carry over into the furnishings, which look like they were ordered from Bob’s.  The friend I was with wished for a picture window over Broadway, where Columbus seems to be looking.  I wished for a lavish fifteenth-century interior with silk drapes and gilded coffers.  From Nishi’s website we can see that he’s built similar “living rooms” to recontextualize prominent statues around the world, including one of Queen Victoria and another by Rodin.  But did he stop to think about what Columbus did and why we need to memorialize him?  Seeing the statue like this prompted me to reread the astounding opening pages of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which retell Columbus’ landing in the Bahamas using excerpts from the explorer’s diaries.  Arawak Indians come to the shores with food and gifts for their visitors while Columbus, from the deck of his ship, observes their physical grace and good nature, and begins thinking about what fine servants and guides they’ll be.  Discovering Columbus gives us a closer look at the statue, but not at the man. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/nypl-public-library-remodel monthly 0.5 2012-10-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515088508-CGQQWU6UCQEZR5B9OYDN/tumblr_mbqu0zneq21qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Earlier this year the New York Public Library (NYPL) announced, to considerable outcry, a plan to remodel the historic main branch on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street.  This plan included removing books from seven stories of underground stacks and building a lending library in that space.  Then, last month, after receiving additional funds, the NYPL announced they would build additional underground stacks below the new lending library in order to keep more books close at hand.  As patrons we won’t see these books, but we’ll know that they’re resting below us in Dewey decimal order in temperature-controlled vaults.  The new plan makes everybody feel better because it recognizes that books are special things, and that this is what the NYPL is all about. But let’s take a look at what’s happening right across Fifth Avenue at Mid-Manhattan Library (MML), NYPL’s main lending branch.  This six-story library spreads its collections in the first four floors, with offices in the floors above.  For over fifteen years the new books, most-lended books, DVD’s and CD’s were kept on the first floor, while other, more esoteric, less-lended books were kept on higher floors.  It made perfect sense, because people could run in, conduct their business on the first floor, and run out.  Then earlier this year the folks at the MML moved the stacks of (worn, scuffed, spine-damaged) most-lended books, which felt like the heart of the place, to the second floor to make room for more DVD’s.  So now about half the floor has been given over to CD’s and DVD’s, just as people are, more and more, consuming music and movies digitally.  While people are also, more and more, consuming books digitally, it’s the library’s original mission to house books.  And MML was a one-of-a-kind urban library.  It offered the exquisite comfort of endless rows of books, but housed inside a hideous brutalist building with turnstiles, security guards, buzzing fluorescent lights, and, at all hours, an eclectic, energetic stream of patrons.  Now, except for perimeter shelves holding new fiction and non-fiction, the entire first floor is given over to music and movies.  Shouldn’t it be all about the books? Patience and Fortitude in sculptor Edward Clark Potter’s studio, c. 1911. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/wallander-mankell-branagh monthly 0.5 2012-10-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515089176-XDFUZWU2SMO381BJZ86Y/tumblr_mbl5ziclrr1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I like to draft while listening to the morning talk radio shows hosted by Leonard Lopate and Brian Lehrer on WNYC.  The voices of these two men are preternaturally soothing, a perfect antidote to the focused graphic and mathematical thinking that goes into computer drawing.  Whomever they’re talking with and whatever they’re talking about, it makes perfect Music For Drafting.  There’s only one time when what I heard disrupted my work, and that was when Kenneth Branagh visited Lopate’s show this summer to promote a movie.  He delivered all the predictable movie star platitudes, but as he started talking I stopped working.  Branagh’s unadorned speaking voice is fine and soft; it carries England and Ireland in it, and sadness and music.  It’s stunning.   In the PBS series Wallander, based on the crime novels of Henning Mankell, Branagh plays the titular homicide detective.  True to the books, the series is shot on location in Sweden and many minor actors are Scandinavians.  But Branagh and the other actors in major roles are British.  The star adjusts his voice for the part.  He doesn’t put on an accent but he holds something back, and in doing so he silences a large part of himself.  Wallander is a laconic personality to begin with, so Branagh spends much of his screen time glowering silently and clenching his jaw.  The Swedish locations give the stories an aptly gloomy tone.  We see the stunted, spiritless streets, ports and parking lots of Ystad where the killers and killed pass their lives.  The look of the perpetually overcast skies is remarkable – like aluminum.  But what’s the point of these details if Branagh can’t use his voice fully?  Why don’t they set the series in Belfast, or Manchester, and let him speak? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-moment-i-finished-reading-sheila-hetis-how monthly 0.5 2012-10-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515089597-CD19HMM978AACR4CYLOF/tumblr_mbmv107yZD1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The moment I finished reading Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be I started searching for Margaux Williamson’s paintings online.  The book, which calls itself “A Novel From Life,” tracks Heti’s adventures among the young bohemians of Toronto.  It’s self-conscious literary tone and explicit descriptions of her love life have earned the young writer some notoriety, and also comparisons to Lena Dunham.  I actually think Heti describes artistic ambition and physical love quite powerfully.  But the real subject of the book is female friendship, and how a strong one can sustain one emotionally and intellectually.  At the heart of the book is Heti’s relationship with her best friend Margaux Williamson, which is challenged as their identities swerve too close to one another during a trip to Miami, and then recovered when they’re both back home and able to identify the very particular ways each supports and inspires the other. Heti’s language is light and she describes things by brushing over them.  The memoir, though it covers one year chronologically, has a porous quality, as if it’s a mass of memories captured at just that moment before they settle into a proper novel (from life).  Williamson’s paintings are, necessarily, concrete.  But there’s a similar hovering quality in her hand.   There’s also a wonderful dissonance in the way she locates figures wthin space.  The people she paints are often at odds, both spatially and dramatically, with their surroundings, as if they’re trapped inside the wrong world.  Do Williamson’s paintings illustrate Heti’s book?  No, but they give voice to the same kind of searching, unsettled spirit.  Expressed so precisely by these two artists, this condition might be a sign of the times. The Weeds by Margaux Williamson https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/louis-ck-louie-david-lynch monthly 0.5 2012-10-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515089937-UU53VS8JZAS00CC58APV/tumblr_mbl27hycWu1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY My taste in television is lamentably lowbrow.  So I favored comedian Louis CK’s older show, Lucky Louie, over his new one, Louie, that’s been so highly acclaimed.  The older show is a dimmer, grittier version of a standard network sitcom, like Good Times with a white family.  I found the new series pretentious formally, filled with too many artfully composed frames, meaningful silences, and dramatic close-ups.  Each time I watched I wanted to say to Louis CK, actor/writer/director/editor, You’re a comedian, so just concentrate on being funny.  Nonetheless I kept watching, encouraged by the occasionally outright hilarious bits like Blueberries. And then, this season, came the gorgeous surprise of David Lynch guest starring as a network television executive who guides Louie through an important audition.  Lynch is playing an exaggerated version of himself, a show business old-timer with a quivering bouffant, flat western accent, and off-kilter timing, and he looks like he’s simply reading (and shouting) his lines off cue cards.  But his presence is both indelible and satirical; you can’t turn away.  This titanic character (as well as the three-episode story arc it’s part of) tips the tone of the goings-on from comedy to something a little bit deeper.  And, in the director’s presence, the show’s visual design becomes charged with Lynchian meaning.  It is, finally, believable that the entire series unfolds from Louie’s specific, sometimes strange, point of view.  The face of his boy-manager looks like that of a carnival freak.  Three hooks on the back of his dressing room door shimmer with menace.  The doorbell in his apartment sounds like it’s ringing from outer space.  It all makes Louie’s dithering, ordinary-guy cluelessness enormously touching.  It’s hard for sitcoms that are trying to do something fresh strike the right visual and emotional tone.  (Watch how The Mindy Project is struggling right now.)  Louie nailed it. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-funniest-dance-ive-ever-seen-has-got-to-be monthly 0.5 2012-10-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515090423-PJDM42L4NTRLB45QVHMH/tumblr_mbhik13m3v1qdm8ato1_r5_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The funniest dance I’ve ever seen has got to be the one in Bring it On when former high school cheerleader-princess Campbell performs as the basketball team mascot – a leprechaun – at the inner city high school she’s been abruptly transferred to.  She does so winningly, shaking her rump around in a furry green jacket, high-waisted plaid trousers, and a gigantic grinning leprechaun mask.  The dance is great fun because you can, right through the costume, sense the good will of the character (and also the actress, Taylor Lauderman), and because it begins to reclaim the tiresome ethnic stereotype of the leprechaun. In our sophisticated, post-racial age, there are still a lot of these little green fellows running around.  There’s the one on the Lucky Charms box, the ones that preside over the Notre Dame sports teams and the Boston Celtics, and the whole lot of them that comes out of hiding just before St. Patrick’s Day.  Perhaps, because people of Irish descent don’t see to be too vocal about it, it’s all good fun.  But the little boxing leprechaun that the law firm Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald (F&F) use in their logo is something particularly awful.  It’s meant to suggest that F&F lawyers are, like all Irish people, pugnacious and relentless.  One reason it bothers me so much is because it rubs up against my own just-as-dumb belief that Irish people are dreamy and literary.  F&F are a major New York City subway car advertiser, so on a slow, crowded, commute, I often end up face to face with one of their ads, tinted green and adorned with leprechauns.  Who would want to retain a lawyer from a firm with a mascot, especially one like this? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/antonio-lopez-fashion-illustration monthly 0.5 2012-10-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515090421-OYYVVCNI6JNXGK5WAMZJ/tumblr_mb487edpj21qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Seeing the Antonio Lopez show at The Suzanne Geiss Company in SoHo is like stepping back into the city in the early 80’s.  More accurately, it’s like stepping into the fantasy of that place I had as a high school student in suburban Connecticut, one that I cobbled together from issues of Details and Interview.  In this world, I believed, people hung out at CBGB’s and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, wore asymmetrical Japanese clothing, and survived on coke and champagne.  One gallery wall at Geiss is covered with Polaroid portraits of the Lopez’ glamorous lady friends including Grace Jones, Paloma Picasso and Grace Coddington, women who weren’t natural beauties but brittle, self-styled divas.  The gallery itself has been painted a dazzling white and decorated with lush potted plants and a neon light, like the interior of contemporary Richard Meier house. I’d always thought of Lopez as a fashion world character, but this exhibit shows what a skilled and versatile illustrator he was.  He handled a broad range of materials comfortably: watercolors, pencil, pastel, ink, photography and collage.  And he rendered with a vivid, fluid hand, one that captured details of garments faithfully while also charging the entire image with a seductive, kinetic energy.  His finest work is soaked in fantasy.  There’s a lovely, lyrical pencil drawing of a naked woman sitting with her hands across her lap while antlers grow out of her head.  Lopez’ imagination perfectly served the pulsating, eccentric energy of the time. Illustration by Antonio Lopez from the New York Times Magazine, 1966 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/acropolis-parthenon-greece-classical-architecture monthly 0.5 2012-10-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515090727-VZQYNW07ZB0NLH5292WH/tumblr_mbacomJvb71qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A very fashionable friend of mine was vacationing in Greece last month, and crafted a special laurel-leaf headdress from gold foil to wear when he visited the Acropolis.  He looked godly in it, so much so that the security guards at the Parthenon asked him to take it off to honor the sacred nature of the site.  Another thing the authorities might want to do, if they’re so concerned, is to protect the building properly while it’s being restored. My friend’s photos captured the timeless appeal of the Acropolis buildings, showing piles of bleached stone against a dazzling blue sky, on a cliff high above the city.  They also showed how vulnerable the Parthenon, the site’s chief attraction, is.  Right now there are two construction cranes inside it, a web of steel scaffolding running through it, and, all around it, in post-apocalyptic disarray, piles of rubble and cut stone, scraps of ornamental sculpture, and three melon-sized canon balls from what looks like a nineteenth-century military attack.  All these things are lying around unmarked, untagged, and uncovered, giving the place the feeling of a sunny junkyard.  I remember a devastating piece 60 Minutes aired six months before the Athens Summer Olympics in 2004, which showed sheep grazing in the field where the new stadium would be.  A spokesman for the Greeks explained cheerfully that this was “the Greek way,” to work without too much anxiety and bring everything together at the end.  I hope there’s a similar magic guiding this project. Photo by Robert Quadrini https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-museum-of-arts-and-design-mad-has-mounted-an monthly 0.5 2012-10-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515090505-KPW3FNL23CPKKCS7MHF2/tumblr_mb4c4pCwOw1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) has mounted an exhibit about Doris Duke’s Hawaiian pleasure palace Shangri La.  Duke built the estate in Honolulu in the 1930’s, when she was a young woman, to house her expanding collection of Islamic art and artefacts.  She built it in a broadly Islamic style, consulting designers in Iran and India to complete ornamental stone and wood work.  But the estate is less impressive for its design, which is modern in plan and pastiche in detail, than for its ambition.  It’s Duke’s innocent enthusiasm for all things Islamic that lights up the place. It’s easy to dismiss the entire project as a rich girl’s fantasy of Islam, a term that’s used in the exhibit wall texts to describe any culture in the world that has come into historical contact with the religion.  There are on display pieces from Spain, North Africa, Iran, Turkey and North India.  One elegant wood table with white stone inlay and curved steel supports is attributed, hilariously, to “India (Goa), or Venice."  (My guess is Venice, because the ornament depicts human figures with a expressiveness that’s highly unusual for Indian art.)  There are some exquisite ceramics, tapestries and jewelry, but the quality of the work is irregular.  The most powerful items are large format vintage color photographs that show views of the rooms and courtyard in delirious technicolor.  Here two fantasies collide: the stately, sensuous Islamic palace and the easy, idyllic Hawaiian landscape.  It seems strange that Duke traveled so far away, to a place with its own marvelously exotic history, only to bring another kind of exotic to it.  But I admire Duke for choosing the fantasy of Islam.  For a privileged young American woman in the 1930’s, it was highly original.  Walking through the exhibit, one senses that it hit her hard. Photo by Horst from Vogue, 1966. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/diana-vreeland-movie-veruschka monthly 0.5 2012-09-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515091395-22O97SRJY2ALUL7DPT1B/tumblr_marezgjSus1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The Eye Has to Travel, a documentary about the life of legendary Vogue and Harpers Bazaar editor Diana Vreeland, a hero of mine, is aptly named.  It roams between magazine layouts, family photos, fashion shows, feature films, newsreel footage, television appearances, and contemporary interviews.  The movie scatters itself over so many places that it’s virtually impossible to detect what Vreeland accomplished: she made beauty the eighth virtue.  Her own books, D.V. and Allure, remain more powerful representations of who she was. It’s fun in the film to see off-the-radar tastemakers like Penelope Tree and Veruschka talk about working with the great lady.  [Spoiler alert: it wasn’t easy.]  But it’s pointless to hear, over and over again, from other fashion celebrities, what a legendary kook she was.  Perhaps because I knew so much about Vreeland beforehand I feel the movie didn’t bring me any closer to her.  It certainly didn’t capture what she did best in her magazine work, which was to show us beauty where we hadn’t found it before.  Towards the end of the film one of the interviewees (it might be John Fairchild), throws his hands up in the air and says, “She understood the genius of vulgarity,” and I imagined that the movie might then show us how she cared so little for good taste and instead veered toward melodrama and the baroque.  But this insightful comment gets lost in a montage of similarly spicy quotes.  It gives us a lot of people, including Vreeland herself, talking about her ideas about fashion instead of showing them to us. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/world-trade-center-twin-towers monthly 0.5 2012-09-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515090891-OKF10PAGAVQ30UWDRBS1/tumblr_manvo3DgB21qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY At a private talk earlier this week, I heard an executive who had led one of the public agencies that’s rebuilding the World Trade Center site praise the “non-monumentality” of the current plans.  He spoke proudly of his own role in changing the tenor of the project from one of high-design fervor, inspired by architect Daniel Libeskind’s original site plan, to a more pragmatic one, which is chiefly concerned with completing construction.  He listed some key decisions that the city had made with his guidance that tempered  artistic ambition and made it possible to move things forward, including fast-tracking construction of the National 9/11 Memorial and simplifying the design of Santiago Calatrava’s new transit station by adding columns inside the main hall. He was a persuasive, intelligent man, but as he spoke my insides churned.  We can’t afford to be sentimental about rebuilding at this site, and we don’t need to build the world’s tallest building here to show them, but can’t we try to do something great?  This is an important site at the heart of the city’s historical and financial districts that’s giving us the opportunity to build a new neighborhood all at once.  Oftentimes, and especially in architecture, what we want to be great ends up going all wrong.  But why are we starting out by doing something that’s deliberately less than great?  Libeskind’s vision for the site would have been complex to execute, but it had been selected by both city leaders and the general public.  One of Calatrava’s signature soaring, rib-cage structures might not be appropriate for this site, but why did the city commission one from him and then lampoon it by sticking columns inside?  I remember the rogue scheme Donald Trump presented to the press, shortly after Libeskind’s plan had been chosen, to rebuild both original towers one story higher.  As I sat listening to this other, powerful city player praise non-monumentality, the Donald’s outsized ambitions for the site site seemed perfectly sane. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/as-i-read-the-profile-of-architect-bjarke-ingels monthly 0.5 2012-09-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515092011-YUZPVMX70G0CQ0P2Y4A6/tumblr_ma34v7zE551qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY As I read the profile of architect Bjarke Ingels of BIG in last week’s New Yorker, I pictured the envy it would generate as a substance, like clouds of steam rolling off the page.  Ingels is thirty-seven (alarmingly young in architect-years), leads a staff of over 100 in New York and Copenhagen, manages a slate of significant international building projects, and wears hoodies and sneakers convincingly at public appearances.  The article focuses on Ingels’ ability to sell projects – to communicate complex spatial and structural ideas in pithy, sexy ways to clients and the media – and the traditional architectural skills (discipline, detail and materiality) he seems to lack. While Ingel’s outrageous success and preternaturally relaxed style really are enviable, I read the piece cheering him on.  He won me over with his bright, bold monograph Yes is More, where he depicts himself as a superhero flying around the world building buildings, which is basically what he does.  That book gave a pragmatic, blow-by-blow account of how major buildings get built, not as ideas crystallizing into form, but as earthbound constructions continually battered and reshaped by budgets, schedules, client preferences, public opinion, site conditions, accident and whimsy.  There are some less than hagiographic details in the New Yorker piece.  (Ingels moves around Manhattan in a black Porsche, and has a comical reputation as a womanizer.)  But he’s as clear-eyed about what he wants to do (build buildings) and what he thinks architecture is (building buildings) as a sage.  If he succeeds, that is, if he keeps going, which I think he will, he’ll have established a new model for the starchitect – one that’s entirely unshackled from theory and pretension. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/albers-josef-morgan-library monthly 0.5 2012-09-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515092110-TRHX5GEOPKOEM67X9S6G/tumblr_ma34t0cAX21qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY It was with considerable reluctance that I moved off my couch on Friday evening to see the exhibit of Josef Albers drawings at the Morgan Library.  I had little interest in seeing more of the artist’s canonical, clinical square-on-square (Homage to the Square) compositions that I felt I already knew too well.  So I was taken aback at the work on display, which included studies for those square paintings, and wells as more robustly figural works that I’d never seen before.  These drawings revealed a warmth and workmanship that, for the first time, brought the artist’s work to life for me. Most remarkable were a series of studies Albers made while living in Mexico from 1947 to 1948 called Variant/Adobe.  Based on the serene, severe geometries of a native house facade, they’re painstaking investigations into the alchemy of color and form.  In each panel the artist constructs the same basic figure – an oblong house front with two windows – from different color schemes.  There’s a gorgeous hesitancy to these pieces.  The shapes are outlined lightly in pencil on rough blotter paper.  Then Albers takes a color, straight from the tube, and, after applying some daub of it, selects another to try right alongside.  It doesn’t look as if he’s always working incrementally, trying to pin down the exact right shade of yellow within a spectrum, but following crazy hunches, doing everything he can to allow the correct color, whatever it is, to reveal himself.  Albers had always seemed like the most tiresome of painters, a pedagogue who painted what was already known to him in order to make it perfectly clear to everyone else.  These drawings, that show him searching and struggling, show otherwise. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/among-the-snapshots-my-mother-sent-of-her-recent monthly 0.5 2012-09-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515092217-WE7Y3VXHWUCT7LY1FOR0/tumblr_m9y5amJHSM1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Among the snapshots my mother sent of her recent visit to Washington DC was one of the National Museum of the American Indian, which was under construction the last time I was at the Mall in 2001, for an anti-war rally, and that opened in 2004.  My first thought when I saw the photo was, Surely Native Americans deserve a better building than this.  It’s an ungainly mass with a banded facade that undulates, as the museum’s website explains, “evoking a wind-sculpted rock formation."  In photographs the building looks less geological – like a form shaped molecule by molecule over eons – than Brutalism manque.  It’s composed with the kind of kooky eccentric language that’s fine for a small house, like those by Bruce Goff, but not for a monument meant to celebrate Native American cultures built by a government that very nearly eradicated them.  This bold, unsettled building just doesn’t feel right. While the website text goes on to explain that the building and landscape were conceived with attention to Native American beliefs, the museum looks more like a testament to the formal willfulness of its designers, and entirely insensitive to any kind of belief.  (There are eleven firms credited with collaboration in the building’s design, including Polshek Partnership, who built the elegant, modernist Pequot Museum near Foxwoods Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut.)  The next, and final, museum to be unveiled on the Mall will be the National Museum of African American Culture and History, which is rising now on the last available plot.  This building, designed by London-based architect David Adjaye, uses a language that’s mercifully unreferential.  Its flat planes and stark geometries confer dignity. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/this-week-everyones-talking-about-the-reddish monthly 0.5 2012-09-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515093008-BFFI9DBPSBP0V8GFTSOL/tumblr_m9y2amvPIR1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY This week everyone’s talking about the reddish brocade Tracy Reese cocktail dress Michelle Obama wore when she spoke at the DNC and, in contrast, the cherry red Oscar de la Renta shirtdress Ann Romney wore when she spoke at the RNC last week.  Full disclosure: I liked Ann’s look better.  But I remain far more captivated by what Bill Clinton wore when he took the podium last night at the DNC.  His performance was magnificent, perhaps because he was given the adoring the audience he craves without any of the attendant responsibilities.  He wore a two-button navy blue suit (Donna Karan?), which, as handlers know, photographs better than black.  It fit his tall frame gracefully, far better than the suit he wore two years ago at Chelsea’s wedding, which looked as if it had been sized for the pre-heart-attack, Big-Mac-guzzling Bill. But it was his silk necktie, a striped, muted red with blue undertones, that clinched the look.  Just as Bill explained, midway through his speech, that Obama values partnership over partisanship, the red-mixed-with-blue of his tie, which was both not-true-blue and not-true-red, went far to suggest ideological subtlety and sophistication.  Compare it to the necktie Mitt Romney wore for his RNC speech, a schoolboy, stop-sign red one with narrow cobalt stripes.  Mitt’s necktie wasn’t about anything but the color red.  While there’s a huge divide between red and blue states, red is used across the board at mainstream political events to symbolize upstanding American politics.  One has to admire both men for having enough sense to stick with the classics. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/dragon-tattoo-book-cover monthly 0.5 2012-08-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515092808-BD832NFJUZVB1Z15UH8X/tumblr_m94j8skFJE1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY There are hundreds of books on my shelves, but the one that jumps out at me each time I’m scanning for something in particular is a mass market paperback for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  My eyes run right over the six-foot-long stretch of Modern Library classics, the complete Charles Dickens, and the stack of four fat, glossy Twilight books, and straight to this airport mystery, which has got a highlighter-yellow cover with safety-orange spots running up the spine. Was it the release of the English-language translation of this book in 2008 that kickstarted the resurgence of neons?  I’m old enough to remember the last time neons were in fashion – in the early 80’s, when we called them fluorescents – and foolish enough to want to wear them once again.  There’s a little electric-pink shift from H+M in my closet right now, waiting for me to find the courage to actually put it on.  What’s the fascination with these ungodly, unnatural hues?  Quite simply, they’re impossible not to notice.  If there’s a girl on the street sixty feet ahead of me with a screaming neon orange bag or blue pumps, I will very surely take a good look when she passes.  These bright accessories are a perfect complement to the dark, fitted dress New Yorkers wear so much of the time.  And other pieces that have been updated with neon accents, like running shoes, have a sharp, modern flash.  But when used as a large field, or as a book cover, the colors are tawdry.  They’re like a strong, sweet perfume. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/if-last-year-belonged-to-damien-hirst-and-his monthly 0.5 2012-08-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515093619-H1TUDJDB9Q2J0A8FPH1J/tumblr_m8r1nd2tV41qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY If last year belonged to Damien Hirst and his spots, then this year belongs to Yayoi Kusama and her spots.  The Tokyo-based artist helped Louis Vuitton roll out spotted accessories, clothing and window displays, installed spotted earth art at Pier 45, and is being feted with a retrospective at the Whitney that highlights her spot performances and paintings.  But while Hirst’s spots radiated happiness, and stripped painting to its syntactic, pleasure-giving essentials, Kusama’s spots are testimony to an obsessional, repetitive personality.  They’re strange. The introductory wall text at the Whitney describes Kusama as an outsider artist rather than a conceptualist, which is what I think she is.  The fact that she voluntarily checked herself into an insane asylum in 1973, where she remains, is offered as irrefutable evidence.  This description seemed insulting to me at first, but after seeing the exhibit I might agree.  The work’s single-mindedness – its disregard for proportion and balance – make it hard to understand as art.  This is particularly true of Kusama’s sculptures, conglomerations of stuffed biomorphic forms that resemble protozoa, sperm and phalluses.  As we passed a particularly exuberant piece my companion, a strong and sophisticated lady, covered her eyes and said, “I just can’t take this."  Kusama’s work is powerful and also unsettling.  It reminds me that art always comes from a person, and that that person might have no choice about who she is. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/dodge-house-irving-gill-california monthly 0.5 2012-08-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515093306-WL016GHWVG9SXTT4N5IM/tumblr_m8p719ovPZ1qdm8ato1_r1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Some architects will tell you that the only way to represent a building fully is in film, but after seeing the short film that writer Esther McCoy made in 1965 as part of her mission to preserve Irving Gill’s legendary 1916 Dodge House in Los Angeles,  I’m not so sure.  In black and white photographs the house is a powerful emblem of California modernism: blazing white stucco, punched blank windows, and palm trees swaying behind. But the film, restored in fulsome technicolor, doesn’t serve the status of the building well, and McCoy’s ordinarily energetic voice well either.  The narration, written by McCoy and read by a stentorian male announcer, is ponderous.  The film isn’t cinematic at all; it’s muddled and choppy, so that one doesn’t get a sense of moving through the house.  And the views are scaled eccentrically, each one too broad or too close to give a good sense of the  place.  It goes to show how difficult it is to film modern architecture well.  And it’s poignant testimony to McCoy’s mission.  I’m sorry the house isn’t here to speak for itself. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/knausg-rd-memoir-house-writing monthly 0.5 2012-08-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515093814-RY13A86ISZSJDT3P637Q/tumblr_m8ccd6UJEE1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY There’s been a fuss about the contents of Karl Knausgård’s memoir, particularly the account of his father’s descent into alcoholism and death.  That description centers on the house in small-town Norway where the senior Knaussgård passed his final days, which is, when the writer and his brother arrive, layered in filth, and presided over by his still-happily-imbibing grandmother.  The pages describing the storm of soiled laundry, food scraps, and bottles inside are terrifically vivid.  The house has already been proclaimed one of the Top 10 Homes in Literature by one newspaper.  (While the American paperback features an irrelevant splatter painting, the UK version features a white wood frame house.) What I found most remarkable about the memoir weren’t the familial revelations (grandmother peeing in her seat) or brutal emotional honesty (apathy towards an about-to-give-birth wife), but the vividness of the physical descriptions.  Even in translation (and the imaginative leap from Norwegian into English must be a big one) those passages that simply describe a thing (any thing, really) shine through.  Each object is alive, a character that acts importantly on the author’s internal life.  When just he, his brother and grandmother are inside the house “the rooms seemed to close around what had happened, as though we were too weak to open them."  And after it’s is cleaned out and the windows are thrown open, "the movement of the air inside plus the sunlight falling over the floors and the overpowering smell of detergent on at least the second floor, allowed the house to open up, in a sense, and become a place the world flooded through…"  It’s a wonderful way to write about buildings. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/worishofer-scholls-sandals-crocs monthly 0.5 2012-08-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515093808-WNOU3ZZY8Q6WWCV61KKS/tumblr_m7y0o8tKML1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Some time between 2008 and now it became socially acceptable to wear Worishofer sandals.  They’ve replaced Crocs as the ungainly (it would be unkind to say ugly) but practical casual shoe of choice.  These German-made sandals have been photographed on hipster-starlets like Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dust and are being sold, in an array of thirty-three colors, right alongside Thunderbirds and Chuck Taylors, at every cut-rate shoe store on lower Broadway. The most popular style of Worishofers, the basic slide, reminds me of the classic Dr. Scholl’s exercise sandals.  Like Scholl’s, Worishofers were developed by a physician in the service of orthopedic health.  Unlike Scholl’s, Worishofers are entirely structureless; they’re lightweight and feel more like slippers than street shoes.  Scholl’s have smart hardware: a sliding metal buckle and rows of bolts pinning the narrow strap to the sculpted oak sole.  Worishofer sandals look like they’ve been glued together from scraps of vinyl.  They don’t have the gorgeous object-quality that the most alluring shoes have. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/gilot-picasso-painting-muse monthly 0.5 2012-08-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515094214-M8LD3A19RS6G10LQT5AR/tumblr_m6g4yb95qg1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY What was it was like for George Harrison, a talented musician playing in a band beside two men who might have been the greatest pop artists of all time?  And what was it like for Francoise Gilot, a talented painter living with a man who might have been the greatest painter of all time?  The most recent of the Gagosian Gallery’s thrilling, museum-quality Picasso shows, Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris–Vallauris 1943–1953, makes one wonder.  The show is organized in three parts: two galleries with Picasso’s work from that period, a gallery with photos showing the life of the two artists together, and finally, a gallery with Gilot’s work.  As we entered that room a gentleman behind me declared, “Well, she was no Picasso,” an assessment that seemed terribly unfair. Gilot’s work is serious but there isn’t enough of it at the exhibit to get a strong sense of what her deep interests are.  Picasso’s work, on the other hand, illuminated what we already know of him.  There are lovely, colorful paintings of Gilot, their children, their pets, and their toys, scenes lighter and more joyous than we thought he was capable of.  But the most moving pieces in the show are Picasso’s two drawings and painting, all titled Femme Designe, that show Francoise at work.  Today Gilot is remarkably good-humored about the time she spent with the master, however much it overshadowed her own work.  She thinks she made it through those years because she had a strong sense of herself, and, as she puts it, “He did not try to destroy me."  She remembers that Picasso supported her work at first but lost interest as she began to gain recognition.  But there’s a tenderness in his depictions of her as an artist that I’d like to understand as an endorsement, however complicated it was. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/olympic-costume-fashion-uniform monthly 0.5 2012-07-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515094813-1L62C9MUUCXTMSAMHYDF/tumblr_m7yaq8IRHt1qdm8ato1_r2_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY While I have not caught Olympic Fever, I watched the Parade of Nations at the opening ceremony with considerable interest.  There was an outcry about the uniforms Ralph Lauren designed for the American team because they had been manufactured in China, yet none at all because they were unflattering (lumpen blue berets, white loafers with bobby socks) and heavily branded (logos on both cap and blazer).  The Brasilians, who wore fitted yellows and green separates, were the best dressed team; they gave off joy and heat.  The British, in space-age white-and-gold jackets, missed the opportunity to do something entirely unironic (Chariots of Fire white flannels) or entirely ironic (trenchcoats and Hunter boots).  Instead the Bermudans, in white dress shirts, navy jackets and red Bermuda shorts (identical to those they sported, brazenly, at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver) took both those prizes.  At the center of it all Usain Bolt, in slim yellow trousers, looked fittingly majestic carrying the Jamaican flag. But my favorite costume was the little cap-sleeved A-line dresses the young women carrying the country signs for each team wore.  The fronts of the dresses were printed with a crowd of contemporary faces, which were meant, I think, to represent the crazy and happy diversity of city of London, the Games, and the whole wide world.  I don’t know who designed them or the signs themselves, which floated above each girl like a halo.  The get-up reminded me of the dresses Hussein Chalayan has crafted out of wood, fiberglass and Tyvek, which are less like garments than contraptions.  There’s something cerebral, innocent and eccentric about these little Olympic dresses that, for the overscaled, overblown event, was exactly right. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/assumption-cathedral-moscow-icon monthly 0.5 2012-07-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515095008-40FGXC64L886P61Q9IHC/tumblr_m7ilitUlXR1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY After taking in the Kremlin’s immense, impersonal government buildings, arriving at Assumption Cathedral, which is tucked deeper inside, is like falling back in time.  Its exterior is a battered, undressed stone that evokes a pre-Christian desert landscape.  And its interior – every square inch – is covered in jewel-hued frescoes that tell the story of the church.  These aren’t like the frescoes in Renaissance churches, that open windows into fictive space.  These are paintings stacked one upon the other, wrapping the walls and crawling up onto the ceiling vaults.  Populated with flattened figures in airless gold backgrounds, they’re like very sacred cartoons, rich with knowledge from another age. The way the embellishment overwhelms the architecture made me think, as I had many, many times during my trip, that Russia not part of Europe but part of Asia.  In many ways the country reminds me of India.  It’s huge, deeply diverse in culture, and moving boldly into the new century while also remaining stubbornly the same.  In Moscow there’s a barely-concealed sense of chaos coursing below the streets that once senses could, at any moment, simply erupt.  This latent (and sometimes not) disorder seems like an essential part of the culture. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/melnikov-architecture-moscow-modernism monthly 0.5 2012-07-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515095609-GHJGKGLX57NLPYRV399F/tumblr_m7guiok0vx1qdm8ato1_540.png DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I went to Florence and didn’t see the Uffizi, I went to Brugge and didn’t see the Leonardo Madonna, and I went to Moscow and didn’t see Lenin’s Tomb, though it was no fault of my own – that part of Red Square was closed off to prepare for a national holiday.  But I felt more torn up about not seeing the house of modern architect Konstantin Melnikov, which had been preserved as a museum like the John Soane house in London.  Melnikov’s house, just off Arbaty, Moscow’s main shopping street, was closed.  Nonetheless I lingered around the sidewalk in front and took some unremarkable through-the-fence-and-foliage photos of it. A gentleman passing by explained that Melnikov’s family owned the house and were currently raising funds to have it refurbished.  It looked terribly run down, with peeling paint and boarded windows, and spookily overgrown trees and bushes.  The house consists of two cylinders stacked like the figure 8 in plan.  They’re built entirely of brick, and adorned with rows of small, space-age hexagonal windows.  Only the back of the house, which faces a yard, is opened with a large picture window.  From archival photos what’s most fascinating is the way the acoutrements of everyday life (curtains, tables, lamps) rest so uneasily inside the structure.  At Soane’s house there’s no distinction between architecture and furnishing, between building and life; the place is one thick, voluptuous substance.  The Melnikov House seems inviolable, as if it wouldn’t lend itself so easily to occupation. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/russia-crown-romanov-peterthegreat monthly 0.5 2012-07-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515095716-JX5MYDORW6HHWVO7UZCP/tumblr_m7gsj3J2gx1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I had a high school history teacher who told us that history was a story, and another who told us that history was people.  I would like to believe the latter.  Visiting the Armoury Chamber, the Kremlin’s national history museum, I was mesmerized by those objects (robes, slippers, mirrors, thrones, carriages, … ) that had been belonged to the tsars and tsarinas.  There’s a pair of black leather over-the-knees boots worn by Peter the Great when he was supervising the construction of St. Petersburg, whose size (they nearly reached my hips) gives a sense of how Great he really was.  They’re punkish, with chunky heels and a soft patina, covered with a film of St. Petersburg muck.  And they’re both identical, because, apparently, while the Russians had the ability to dredge the canals of St. Petersburg, they didn’t have the ability to design left and right shoes. Most enchanting were the objects of the young tsars.  There’s a sleigh carriage used by Peter’s son Alexey, whose small size (it is also hip-high) gives it a toy-like grace.  It’s windows are sealed with micah rather than glass, which must have given the boy a strange, softened view of the world outside.  Because of uncertainties in succession the Russians sometimes crowned boys tsars and, at least once, in 1682, two at the same time.  That was when Peter (he was ten) was crowned alongside his less robust brother Ivan (he was fifteen).  Inside the museum there’s the lovely twin throne they shared at the coronation.  And there are the crowns they wore: the traditional Crown of Monomakh (above) for Ivan and, for Peter, a smaller, fancier replica.  They’re dreamy.  To see them is to feel, whatever one’s political inclinations, like a royalist. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/before-leaving-for-europe-this-summer-i-met-a-man monthly 0.5 2012-07-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515095916-DM2ZM0LU3AGBS4WLQ7Q4/tumblr_m7gvstG9o21qdm8ato1_r3_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Before leaving for Europe this summer I met a man from St. Petersburg who told me that if I saw only one thing in Russia it should be the Amber Room at the (Catherine) Summer Palace in Pushkin.  But when we arrived at the gates my heart fell.  In St. Petersburg the architectural ornament had been dramatic but perfectly pitched, executed with unparallelled fineness.  Here in Pushkin the facades felt overwrought.  There were monstrously-scaled caryatids holding up the walls, similar to the ones at Sanssouci, but without their grace and severity.  The blue and gold paint seemed too bright, a bit vulgar.  My discomfort grew stronger after we moved inside.  In the (accurately-named) Grand Hall gold ornament rose in stiff waves across the walls.  And in the Amber Room mosaics of the luminous stone encrusted every side.  The ornament was as spectacular as that in the Winter Palace at the Hermitage, but denser – it sucked the air, and pleasure, right out of the rooms. On the way out we passed through a narrow hall with small black-and-white photos showing the state of the Palace during WWII, when it had been raided and bombed.  All that remained of the place were brick walls and roof rafters.  Over the following decades the Palace was reconstructed, with considerable care, in accordance with original documents and photographs.  (The Palace is so large that this renovation is still underway.)  The rooms we visited had been restored with incredible skill; there’s obvious contemporary talent in Russia for parquetry, mosaic, plasterwork, masonry and metalwork.  But I don’t think the restoration represents the original designs faithfully.  I can’t quite believe that the eighteenth-century craftsmen who built the Winter Palace built the Summer Palace.  They’re entirely different things. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/stone-lapis-malachite-russia monthly 0.5 2012-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515096403-HCGWQ39JXEQ7GL7TW01K/tumblr_m7bh6qjJcO1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Though St. Petersburg is extravagantly picturesque, offering the pedestrian winding canals, candy-colored buildings, and fancy-capped churches each way she turns, I’ll remember the city for the decoration of its interiors, particularly the stonework in its churches. Inside Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral on the island fortress, there are monolithic tombs for Alexander II and Empress Maria carved from deep green jasper and mottled pink rhodonite whose otherworldly hues and markings befit a tsar and his wife.  The chunks of stone are very literally magnetic, drawing one forward.  The inside of the Cathedral of Our Lady of St. Kazan is crowded with religious paintings, gilded trim, brass chandeliers, wreaths of lit candles, bearded priests, and praying babushkas.  And the walls and floors are lined with stones the likes of which I have never seen before.  The floor is a mosaic of different dark, tumultuously-patterned varieties, the tiles of each worn to different depth because of its unique hardnesses.  There are pilasters flanking the altar carved from lapis lazuli and malachite, their blue and green the strongest, purist colors I’ve ever seen.  It’s suddenly obvious why the stones are precious, and why they’re employed here in the service of the divine.  There’s something in the way strongly colored and patterned stones are used so liberally in (many are mined in the Urals) that’s particularly revealing.  The stone isn’t subservient to the architecture or ornament; it remains a substance with marvelous properties. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/moscow-station-communist-architecture monthly 0.5 2012-07-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515096723-GIVRYRPGAIKFW5IBHB2O/tumblr_m7bcv1MSHV1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY One thing I did not see nearly enough of in Russia was Bad Communist Architecture.  You know, the sort of overbearing, rationalist, concrete megaliths we associate with the cold war.  There were, in the parts of St. Petersburg I visited, precious few communist-era buildings to be seen, and those were sedately neoclassical.  The entire city seems to have been restored to its picturesque eighteenth-century origins.  It wasn’t until we arrived at St. Petersburg’s Moscow Station (Moskovsky Vokzal) that I found what I’d been searching for. While the main station is from the nineteenth century, the small hall from which we departed is from 1912.  It’s a simple concrete shell with bare walls, clerestory windows, and a triangulated concrete ceiling, anchored by a giant bust of Peter the Great raised on a pillar right in the middle.  (The bust was added in 1993.)  Light from the clerestories threw delicate shadows across the concrete, giving the entire space a special softness.  The design isn’t terribly complicated (just compare this ceiling to the triangulated concrete ceilings of Louis Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery), but it’s simple, handsome and well-proportioned.  Peter the Great’s presence is a bit bombastic but adds warmth, focus, and a sense of history.  Maybe without it the hall would have felt exactly like one of the sturdy, unglamorous communist buildings I was romanticizing. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/russian-military-police-hat monthly 0.5 2012-07-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515096819-9FYJHA3KTA3NFK1NR3BQ/tumblr_m7babjpMPA1qdm8ato1_r3_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY If you love a man or woman in a uniform, then you will love the crowds of them milling about Plaza Square in St. Petersburg, near the naval training academy (Admiralty).  Both the men and women wear dark olive jackets embellished with red trim.  The men top off the look with big, round concave hats that rise dramatically in front and frame their faces like halos.  (Their shape reminds me of the asymmetrical bowls that trendy pan-Asian restaurants serve noodles in.)  The men in the city’s police force wear similar hats, in black.  The women soldiers and officers, rather sadly, wear peaked flight-attendant-style caps that don’t do justice to their powerful roles. After arriving in Russia I was starved to see those things that were authentically Russian, and these hats struck me so.  They’re modern, exotic, and old-school communist.  Each time I saw a man wearing one I had to stop and stare and say a silent prayer in appreciation.  It’s easy to sport a hat that’s practical (like a knit skullcap) or fashionable (like a baseball hat).  But the men wearing these sloping-bowl-hats are going out on a limb, wearing an accessory, like a bustle or heels, that isn’t absolutely necessary and that requires considerable poise.  In St. Petersbirg the men in uniform are participating hard in fashion. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/matisse-hermitage-dance-game monthly 0.5 2012-07-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515097321-S3UBNPJXU21RBJ3VPDCM/tumblr_m78donLNqn1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY After seeing the rooms of the Winter Palace, two Leonardo da Vinci canvases, and twenty-six Rembrandt canvases, museum fatigue set in and I was ready to leave the Hermitage.  Just then our guide dropped us off on the third floor, where the modern paintings are, and my energy level exploded.  The thirty-seven small galleries here are crammed with pieces from Picasso, Chagall, Cezanne and other masters.  They rival the selection of modern paintings on display at MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. At the heart of the collection are a number of groundbreaking works by Henri Matisse, including Dance and Red Room.  Seeing Dance for the first time, after knowing it from reproductions, was convulsive.  It’s huge, like a mural, and rendered in sour, unpretty reddish hues.  Seen at this scale, practically life-size, the flatness of the rendering is incredibly brazen.  It’s not pictorial really and not graphic really and yet it depicts a world that is, dramatically and spatially, complete.  The canvas was coursing with energy, as if it would burst from the wall.  (It would certainly benefit from being moved to a larger gallery.)  My favorite Matisse was Game of Bowls, a smaller canvas that shows three boys playing on the lawn.  The composition is simple, strange and calm.  There is something primal about the means – smears of color – with which the boys are rendered, and with which their joy is captured.  Standing in front, I felt the jolt that turn-of-the-century Parisians must have felt when encountering modern painting for the first time. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/hermitage-interior-romanov-opulent monthly 0.5 2012-07-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515097628-682Q9Q8KPNZRA70UR09J/tumblr_m76d8tVDwx1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY There are museums and then there is the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.  Even the names of its rooms make magic, like The Twenty-Column Hall, The Raphael Loggias, and The Blackamoor Dining-Room.  The galleries are so opulent that the collections of artwork they house, which are superb, might be beside the point.  This museum is an immense, multi-courtyarded complex that overlooks Plaza Square on one side and the Neva River on the other.  On the outside, it’s formidable, with an endless facade that’s been restored to a delicate tint of blue-green that evokes both sea and sky. On the inside, particularly in those rooms that were originally part of the Romanovs’ Winter Palace, it’s decorated with fairytale splendor.  To visit the Hermitage is to move from one astoundingly furnished gallery to the next.  They are dressed with gilded and coffered and vaulted ceilings, tapestries and bas-reliefs, wood parquetry and tile mosaics, and chandeliers exploding with crystals.  There doesn’t seem to be any architecture present – every surface dissolves into ornament.  And the ornament is executed with such fineness that it’s never over-sweet; it all seems, somehow, entirely appropriate.  (The ornament seems, also, more Asian in spirit than European.)  The highlight might be St. George Hall, the room where the Romanovs held their coronations.  It’s finished in a frosted palette of blue and white, with gold accents that shimmer in the white daylight.  The museum’s astonishing interior design that offers a seamless dream of royal Russia. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/how-do-you-care-for-a-city-thats-centuries-old monthly 0.5 2012-07-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515098021-FXXVW5EWLPATZO13BSIY/tumblr_m74hseR9IR1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY How do you care for a city that’s centuries old?  Do you preserve it for tourists and purists, or fix it to suit those who live there?  The people of Tallinn seem to have got the balance just right.  The old city center of the Estonian capital, which dates to the twelfth century, was happily preserved behind the iron curtain and is now a thriving tourist destination.  There are little winding streets and a big public square and stone buildings with steep tiled roofs, all of which seem (to an American at least) older than time.  And there are, everywhere, bars, cafes and curio shops and, just inside one of town’s gates, a big, bustling McDonalds.  Yet the charm of the city shines through.  Unlike the Old Town in Stockholm, which feels polished and preserved to the point of sterility, Tallinn felt like a real place where real people live.  Certainly the city could take its preservation work more seriously.  I saw places where ancient stone copings had been replaced with clumsy tin flashing, and cobbled walks with asphalt.  But however awkward these modernizations were, they never felt egregious.  Instead they felt like a proof of life, that people living here make the place their own.  What I liked best about Tallinn were the teenagers dressed in historically correct period costumes manning the entrances at some of the restaurants and bars.  While they were friendly enough they looked just like teenagers everywhere else – slouching, sluggish and sullen.  One girl wore ostentatiously unlaced Doc Martens with her court jester’s hose, and one boy had rolled back the sleeves of his horsehair cape to show off his tats.  While the center of Tallinn is very, very pretty it’s a city where people live and, to some extent, rely on tourists for their livelihood.  In that sense it’s like a much more genuine, much more spectacular Medieval Times. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/as-i-was-pacing-the-sidewalk-outside-finlandia monthly 0.5 2012-07-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515097709-02OOHCV95ZHDYYPSUG5B/tumblr_m74gnlTlok1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY As I was pacing the sidewalk outside Finlandia Hall, trying to photograph the entire length of its facade, my mother asked why I was so interested in the back of the building.  The famous concert hall by Alvar Aalto lies tucked between Mannerheimintie, Helsinki’s handsome main street, and a service road.  And one could make a very compelling argument that its back – the side facing the service road – is actually its front.  There are balconies there where concertgoers can congregate during intermission and peer north into the pretty park around Töölö Lake.  While the street facade is low and plain, its rhythms interrupted by stands of tall trees, the service road facade features runs of stairs breaking through and hanging below the interminably long wall like notes on a staff.  Yet there you are, standing by the service road, while you’re taking it all in.  Perhaps the healthiest position to take is that the building has no front at all. What’s amazing is how sprawling the hall is, like a cake that didn’t set properly.  I wanted very badly for the building to be a heroic, mountain-like, sculpted mass.  But it looks, from the outside, almost like a student project, where that student has diagrammed each item in the client’s program (entrance lobby, ticket booth, hallway, small auditorium, large auditorium…) and strung them together.  The concert hall in Oslo is also low and long, but it’s unified; one senses the heart within.  Finlandia Hall remains an enigma.  This is not a building that was made to be looked at. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/how-is-a-contemporary-art-museum-different-from monthly 0.5 2012-07-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515098524-ND8R8FOFF9ZOVYJ5SFK1/tumblr_m6qv93M3GX1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY How is a contemporary art museum different from any other kind of art museum?  And how is a museum different from any other kind of building?  Kiasma, the contemporary art gallery in Helsinki designed by Steven Holl, might be the perfect showcase for contemporary art.  Museums with similar programs, like PS1 and Mass MoCA, both adaptations of existing buildings, seem to have been designed primarily to accommodate the humongous scale of so much contemporary work, as well as an increased focus on sculpture and installations.  Kiasma has been designed to house the art, and delight visitors, in an array of galleries that are diverse in size, proportion and character.  The result is a warm, welcoming gallery for a kind of art that is, oftentimes, not. The most surprising thing about the building is its gentleness.  Kiasma, which Holl won in a design competition, opened in 2008, at at time when he was regarded as a rock star in the United States.  Publicity photos showing the building’s sweeping interior ramp made the museum seem highly expressive, sculptural, and idiosyncratic – another signature work from another over-regarded post-postmodern architect.  But the building is astoundingly fluid; one moves through it effortlessly.  A great deal of this is due to the careful composition, scaled beautifully for the moving body and alert to the picturesque.  And a great deal of it is due to the judicious use of daylight, which is carried into the galleries through concealed windows and skylights.  It’s a wonderful place to see contemporary art and, probably, just about anything. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-overheard-a-man-in-our-hotel-lobby-in-helsinki monthly 0.5 2012-07-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515098228-7JF04KKWVUM7AKHOCQSS/tumblr_m6g7jse3qi1qdm8ato1_r4_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I overheard a man in our hotel lobby in Helsinki say that he wanted to visit the Hard Rock Cafe to pick up an only-available-there souvenir t-shirt.  It’s with the same abject touristic spirit that I visited the Marimekko flagship, hoping to pick up a very cool, very authentic kind of souvenir, one in keeping with the city’s designation as World Design Capital 2012.  The store turned out to be off-putting.  While the brand’s graphics (like their map of Helsinki) are always charming, that charm just doesn’t always find its way into the products.  The store’s two floors were merchandised unimaginatively, with products I’d already seen before, in patterns that were overly familiar, with laughingly expensive prices.  Ten American dollars for a plastic change purse?  Forty for a glass votive candle holder?  The quality of the goods just didn’t justify it.  The dresses were shapeless and and the linens were coarse; they didn’t feel luxurious at all. What really inspired were the Iittala glasses and plates I stumbled across in the housewares section of an unassuming department store further off the main street.  Even the simplest pieces here (water glasses, pitchers, cereal bowls) were pristinely shaped and finished, in dreamy, watery hues.  A new line of Iittala tableware called Korento by designers Klaus Haapaniemi and Heikki Orvola was graced with a complex flower-and-insect pattern that is very close to sublime.  It feels both old-world and contemporary, and definitely Finnish.   I stopped and thought, for just a moment, about carrying some place settings home.  They would have made an entirely fitting souvenir. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/helsinki-is-like-milan-a-city-thats-infused-with monthly 0.5 2012-07-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515099007-01ZDIIZ1VFONV4XGJL0D/tumblr_m6gifwjDyX1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Helsinki is like Milan, a city that’s infused with both old and new energies.  In the monstrous, postmodern urban plaza near our hotel, lined with high-rise apartments and shopping malls, there were stands selling African food and a DJ broadcasting hip hop.  And at the other end of the plaza there was Mannerheimintie, the broad, bustling cobblestone avenue that cuts through the city center, anchored by a cluster of impossibly stately nineteenth-century buildings.  With dark brick, copper roofs, and cast stone details, they have a consistently fine level of ornament that makes them feel more lively than similar buildings in central Stockholm and Copenhagen.  They give the city tremendous gravity, and also a compelling backdrop for contemporary goings-on. No doubt the jewels of the old buildings, both right on Mannerheimintie, are Helsinki Central Station and The National Museum of Finland.  They were designed by Eliel Saarinen, before the great architect left the country to take a teaching residency at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan.  While they’re built with the same materials and in the same scale as surrounding buildings, their facades are decorated with a unique theatricality.  They’ve got exquisite stone and metal details, and are brought to life with some marvelous figures.  There are two giant male caryatids flanking the Station’s front entrance, holding disc-shaped lamps in front like religious offerings, and a proud black bear at the entrance steps to the Museum that roars in welcome.  Yet the buildings don’t feel like stage sets; they have the naturalness of mountains. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/asplund-cemetery-stockholm-skogskyrkogarden monthly 0.5 2012-07-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515099115-LDMXOQ6TY7SNAWQ4QQBM/tumblr_m630gptehC1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Like its famous public library, Stockholm’s cemetery, Skogskyrkogården, is an icon of modern architecture.  Based on a winning competition entry by Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, it was completed between 1917 and 1940 and still serves the city.  On the afternoon I visited people were gathering outside one of the chapels for a service.  The crematorium, chapels, and gardens at Skogskyrkogården are revered by architecture teachers and students everywhere because they are built so simply and finely.  This is certainly true.  Each element – roof, paving, door, window – has been reduced to essentials.  A door is simply a flush panel in the wall.  A fence is simply a stone wall with a metal coping.  A patio is simply a row of stone tiles set in the lawn.  Yet these structures aren’t naive; they’re precise, elegant and resonant. What might be even more remarkable than the refinement in the construction is the way that the dead are present here.  Do Scandinavians have a more holistic understanding of death than Americans do?  Right at the center of the cemetery there’s a clearing with a meditation garden built on a rise that resembles the sixth century burial mounds in Uppsala.   As one moves through the chapels this formation is never out of sight.  There are over 90,000 graves here, most buried with simple, stone markers within the groves of high pine trees that make up most of the grounds.  They lie low, between the trunks, just barely visible.  The city cab driver who accompanied us to and through the grounds told us, with perfect equanimity, that his own mother and father were buried there.  One of my companions responded, “The dead must feel at peace here."  I concur. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/fjallraven-backpack-llbean monthly 0.5 2012-07-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515099418-4MH9OEQP4WTZ93BD06E4/tumblr_m5q0wixv6H1qdm8ato1_r2_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY For many years my schlepping bag has been the LLBean Boat and Tote.  It’s attractive, sturdy, comes in every size and color and, depending on how you carry it, preppy or modern.  But the Fjällräven Kanken knapsack I brought back as a souvenir from Stockholm is winning me over.  Lord knows what the bag signifies to fashionable Swedes, but to New Yorkers it’s a dowtown classic, worn with flowered dresses and plaid shirts by ladies on the L-train.  (There’s a Fjällräven boutique in NoLIta, and basic colors are available through JCrew and ASOS.)  I would like to think that the bag is something Swedish schoolchildren carry around, though the Swedish schoolchildren I saw looked not-at-all different from American schoolchildren, carrying backpacks adorned with superheroes and princesses. While the Kanken was developed ergonomically to distribute weight correctly over the back, I’m most impressed by its lightness and simplicity of design.  Most nylon knapsacks have awkward egg-like proportions and are encrusted with zippers, pockets, toggles and straps.  I’ve always wished that my Boat and Tote had an additional layer of details: an inside pocket for papers, a zippered compartment for pencils, and buckles to adjust the strap length.  The Kanken has these things, as well as platonic, squared-off proportions.  The first time I took my Kanken out it was stuffed full with folders, clipboard and measuring tapes, and it started to rain mid-day.  The bag was easy to carry, both in my hand and on my back, and the water streamed right off of it.  It simply works. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/asplund-stockholm-library monthly 0.5 2012-07-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515100155-F52EPVCYQX5KC09MA3Q1/tumblr_m62w1nNx4q1qdm8ato1_r4_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Buildings I learned about as a student – through photographs and drawings – have a persistence in the mind that real buildings often don’t.  Gunnar Asplund’s Bibliotek in Stockholm is one of those buildings.  I learned about it more than twenty years ago in an art history lecture and its parti – a cylinder set within a cube – stayed with me.  While embedded in the modern canon, it’s a building celebrated for its eccentricity.  It stands for a very early modernism, a non-International Style modernism, and a Scandinavian brand of modernism.  It’s the building’s plan I remember best, with its awesome platonic geometries. Visiting the library itself was something altogether different.  The building is in good condition and remains a working branch of the Stockholm public library.  It’s close to the city center, near Stockholm University, tucked away behind a large stagnant pool (also designed by Asplund), next door to a McDonalds.  The evening I visited the place was busy with children, college students, and adults stopping by on their way home from work.  The drum-like central hall, lined with stacks of low, curving, bookshelves and lit from windows high above, was cluttered with a temporary stage, display tables, folding chairs, and carts of books waiting to be reshelved.  It’s finishes were just as dreary as those one would find in any public library: linoleum floor tile, varnished woodwork, and painted brick.  Through it all the pristine geometry of the central hall asserted itself, reaffirming Architecture within the assault of everyday life.  I doubt that most Stockholmers see that their library is an icon of modern architecture.  But the building adds some splendor to their lives, which is much more than most. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sweden-landscape-fence monthly 0.5 2012-07-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515100207-MJ07C44S5OPAZQYHT08N/tumblr_m62za7nv7k1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I’m an indoor girl, but as I rode through the countryside outside Stockholm I was tremendously moved by the landscape.  Not the raw power of it, but the quiet, incisive ways people have intervened to tame it.  There are farmhouses here standing in thousand-acre plots, yet they’ve been set within small yards that as are intensely and exquisitely maintained as those in the most precious American suburb. I’ve always felt that New Yorkers fetishize outdoor space, colonizing any square foot of occupiable roof, courtyard or sidewalk with stanchions, potted plants and cafe tables, however uninspiring the results.  Mayor Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn are using similar strategies to domesticate our streets, using concrete bollards, folding chairs, and green paint to shape no-drive pedestrian zones in Times Square and Union Square.  But in the Swedish countryside, where there are land and views all around, farmers have done just the same thing, claiming small spaces for themselves in the simplest manner, with a row of bushes, stone paving, a big tree, wood fences, or a pair of lawn chairs.  Against field and forest, these little suburban yards look like they’ve fallen out of the sky.  This way of building a fence might be a primeval, civilizing act; it’s how we make a place for ourselves in the world. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/oslo-opera-snohetta-bieber monthly 0.5 2012-06-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515100833-V2WELNVUYO2U1WTK73UN/tumblr_m5pzh4Z0UU1qdm8ato1_r3_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The splash image of the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, by Snøhetta, on the architect’s website is a powerful one.  In that photo, taken after a snowfall, the building looks like: mountain, iceberg, fortress and ocean liner.  When the building is approached on foot from the city center, on a temporary steel footbridge, over a road that will be eventually channeled underground, the building is actually lower, broader and less imposing.  It looks like: spaceship, folly, and something-still-under-construction.  It has no center and no front, no strong image at all.  It just barely looks like a building. While the artfully sloping structure (this sloping is Snøhetta’s signature) feels as if it’s going to tumble into the water, it actually directs one back to the city.  Its roof, clad in blindingly-white travertine tiles, can be occupied like a landform.  As one steps up and walks the perimeter Oslo emerges all around as a modern commercial city, thick with with towers and cranes.  And as one turns back to the building itself, its peaks emerge and recede cinematically in a way that’s pleasingly disorienting.  The roof is public park, promenade and theater.  The evening I visited people sat facing a floating stage listening to a soundcheck for the following evening’s Justin Bieber concert.  To get back to our hotel, where The Biebs was in residence, we had to navigate a crowd of swooning, screaming and stampeding pre-teen girls.  It’s impressive that such a cerebral, elegant building could host, comfortably, this kind of pop-cultural happening. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/munch-oslo-theft monthly 0.5 2012-06-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515100905-YP6YJ2UUIUE7RYP5I628/tumblr_m5pwk3Mhl21qdm8ato1_r4_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY In 2004 the Edvard Munch paintings The Scream and Madonna were stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo.  They’ve since been recovered, repaired and reinstalled.  But look what’s going on over at the Nationalmuseet, which houses its own extraordinary collection of Munch paintings, including versions of The Scream and Madonna that are displayed behind glass shields.  There’s a uniformed guard at the gallery door, who spends most of his time and energy enforcing the no-photography rule.  The glass shields only draw attention to those two paintings so that visitors head straight for them, their cellphones cocked. I don’t think the Munch theft was a crime of passion, because if it had been the thieves would have made away with the painter’s portrait of his sister Inger, or Puberty, or The Dance of Life, which get under the skin in a deeper, more unshakeable way.  If I were to steal one painting it would be Four Girls on a Bridge, which charges an innocent subject with longing and dread.  Munch was a masterful printmaker, and many of his paintings retain a strongly graphic quality – an energy in the line – that trumps modeling and space.  His most poweful paintings, however,  don’t employ line so much as molten streams of color.  In some, like The Kiss, figures melt into one another.  In Four Girls (and in Moonlight too) figures melt into everything around them.  Here it is into the street, the bridge, and the sky.  The world, and not just the figures, is charged with life. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/oslo-town-hall monthly 0.5 2012-06-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515101474-QZCIF5ZH7VU88U3GG4DC/tumblr_m5pvueKBzn1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Oslo City Hall, which sits close to the harbor, cuts an ominous figure.  From the outside it’s a severe, utilitarian, proto-Brutalist building.  From the inside, however, it’s an eye-popping fantasia of color and pattern.  Each of its stately-proportioned public rooms, including its high central hall, is finished with sumptuous mosaics, murals, wall coverings and draperies.  The rich colors and patterns aren’t what one expects inside an institutional building, and certainly not inside the one in which the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded.  (What is entirely Nobel-appropriate is the gentle white light that falls through the clerestories in the central hall.) There’s an intensity to the interior design that’s a bit nutty, especially in relation to what we understand as the inherent restraint of Scandinavian design.  (Civic buildings in Copenhagen and Stockholm are richly appointed too, but don’t have this intensity.)  Even the ceilings in Oslo City Hall are extravagantly embellished, finished with murals, colored tiles, and gigantic, space-age pendant lights.  Our travel guide, an Oslo native, told us that Norwegians typically “found their own way to live,” and that sense of inventiveness and individuality is evident inside Town Hall.  What’s most remarkable is how the building’s sober exterior supports a pulsating, eccentric inner life, and how at ease they are with one another. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/on-my-last-morning-in-copenhagen-i-saw-a-young monthly 0.5 2012-06-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515101474-K2WK158XKIHZC16P679J/tumblr_m5greaLOtI1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY On my last morning in Copenhagen I saw a young woman with long blond hair, in denim shorts and a fisherman’s sweater, bike slowly and serenely past stalled lanes of morning traffic.  It was a perfect image, one that I’ll associate forever with the city and the country.  But what image is there of the architecture? In the same way that I think of red brick for Boston and limestone for Paris,  I will think of glazed black ceramic roof tile for Denmark, where it’s used on many small residential buildings.  On steep gable roofs the rows interlocking curved tiles, shaped like soda cans sliced in half, make a cool, enigmatic surface.  Unlike similar Spanish-style terracotta tiles, the black ones don’t cast intricate shadows – they’re seamless.  Against the simple, whitewashed volumes of the homes, both new and old, it’s a strikingly modern look.  And when a such a building sits on a flat green lawn, with sunlight glinting off its roof, it’s an image of impossible refinement. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/because-of-the-reserves-of-time-and-skill-invested monthly 0.5 2012-06-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515101607-ZZMNME5C54NHC842ENIN/tumblr_m5xqjuhvs21qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Because of the reserves of time and skill invested in them, tapestries are inherently valuable.  I’m told that in the Middle Ages they served as an important form of portable wealth.  So that if a burgher’s house were on fire, he could take down his tapestries, roll them up, and make a run for it.  But why make tapestries now, when we can print large-format images with hallucinogenic clarity? To honor the Queen Margrethe’s 50th birthday in 1990, some Danes commissioned tapestries to wrap the walls of the Great Hall at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, where she receives heads of state.  Based on drawings by artist Bjørn Nørgaard, who’s best-known for conceptual pieces and site sculpture, and executed by centuries-old guilds in France, they were woven by a team of thirty craftspeople over ten years and installed in 2001.  In stark graphics reminiscent of woodblock prints, these seventeen panels tell the history of Denmark and the world.  This panel depicts Margrethe, her consort, and their dogs.  (While the Scandinavian countries are committed to socialist policy, they also care a great deal about their monarchs.)  The panels have a fine, dense needlepoint-like finish and are rendered in eye-popping colors.  While it’s possible to identify each character and scenario within the tapestries, what overwhelms is their dramatic and spatial intensity.  Not one square inch of tapestry is left unoccupied; entire worlds are stuffed inside.  It’s astounding that a tapestry project this ambitious was undertaken so recently, and that it achieves this level of virtuosity. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ive-visited-musuems-that-are-brilliantly monthly 0.5 2012-06-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515101865-GSPPOF7DQBOXNC9BRYHO/tumblr_m5gmdc6M3z1qdm8ato1_r5_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I’ve visited musuems that are brilliantly constructed and curated, but none whose artworks are as perfectly choreographed  – that is, perfectly laid out for display – as the Glyptoteket in Copenhagen.  This museum, which specializes in ancient and modern sculpture, is housed in a stately nineteenth-century building organized around a high, planted atrium.  (The museum’s collection of modern paintings is housed in a contemporary addition whose entrance is slipped so discretely inside that it’s difficult to find and navigate, all especially frustrating since that collection is so impressive.) In the main building, each long, high gallery is painted a different strong, sober color, and lit from unobtrusive clerestories.  The smaller sculptures are gathered together on tables, and the larger sculptures are grouped together in vignettes, and all seem absolutely correct in their disposition.  Each sculpture is placed in just the right spot, facing just the right way, with just the right amount of free space around it.  This makes the museum virtually hypnotic to move through.  Most memorable is the installation of Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais at the end of one ground floor gallery.  Raised a few steps and set off with steely blue walls, the piece is exquisitely framed.  The figures, like most of Rodin’s, are scaled just a bit larger than life, so that they’re imposing without being monstrous.  The museum serves them magnificently; their power shines through. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/scandinavians-are-awfully-cavalier-about-their monthly 0.5 2012-06-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515101869-DTI5QU2Y2SZR32ZUJR0N/tumblr_m5gnjfHUIa1qdm8ato1_r2_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Scandinavians are awfully cavalier about their treasures.  The Munch canvases in Norway’s National Gallery are displayed near rooms with open windows.  (More about the rooms, and the paintings, later.) The Danish crown jewels, on display in the basement of Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, a royal residence from the seventeenth century, are crowded in vitrines that tourists squeeze through and photograph without supervision.  In any other country (which is to say, in the United States), pieces this precious would be secured with armed guards and bulletproof glass in a bunker. While they’re appropriately dazzling, the Danish crown jewels aren’t as formidable as the English or as fairytale-wondrous as the Russian.  By comparison they are, like the security, remarkably informal.  What struck me most was how so many of the designs steer away from abstraction and incorporate flowers and figures.  It gives them a fizzy, Pop-Art sensibility.  There’s a charming chain strung with elephant charms, a small lion bowl, and several pieces with skulls in them.  This seventeenth-century chalice has a porcelain skull with glittering stone eyes.  It’s kooky and Gothic, and calls to mind both Hamlet and Damien Hirst.  The official English-language museum text reassures us that the skull is a symbol of “eternity” rather than mortality.  Graced with diamonds and emeralds and set in gold, with a dramatically flaring base, it possesses a seriousness that so much contemporary skull imagery, which adorns everything from oxford shirts to baby clothes, just doesn’t.  It’s grave. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/one-of-my-traveling-companions-remarked-that monthly 0.5 2012-06-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515102307-UNKP0BHN7HUEOKYITOHG/tumblr_m5gnau5mLs1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY One of my traveling companions remarked that Copenhagen was awfully nice, but that it looked as if they had put the same building everywhere.  He’s right.  There’s a uniformity to the old parts of the city, where all the blocks are built to a six- or seven-story height, with an identical, rather relentless pattern of high, wide windows lined up across long, flat facades.  Yet the feeling isn’t banal: the buildings vary in detail, and are scaled so that they’re solid but not oppressive.  The streets, open to the sky, are relaxed.  The big windows let in daylight, a precious commodity in this part of the world, and their insistent rhythms measure one’s passage through the streets. Of all the tasks an architect needs to contend with, crafting a compelling facade for a city building might be the most difficult.  The street elevation is most often what shapes an image for the building and a character for the city.  Copenhagen offers an important lesson in how simple a good facade can be: it’s just a wall with windows in it. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/after-seeing-a-show-of-contemporary-art-at monthly 0.5 2012-06-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515102907-YIHLL4UV9GAYGVUB4WPY/tumblr_m5nx1o9co51qdm8ato1_r6_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY After seeing a show of contemporary art at Scandinavia House last summer I was disappointed to come away without a better idea of what Scandinavia is.  What I conjured about the place continued to be based on various random associations: long winters, virgin forests, Bjorn Borg, the Villa Mareia, Aga stoves, the movies of Ingmar Bergman, and the magnificent, misanthropic, coffee- and alcohol-swilling character of Kurt Wallander.  This fantasy of Scandinavia was predominantly Swedish.  If one image prevailed, it was the views of Faro at the end of each episode of Scenes from a Marriage, which show a lyrical, desolate island landscape.  The panoramas offer a stripped-down beauty that refreshed after the heated, tangled emotions of the narrative. (There’s a good account of Bergman’s life in Faro in this spread from W Magazine.) Then last month I set off for Scandinavia – the real place, that is – still wanting to know what Scandinavia was.  I accepted the platitudes that it was an orderly culture within a powerful landscape, whose peoples valued socialist politics, good design, and healthy living.  Now, after I’ve returned, I might agree that there is no single, uncomplicated Scandinavia.  Nonetheless what I saw left me with a tangle of new impressions, which follow here. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/last-summer-all-the-lads-were-sporting monthly 0.5 2012-06-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515103313-KJU8AQI62NFB21S5VBZ4/tumblr_m4hfdoabVO1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Last summer all the lads were sporting ribbon-trimmed straw fedoras pulled down low in front, and this year it looks like they’re going to be sporting black porkpies perched at perilous angles.  At a diner I spotted a young man wearing one just like that and it took me right back to the 1980’s, when I was in high school, and, more specifically 1986, when Madonna wore one in the video for Open Your Heart. I can’t tell you how much videos meant to us back then.  We listened to music on the radio and on cassette tapes in our Walkmen.  We saw what artists looked like by reading Creem and watching MTV, whose original mission was to, like, play music.  And I can’t tell you how much Madonna meant to us back then.  It wasn’t all the obvious things she did to provoke – like singing about being a virgin and wearing wedding dress.  It was the way she dressed up and then dressed down and wore too much makeup and transformed herself into the different women she wanted to be: lady, artist, ingenue, whore.  After seeing the videos for Burning Up and Borderline I acquired fishnets, black leggings and an oversized white t-shirt with neon graphics.  I didn’t wear them with the boldness that Madonna did and I couldn’t, as I was a trapped in a Catholic school uniform and my own nice-girl inhibitions.  But I started, tentatively, using clothing to make myself the person I wanted to be. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-was-not-one-of-those-little-girl-who-dreamed-of monthly 0.5 2012-06-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515103508-RRO7HDM4P983F4VGDPMH/tumblr_m4hgq0G4vB1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I was not one of those little girl who dreamed of horses, but after seeing War Horse at Lincoln Center I might very well become one.  The primary enchantment of the production is the life-size horse puppets, made by Handspring Puppet Company, used to depict the title character, Joey, as he is raised on a farm in the English countryside and moves with a cavalry troop through the battles of World War I.  Each puppet is managed by three actors: two crouched inside the torso moving its legs, and one standing outside, in front, moving its head and mane.  There’s no attempt to camouflage the actors against the dark stage; they’re dressed like farm hands in boots, caps and suspenders, and move about just as freely as the actors portraying the other (far less compelling) human characters.   Yet a minute or so after the curtain rises all you see are the horses, which whinny, stomp, rear, and roam around with all the impetuous majesty of real horses.  You just don’t care about anything else. While the production credits the horses as puppets, that word doesn’t feel entirely adequate.  They are brought to life (really, they seem alive) by the transparent work of some very skilled actors, yet they’re not as passive, as inert, as conventional puppets are.  Instead, in their condensed, calligraphic movements, they summon something like the essence of horse. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-product-at-icff-that-gave-me-the-most-pleasure monthly 0.5 2012-05-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515104204-04Q6YQNPAXDOYQ1B6TJN/tumblr_m4hayf77zM1qdm8ato1_r5_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The product at ICFF that gave me the most pleasure was a silly one: a fussball table by R S Barcelona with teams of female players.  Very early in the morning, after a tortuous trip from home that included three subway transfers and a descent into the basement of the Javitz Center, it made me smile.  The table comes in different candy-colored metal enamel finishes, all far too pretty for a bar.  Their bright sheen drew me in and then, a full minute later, I realized what was really going on. There’s nothing feminist about the table and nothing revolutionary about it either.  It’s all in the service of the same rather dumb parlor game and time-waste.  But it’s refreshing to see female figure primed for action rather than dress-up, and it’s reassuring that the table is from Spain.  In America the likeness of a female fussball team would most likely have been implemented (and then interpreted) in the spirit of Title IX.  My image of Spanish womanhood had always been the eye-popping, overdressed Madrilenas in Pedro Almodovar films.  This toy throws a new figure into the mix. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-saw-a-young-man-at-this-years-international monthly 0.5 2012-05-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515104005-CYKGDDWONGIJTWO0Z20G/tumblr_m4heloEXzJ1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I saw a young man at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) ride a bike through it, and it struck me that he had exactly the right idea.  This year’s show is significantly smaller than it’s been in previous years, but it still fills the entire lower level of the Javitz Center.  The show is usually fun to walk through, and each new booth has the potential to surprise and delight.  But this year I spent just an hour on the floor and then took a seat while my friend finished her viewing.  The show felt like an endless array of the same handful of products: artisinal wood tables, artisinal hand-blown glass lamps, and artisinal wallcoverings. I’m all for a return to craft, sustainable materials, and small-scale fabrication.  But most of the artisinal-minded products at ICFF are too obsessively designed and machined to be authentically artisinal, or even artsy.  Their one-off hand-finished look is just an aesthetic.  It’s obvious that behind the reclaimed materials and artfully irregular finishes, highly ambitious trained designers (frustrated architects, perhaps?) are at work.  The rage for handmade stuff has already been parodied, lovingly, by the iconic Put a Bird On it! skit on Portlandia.  What’s the limit to the number of artisinal products the market can bear?  Isn’t it just a matter of time before the sensibility, like all other trends, falls out of fashion? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/pairing-miuccia-prada-and-elsa-schiaparelli-as monthly 0.5 2012-05-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515104317-VK4ZSOG84CI2VNEW328V/tumblr_m40w2aRMSd1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Pairing Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli, as the Met has for this year’s Costume Institute blockbuster, doesn’t serve either designer well.  Prada’s work, especially, would have benefited from a different context, perhaps that of the fabled brand’s history, which is also her family history.  Miuccia’s grandfather Mario started the company in in Milano in 1913, with a shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II that sold handbags, suitcases and other small leather goods.  That store is still there, with its lovely Victorian trappings: a checkerboard stone floor, utilitarian steel racks, and P-R-A-D-A spelled out in gold foil on the glass. It was Miuccia Prada who oversaw the brand’s (brilliant) expansion from accessories to shoes and then ready-to-wear in the 1980’s.  Prada never, however, entirely shook off its identity as an accessories brand.  The shoes and bags have become iconic, deeply desired by both those who know fashion and those who don’t.  On a deeper level, there’s a raw physicality to the brand’s products, even the clothing, that hearkens back to its workmanlike origins.  Most of the garments on display at the Met possess a heavy, hearty sense of fabrication.  There are simple A-line skirts (Is Miuccia Prada the Stradivarius of the A-line skirt?) layered with shards of mirrors, fake jewels, plastic baubles, leather cut-outs, rivets, rings, and paillettes.  These embellishments are all slightly oversized –they’re more than just ornaments – and fastened with visible stitching and hardware.  There’s in the pieces great inventiveness and freedom; they really do, as Miuccia says she intended, stretch the boundaries of good clothing.  But there’s also in them, embedded, the image of her grandfather leaning over his work bench, making things with his hands. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/one-thinks-of-elsa-schiaparelli-as-a-wit-more-than monthly 0.5 2012-05-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515104419-2SYSPHBD6R6OHUZV7Y8B/tumblr_m40ufnnJfz1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY One thinks of Elsa Schiaparelli as a wit more than an artist.  What pops to mind first are the shoe hat, the lobster gown, and the seed packet dress, creations that are more like one-liners than clothes.  What becomes apparent when seeing her work up close, as it’s possible to at the Met’s new exhibit Impossible Conversations, is that she was, also, an impeccable seamstress.  The dinner jackets are fitted and fastened with armor-like severity, and the floor-length gowns are draped asymmetrically, on the bias, with a sumptuous, casual mastery.  Without wit – without any ideas at all – the finesse of Schiaparelli’s cutting and draping would assure her reputation. The Met exhibit pairs Schiaparelli with another great Italian fashion designer, Miuccia Prada, and is framed as a series of dialogues between the two.  Throughout the galleries there are video monitors showing the two great ladies chatting with one another in a special film by Baz Luhrmann.  Prada portrays herself, admirably, and actress Judy Davis portrays Schiaparelli with campy excess.  The fineness of the garments on display show up Davis’ portrayal.  (They also, unhappily, show up most of the Prada garments.)  On a mannequin encased in a full-height vitrine, Schiaparelli’s silk lipstick-printed gown looks less like a piece of clothing than a delicate, palpitating, creature.  It’s as if it were born rather than made.  All the cerebral references – to surrealism, to popular culture, to women’s roles – are rendered irrelevant.  When it comes right down to it, Schiaparelli knew how to make a dress. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/mies-steel-dream-hotel monthly 0.5 2012-05-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515104805-KU6NP9AYI6MXD4P0WLIG/tumblr_m3olcvpYOR1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY 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. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/at-the-checkout-at-the-indian-grocery-im-always monthly 0.5 2012-05-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515105281-IIBU5AFBSUK1LW49PDHB/tumblr_m3x4p3uzft1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY 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. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/a-friend-gave-me-a-bouquet-of-candy-colored-pink monthly 0.5 2012-05-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515105713-DVR7W6TTJJI39EHN06LV/tumblr_m3x43vLLHo1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY 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. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/guggenheim-john-chamberlain-sculpture monthly 0.5 2012-05-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515105511-FR3GPZ06ZXHXZ93WQBXH/tumblr_m3x3goandM1qdm8ato1_r5_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY 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. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/renzo-piano-has-become-our-go-to-architect-for monthly 0.5 2012-04-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515106322-4XRFG9Y44IT5TI6OZIG4/tumblr_m2y8atj8OJ1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Renzo Piano has become our go-to architect for museums.  He designed the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1977 with former partners Richard Rice and Richard Rogers and then, solo, the Menil Collection and additions to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art.  The Pompidou Center is a singular piece of work, but the others are tasteful, intelligent and unobtrusive structures that generally stay out of the way of the artwork.  So nothing prepared me for the power of Piano’s addition to the Morgan Library, which opened in 2006 but I saw for the first time last week.  I’ve passed its discrete, metal-clad entrance on Madison Avenue countless times and simply walked on by, so unprepossessing did it seem from the sidewalk. But the interior is commanding, a place where pristine cartesian space rules.  Piano’s addition, which serves as a lobby and cafe, connects three existing Morgan buildings, including the original Charles Mckim-designed museum from 1903.  Piano imagined the new building as a perfect cube and there’s a a geometric rigor in its details and construction as well as its proportions.  This modest glass box (it’s only about about eighteen feet high) gave me more pleasure than any other modern building I’ve visited in New York City.  My favorite parts are the framelesss glass elevator cabs (they’re also cubes) that rise and fall musically, and seemingly effortlessly, on exposed pistons.  American architects continually grumble that their clients prefer traditional styles and that their contractors can’t build finely.  This building shows otherwise. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/a-new-play-seven-homeless-mammoths-wander-new monthly 0.5 2012-04-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515106707-FM4NZ31UHBEHC6V8FQL8/tumblr_m2ya1jXBkz1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A new play, Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, takes the controversial closing of the Natural History Museum at Amherst College in 2001 as its subject.  That neat, brick box, called the Appleton Cabinet, was subsequently converted into luxe student dorms.  In the play the woolly mammoth skeletons that reside inside serve as emblems of historical time, personal evolution, and our own artfully-concealed yet always-stirring animal natures.  When I attended a reading of the play I had no real scientific knowledge of woolly mammoths and also a surprisingly clear image of them.  I pictured them as clumsy, plundering beasts that made their home in snowy nether regions. What was missing from my vision were the animal’s most salient feature, their enormous, gravity-defying, corkscrew-twisted tusks.  Our images of woolly mammoths are fantasies, not so different in their speculation than our images of unicorns and mermaids.  In dioramas the woollies are typically depicted as friendly, hairy elephants, and in scientific illustrations as noble monsters.  My favorite image might be the skeletons themselves, which make them seem like big horses with fancy tusks.  It’s a happy fantasy. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-came-of-age-and-came-to-new-york-before-sex-and monthly 0.5 2012-04-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515106809-3HTDF2JN8X7H3I17UW9P/tumblr_m2y6kh6dfK1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I came of age and came to New York before Sex and the City, so I was spared the ungodly standards of glamor that show established.  SATC inspired a whole generation of young women to move here and run around in super-high heels and super-expensive clothes.  That’s one kind of fabulous, to be sure, but for me the deep glamor of the city lies elsewhere: in street life, in slang, and in the secret spaces of the city. I’ve attended line-ups at a midtown precinct, a runway show at Lincoln Center, play-off games at Shea and Yankee Stadiums, a two-dollar burlesque revue at a basement lounge in the Village, and a Star Wars themed party on an East Harlem rooftop.  Each time I felt that I was in a privileged place very close to the heart of the city, as I did again last month at a cocktail reception on the forty-fourth floor of Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower in midtown.  From photographs and firsthand accounts I knew all about the building’s skewed feng shui escalator, the deafening lobby waterfall, and the look-at-me diamond-patterned exoskeleton, but nothing prepared me for the awesome urban glamor of the event space.  To the north there was the entire spread of Central Park, unfurled like the map of a medieval kingdom.  To the south there were the blocks of the west side, lit up with a phosphorescent glow.  The space wasn’t huge but the canted columns and glass made it feel, somehow, as if we were not enclosed, as if we were floating free above the city.  That felt pretty spectacular. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/its-hard-work-being-modern-and-it-must-have-been monthly 0.5 2012-04-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515107745-ETVXBICDSX6Z9XVPPQQD/tumblr_m2jvhfMsUy1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY It’s hard work being modern, and it must have been especially so for the Steins.  Siblings Gertrude, Michael and Leo were middle-class Americans, heirs to a modest fortune, who moved to Paris at the turn of the twentieth century determined to find the future.  They attended exhibitions, held salons, and amassed an astounding collection of early modern paintings by Matisse, Picasso and their contemporaries that’s on view now at the Met.  Then, as a kind of coup de grace, the Steins commissioned what might be the most modern house ever, the Villa Garches by Le Corbusier. Tucked deep inside the exhibit, in the corner of a small gallery, there’s a one-minute loop of vintage black and white film footage documenting the house.  The clips (like everybody’s home movies, they’re tilted, jittery and out-of-focus) show kids running around in the yard and adults parading about in their finery rather than the house itself, which looks like a big, white spaceship that just landed behind them.  The house still looks terrifically modern, a complex, idealized concoction of planes, ramps and ribbon windows.  In the film footage the Steins, wearing heavy wools, hose and hats, look like Victorians lost in a future that’s not their own.  Their foresight and fearlessness is remarkable. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/though-i-dont-speak-italian-the-word-brutto monthly 0.5 2012-04-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515107118-V7QL35UEO111A7QW6130/tumblr_m2jte7xi9P1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Though I don’t speak Italian, the word brutto popped into my head as I was walking through Carlos Scarpa: The Architect at Work, an exhibit of his drawings at Cooper Union.  These aren’t drawings to frame and hang in the living room like Frank Gehry’s lyrical doodles.  These are, as the title suggests, documents Scarpa is using to hammer out geometries, proportions and details for two projects he completed in the 1980’s near the end of his life: Villa Ottolenghi and Villa Il Palazzetto. Scarpa is an architect’s architect, so I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I don’t care for the work of his that I’ve seen in photographs.  His buildings have an obtuse physical expressiveness that overwhelms spatial clarity.  Why does every column, door handle, and water spout (the architect is from Venice and often incorporates water elements), need to be so highly particular?  But I was charmed by the drawings at Cooper, which are both precise and dreamy.  Scarpa isn’t drawing to show what each house will look like but to determine what it will be.  He drafts construction lines with a hard, fine pencil and then fleshes them out with shading, color-coding, notes, and numbers.  The sheets have a sodden quality; they’re thick with work and thought. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/django-unchained-quentin-tarantino monthly 0.5 2012-04-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515107612-QJK3VOMTO7W3THV57UDT/tumblr_m2jxdcUQpM1qdm8ato1_r4_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY An official poster for Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming slave saga Django Unchained was just released.  It’s a bold graphic, in red and black, reminiscent of constructivist, primitivist, and mid-century modern aesthetics, and particularly, as others have observed, Saul Bass’ work.  But the text on the new poster is isolated and terribly buttoned-up; it looks more like a caption than a title.  The imagery doesn’t soft-pedal the theme, but it lacks the kooky emotionalism of some of the unofficial fanboy posters that have been circulating online.  I want so much to see a hand at the top shaking the chain, like the hand in posters for The Godfather. It’s a shame the designers didn’t try to incorporate Tarantino’s handwriting, which resembles that of an obsessive, over-stimulated, ten-year-old boy.  I’ve been smitten since seeing the title page he crafted for the final draft of Inglourious Basterds, where he draws S’s like those in the Kiss logo.  His hand, with its sloping, bloated block letters, looks like a serial killer’s, and yet there’s real tenderness in it.  Look at the tenuous closing of the capital G in the Django poster and the tiny, trembling quotation marks.  It’s a rich graphic. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/normal-foster-warehouse-swindon monthly 0.5 2012-04-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515108015-5W4O4J4YXT4OA4711D0X/tumblr_m1ts7b0Aw61qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Architect and critic Witold Rybczynski spoke recently about one of Norman Foster’s first works, the Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts in Anglia, Norwich, which he’s just written a book about.  While Rybczynski didn’t have anything particularly resonant to say about that building, he did a brilliant job of introducing Foster to the audience.  To do so he showed slides of the Reliance Reliance Controls Factory in Swindon, England, a project Foster had completed just a few years earlier in 1967, in collaboration with his classmate Richard Rogers. Foster’s first commissions were for warehouses and industrial buildings, which makes perfect sense, because his work is all about magnificent shells.  He seems much more concerned with external structures than interior worlds, and yet the structures he devises often make splendid interiors.  It’s easy to lampoon his recent work.  The London Gherkin and the Hearst Tower in New York are better-known as emblems of urban ostentation than as architecture.  But when looking at photos of the Reliance building it’s easy to see what Foster’s interests are and where his work is headed.  These structures are banal syntactically, close to vernacular forms except for their exposed tie rods and attenuated, unperturbed horizontal proportions.  (They were razed in 1990 to make room for a big box computer store.)  They are super-fine sheds. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/rosamond-bernier-picasso-memoir monthly 0.5 2012-04-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515107923-UC5JOA3VIMNGPBQA8BHM/tumblr_m1tn0lEnSD1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Rosamond Bernier went to Paris the same way that Isak Dinesen went to Africa, with crazy dreams in her head.  Both of these privileged, high-spirited ladies got up and moved far away from home, throwing off conventions that might have held them in check had they just stayed put.  And both of them, in between their adventures, wrote.  Traveling to Paris after the war to serve as a European cultural editor for Vogue, Bernier fell right in with Picasso, Matisse, Miro and other art stars, started the magazine L’Oiel, and then returned stateside triumphantly, writing art history books and lecturing at the Met. Today, at ninetey-five, Bernier retains an aura of glamor.  She wears couture separates, grooms herself regally, and walks with the assistance of a handsome young escort.  She spoke in New York recently to promote her latest book, Some of My Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir.  As slides flashed on the screen she offered up gossip about her brilliant friends.  Before meeting Picasso, she remembered, her publisher advised, “Whatever you do, don’t wear a hat and don’t ask any questions.”  Those words served her well.  The great painter made her a confidante and granted her exclusive access to some of his work.  Bernier lives life big.  When she married her third husband, art critic John Russell, at the Glass House in Darien, Aaron Copland was the best man, Leonard Bernstein was a witness, Richard Avedon was the photographer, and Philip Johnson was in attendance.  Looking back at it all and summing it up, she said,  “I made terrible mistakes and had a marvelous time.”  There has got to be some wisdom in that. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/fenway-park-stadium-moneyball monthly 0.5 2012-04-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515108140-HI7YQDNG30RK1BR7KQQH/tumblr_m1tncuXjYG1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY In 2002 Red Sox owner John W. Henry invited A’s General Manager Billy Beane to lunch and made him an offer that he couldn’t refuse, but did.  As as preamble Henry led Beane through the august stands at Fenway Park, a scene that’s recreated gorgeously in the movie Moneyball.  We see the men strolling through the empty stadium in the rain under a big umbrella, like young lovers in Paris.  (In the movie Beane is played by Brad Pitt and is, unbelievably, single.)  Beane turns down the Red Sox and their 12.5M offer, but remains appropriately enchanted.  He says, “It’s impossible not to feel romantic about baseball.” Well it’s impossible not to feel romantic about Fenway Park.  The little wood seats, the great green fence, and the lopsided, low-lying field shape what might be the most singular sports venue in the country.  If the old Yankee Stadium felt like it was raised in the sky, and the old Shea Stadium felt like it had been dropped in a parking lot, then Fenway Park feels like it’s embedded in the earth, as if it’s geological.  A great deal of its charm comes from the outrageous and also, somehow, gentle irregularities of the field, especially the way Landsdowne Street tears through the stands and clips left field.  The resulting asymmetries leave spectators feeling as if they’re steeped in the realities of history and the city rather than detached, omniscient spectators, as they do at some of the new stadiums.  Fenway, instead, makes a peculiar picturesque. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/folding-chair-flux-gehry monthly 0.5 2012-04-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515109115-UQWS6IC697Y2L6YP5QI0/tumblr_m1yg74jkMe1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY How many lectures and receptions have been made more insufferable than they really are by folding chairs?  Regardless of the locale, a painted aluminum folding chair sends the message This event is not fancy and neither are you.  The Flux folding chair sends an altogether different message.  It certainly doesn’t look like a folding chair.  Instead it resembles an origami zoo animal, the blossom of some hothouse flower, and, a little bit, Frank Gehry’s Flintstones-style molded plastic furniture.  It certainly doesn’t feel like a folding chair.  It’s made from a stiff grade of plastic that offers a sturdy seat, and its boxy base gives it a substantial mass.  This folding chair sends the message on over and take a seat. At the design fair where I first saw them, Flux had secured an unadorned corner booth and crowded it with white chairs.  A tired-looking woman, thinking it was a cafe, came over and took a seat.  The product rep cheerfully brushed aside her coffee order and seized the occasion to demonstrate how the chair folded, simply, into a flat package the size of a card table, and to explain how it could be slipped into the trunk of a car, underneath a bed, and into a closet.  The woman closed her eyes and waved him away, which made it clear that the chair had passed the greatest test of all.  She simply didn’t want to get up out of it. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/google-mies-van-der-rohe monthly 0.5 2012-04-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515109007-30SKJGJ7SERL8ZSZ7WT4/tumblr_m1tqlmnvp21qdm8ato1_r2_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The folks over at Google have far-ranging obsessions, something reflected in the unique splash pages they create every month or so to celebrate anniversaries and events.  Some of these graphics, which are called, officially, “doodles,” are enlightening (Heinrich Rudolf Hertz’s 155th Birthday), some are super cool (Freddy Mercury’s 65th Birthday) and some, in their unabashed obscurity, baffling (300th Anniversary of Spain’s National Library).  Commemorating the 126th Birthday of Mies van der Rohe last week seemed like a perfect idea. But when I saw the Mies doodle online I groaned inwardly, and then outwardly.  The cartoon showed the crayon-colored Google letters stuffed inside a long glass box that’s loosely modeled after Crown Hall at IIT, an icon of postwar American architecture.  The doodle, with its flattened proportions and heavy mullions, inadvertently mocked the refinement and luxe of the great architect’s work.  Mies never would have crafted a volume so bluntly inert and opaque.  It’s especially disappointing because the default Google splash page, with it’s super-clean, super-clear configuration, might be the most brilliant page on internet.  (Compare it to the aspatial clutter of the Bing splash page.)  If Google is going to invoke the memory of a master like Mies they need to come up with similarly disciplined graphics.  Their 2008 doodle celebrating the 125th birthday of his contemporary Walter Gropius – each of the Google letters rendered as a cubish, International Style bungalow – was clunky, but so was Gropius’ work.   Mies, on the other hand, was snobbish about form.  He would have taken one look at his doodle and refused it. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/queen-elizabeth-stamp-rug monthly 0.5 2012-03-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515109420-NJYXA6BGKCGLVATRNNLT/tumblr_m1cvytHhhV1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Sometimes designers take on problems that are very, very big, and sometimes designers take on problems that are very, very small.  When I saw Stamp Rugs, which are designed, very simply, to resemble Royal Mail postage stamps commemorating Queen Elizabeth II, I couldn’t help but feel that the brand’s designers had done something small just right.  They took one idea and executed it perfectly. These candy-colored rugs, lining the walls of a small booth at the AD Home Design Show,  lit up the place.  Unlike a lot of the other goods being peddled there, high-tech and high-minded luxury goods, the rugs were lighthearted.  Their blooming colors mirrored the lovely, unexpected, spring weather that had just arrived in the city.  It takes just an instant to see the rugs and “get it” and yet they’re not kitsch.  They’re hand-woven from wool and have rich textures and irregularities that come to life as you look at them closely.  In their absolute clarity of intention – making rugs that reproduce postage stamps featuring the Queen of England – the rugs honor that lady perfectly. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/digital-photography-lytro monthly 0.5 2012-03-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515110074-XGQF3DDWPJGEKZSRB8MA/tumblr_m13y1cbz5Y1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Is it the end of photography?  Earlier this year Kodak declared bankruptcy.  Then a few weeks later the start-up Lytro began shipping its new new digital image-making device that is not, according to press copy, a camera.  It certainly doesn’t look like a camera.  Most point and shoot (P&S) digitals mimic point and shoot film cameras, which have oblong bodies to accommodate the spooling of a film roll.  The Lytro does away with that anachronism.  Its slim profile resembles that of a slide viewer, a photographer’s magnifier, or a one-eyed View-Master more than a digital camera, and it uses a square image format like a Polaroid.  It stirs up instant nostalgia for old-fashioned photography. The Lytro doesn’t catch images on a single curved plane, like the lens of a conventional camera, but catches an entire “field of light,” so that you can point and shoot without focusing and then adjust the image for resolution later, on the device’s 1 ½" x 1 ½" touch-screen, or with software on the computer.  The Lytro-produced images on the company’s website all dramatize the contrast between foreground and middle ground, obliterating elements in the distance.  The device takes in a very small part of the world and gives it a funky, fish-eye artsiness.  The images are distinctive but they look like they could have bee produced with a PhotoShop effect or a mobile phone app.  They’re digital photographs, just a little bit twisted. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/wang-shu-pritzker-china monthly 0.5 2012-03-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515109824-O2QHPW3N766FAG20PGSC/tumblr_m13xydLZ621qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY It was bound to happen.  Last month the Pritzker Prize committee named Wang Shu as their 2012 laureate, making him the first Chinese architect to receive the honor.  I took a closer look at his work researching another piece, and was impressed with what I saw.  Shu is well-known for building with materials salvaged from demolition sites, a practice that gives his structures an extraordinary tectonic presence.  He incorporated rubble into the immense, canted walls of this textile museum in Ningbo, so that they seem to emerge naturally out of the earth. For a long time western architects have understood mainland China as a culture that will simply copy European and North American models of design and construction.  And we  often look to China (and Russia, South America and India too) less as a place or a culture than as a lucrative, practically limitless new market our own work.  A feature in this Sunday’s Times Magazine called “Building the American Dream in China” is typical.  It focuses on the professional opportunities in China for American architects, mostly young, inexperienced ones who can’t find work here.  After Shu’s Pritzker, hopefully, we’ll be looking more astutely now at what’s being built in China.  The new architecture might be one that’s true to place and time, with lessons for everyone. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/bilbao-gehry-marilyn-muschamp monthly 0.5 2012-03-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515110392-B4EMV9LGPJHCARY53B0D/tumblr_m13v0ldRlE1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY There was a summit of architecture critics last week to launch Alexandra Lange’s new book Writing About Architecture.  Julie Iovine scored points early on, when she said that good writing mattered far more than good criticism.  She read extraordinary passages from Reyner Banham and Esther McCoy out loud, which landed those authors on my must-read list.  Then she lost points at the end when she said that architects can’t write, a generalization that hits awfully close to home.  The emotional highlight was when Lange read a famous excerpt from the late Herbert Muschamp’s 1997 New York Times Magazine cover story on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao.  In the passage, which was even excerpted in the writer’s obituary, Muschamp describes returning to his hotel room at Bilbao, seeing a woman in a white dress on the street below, and, all at once, understanding something vital about the building.  He writes, “[T]he building I’d just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe."  Fifteen years later the panelists still found the reference "galling” (Iovine’s word) and rattled on about the eccentricities of the writing, including its stupendous length, starchitect worship, hyperbole, and mythopoetic prose. Their stony reactions sent me back to the original text, in which Muschamp follows the Marilyn reference with this lucid perception: “What twins the actress and the building in my memory is that both of them stand for an American style of freedom. That style is voluptuous, emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material, mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child… "  Muschamp’s essay is, in addition to a hagiography of Gehry and a critical account of the building, an attempt to understand architecture as a popular culture and to claim, for just one moment, in a tumbling world order, an American cultural victory.  It’s rich and magnificent overwriting, which often happens when a serious writer tackles a subject that matters dearly to him.  Here the building seems too big for the writing, even Muschamp’s writing, and remains, somehow, just out of reach.  The heated language makes it clear that Muschamp loves architecture, something that’s not so clear about the critics on the panel. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/bill-cunningham-street-fashion monthly 0.5 2012-03-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515110406-D4LLYRIVPCAF9TD9H4YQ/tumblr_m101tlVVWp1qdm8ato1_r3_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY In the documentary that celebrates his career covering street fashion and social events for the New York Times, photographer Bill Cunningham hits the nail right on the head, explaining, “Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life."  I doubt that any designer, theorist or fashionista could put it better.  Cunningham has spent more than thirty years taking pictures of New Yorkers and what they wear, most of it from his customary haunt at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue.  I spotted him once years ago at Bryant Park on the first dazzlingly warm day of spring.  Women had broken out their sundresses and sandals and men had rolled back their sleeves, and the photographer was jumping around them like a kid on Christmas morning, trying to take it all in. Cunningham has the highest respect for well-bred ladies who dress relentlessy to type – like Lee Radziwill and the late Brooke Astor – and for eccentrics who dress relentlessly to shock and delight – like Anna Piaggi.  For someone with such a refined fashion eye, however, he’s outstandingly modest in his own dress.  He wears a uniform of Ordinary Guy separates with a cobalt blue French worker’s jacket, the kind worn by sanitation workers.  Cunningham likes the jackets, which he buys in bulk from a hardware store in Paris, because of their pockets.  Along with the bike he tools around on, the blue jacket has become his emblem.  Of course there are designer versions around, some precious and some less so.  Junya Watanabe even collaborated on a version with L'abourer (a French heritage brand something like Barbour) for Comme des Garcons.  But these high-fashion interpretations miss the point.  Cunningham’s looks is so brilliant because it’s distilled and unchanging.  He knows exactly who he is and doesn’t care what anyone thinks. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/fantasy-architecture-alvernia-studios monthly 0.5 2012-03-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515110819-Q7C8GKPANMZCVEQ3YAW5/tumblr_m0qkfxSsli1qdm8ato1_r1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY An architect I admire describes the discipline as “a negotiation between different desires."  The hardest part of it, I think, is to honor both the dreams in one’s head and the realities of construction.  Well-known architects who can perform this trick include Zaha Hadid and Herzog and de Meuron, who build museums and fire stations and soccer stadiums that are also shimmering, magical things.  These are buildings forged in the flames of creativity and bent purposefully to program.  But there’s something to be said for architects who just take a vision and run with it, however impractical, improbable and expensive its execution is.  Alvernia Studios outside of Krakow, Poland, where Radiohead guitarist and composer Johnny Greenwood is recording new symphonic work, is one of those buildings. Although there’s no architect of record, we know the studio was built by businessman Stanisław Tyczyński in the style of H. R. Giger, the Swiss visionary who designed the effects and sets for the Alien movies.  It is, essentially, an array of huge metal half-domes linked by raised tubular glass walkways.  The studio interiors look just like those of the Alien spaceship, encrusted with eery futuristic, biomorphic, Gothic embellishments.  It’s all especially impressive because these are film and sound stages; they don’t need have to have any kind of identity of all.  A bunch of big cinder block sheds would have done the trick, but someone (the client, most likely) dreamt this up and made it so.  It’s an entirely uncompromised architecture. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/cartoon-architecture-jimenez-lai monthly 0.5 2012-03-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515112521-NMO6WXXD94HQEIRWP29T/tumblr_m0fqqvOqFn1qdm8ato1_r3_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Jimenez Lai, the young architect and academic who heads Chicago office Bureau Spectacular, spoke recently at SVA about “Cartoonish Architecture."  Lai makes striking monochrome cartoons that explore the narratives and personalities of buildings.  The cartoons are, in their lyricism, economy, and sincerity, quite powerful.  Lai has also completed a number of architectural installations, with another one planned for the fall.  He described his own work, unabashedly, as "paper architecture,” and said that that he was working hard to get all of his ideas from drawings into architecture. There’s a long, fine tradition of paper architecture, from neoclassicists like Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Étienne-Louis Boullée to contemporaries like Lebbeus Woods and Raimund Abraham.  Their work seems to swing between two poles: the geometrically idealizing and the apocalyptically ominous.  More than they’re drawing buildings, these paper architects are drawing new worlds.  Lai’s cartoons are smaller-scaled and gentler.  They remind me of Archigram’s happily futuristic renderings and Madelon Vreisendorp’s funny, lovely illustrations in Delirious New York.  There is so much pleasure and grace in Lai’s graphic style.  One part of me wonders what sort of architecture they will inspire, and another part of me thinks they don’t need to become architecture at all. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/cindy-sherman-moma-photography monthly 0.5 2012-03-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515111404-94H32NPGC04QP7G3E6P7/tumblr_m0flf2TIXt1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A young woman at the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA missed the point rather badly, observing about the artist, “She’s pretty.  Why does she do all of this?"  Sherman has made a career of dressing up in costumes, makeup and wigs and then photographing herself.  One one level her project is about how superficial social identity is, and specifically about how women are so often called upon to be something that they’re essentially not.  But the seductive quality of her work makes it difficult to categorize simply as feminist or media art.  I look at these pictures and fall right into them. It was stunning to see Sherman’s small black and white photographs from the late 1970’s, film stills, mounted together in groups.  When seen one-at-a-time in magazines and online, each one has a smart, iconic presence.  But when seen en masse their artifice is apparent, and it’s at odds with their poignancy.  The women pictured in them, observed without their knowledge, are psychically and physically vulnerable.  They fall into recognizable feminine archetypes (abandoned, ambitious, ruined, hunting) but also arouse sympathy.  (Sherman’s later works, when she’s disguised so elaborately or pointedly that no part of herself shows through, don’t have the same emotionalism.)  Sherman strikes an even finer balance between honesty and artifice in her color photographs from the early 1980’s, the rear projection series.  The washed-out stock image backdrops, and the absence of shadows connecting her figure to the scene, give them a special ambiguity.  These are alluringly incomplete tableaux, without a middle ground and without a simple explanation.  Who is this lady, where is she going, and what’s troubling her?  With simple means, the pictures harbor mysteries. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/architect-role-changing monthly 0.5 2012-03-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515111732-C4XDYQDZ4WPZ2CCUD4FN/tumblr_m0qmu8QlZG1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Last week I had a charged discussion with a friend, also an architect, about the future of our profession.  She’s an expert in sustainable construction and feels that as fuel prices rise, the need to remodel existing structures for energy-efficiency will furnish an important new stream of work.  I tend to be more of a doomsayer, and see years more of rough going.  The conversation left me rattled.  While we have different viewpoints, specialties, and lifestyles, we could both agree that economic instability and climate change are reshaping the profession.  After the dust settles, architecture will not be the same. What bothers me most deeply, which I wasn’t able to articulate during our discussion, is that the traditional role of the architect, to shape form and make place, is at risk.  I’m not invested at all in the identity of the architect; I don’t need to play the part.  But constructing buildings is a primal act, like making music or telling stories or preparing food.  I was stunned when I reread Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture last year because so much of what the Roman architect discussed more than two thousand years ago is still pertinent, like siting, orientation, scale, and proportions.  Architecture has been around for a long, long time.  And if architecture suddenly becomes something else, like super-insulating existing structures or remodeling kitchens or securing building permits or creating backdrops for video games, then who will shape form and make place?  At one of my first architecture jobs my boss took me with her to a rural job site.  She stepped forward, waved her arm in the air, and described the building she imagined there – she simply conjured it.  Isn’t this what architects do? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/modern-dance-jodi-melnick monthly 0.5 2012-03-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515112018-6XQ78YND81CQJGBLFQ27/tumblr_m0qq4q4zKA1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY At a discussion before the premiere of two new works by Jodi Melnick, fellow dancer and choreographer Kyle Bukhari proposed that Melnick’s dance was a form “between writing and speaking,” which blew my mind and also made perfect sense.  The two dances she presented, Solo, Delux Version (choreographed in collaboration with Trisha Brown) and One of Sixty-five Thousand Gestures, reflect her unique style, which some of her colleagues there characterized, with admiration, as one that combines precision and force.  These qualities, when coupled with her lithe, almost spectral physicality, make her a remarkable presence. The postures Melnick captures have the specificity of letters in an alphabet, and her movements have the mesmeric, fluttering quality of an old-fashioned train station destination board.  But I can’t help understanding these two dances, and dance in general, as a form of theater, and the movements of the body as drama.  The image I’ll take from me is one from early in Gestures, when Melnick, dressed in khaki cargo pants and a silver foil hoodie, lies on the stage and drags herself across it, from front to back, lit by acid-yellow footlights.  I imagine she’s somewhere very remote – on the cratered surface of the moon or deep in the desert.  There’s heroism in each inch she creeps forward and fear in the solitude.  Suddenly Melnick stops, lifts her torso off the ground and reaches far forward with one arm, for something or someone she will never reach.  At this moment the dance doesn’t seem like a form of language but like something wilder and greater, something that can’t be fit into language.  If Melnick’s choreography lies between writing and speech, her performance exceeds them. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/moma-yoshio-taniguchi-museums monthly 0.5 2012-03-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515112432-BJKTM657X04364657GSB/tumblr_m0fo6b2rSy1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The old Philip Goodwin- and Edward Durell Stone-designed MoMA was my first museum.  I visited from high school through college and can still dream-walk my way through, conjuring many of the famous works in exactly the spots where they were displayed.  When it reopened in 2004, after a highly sophisticated expansion by Yoshio Taniguchi, I couldn’t bear the bigger, noisier place, with its airport terminal acoustics, listless crowds, and enormous, empty central hall, the Marron Atrium.  I stayed away, mostly.  Now, eight years later, I’ve come around. What happened?  I stopped thinking of the place as one museum but as many museums, all glued together by that court.  Last week, with limited time, I ran inside to see one specific exhibit and then back out again.  As I was riding down the escalators I realized that the  museum was like an airport terminal, a good one, leading a visitor to and from one gallery, and not necessarily through all of its galleries at once.  Seeing the new, expanded MoMA requires strategy; you go to the sixth floor to see the blockbuster, to the third floor to see design, or to the fourth or fifth floors to browse the permanent collection.  The place can’t be taken it all at once, as the older MoMA might have been.  Before leaving I walked through the court, where there was some sort of politically-charged sculptural installation, and luxuriated in the great, fat void that it cuts, perversely, through the middle of the museum and the middle of midtown.  After Marina Abramowic’ performance and then Yoko Ono’s installation there last year, that space has a history of its own; it reverberates.  In 2005, MoMA mounted an exhibit of Tanagachi’s work called Nine Museums.  That might be a perfect title for the current museum. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/peter-eisenman-architecture-theory monthly 0.5 2012-03-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515112679-R508NWRBJROVVP2U5E86/tumblr_m0fjosSnL21qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I went to hear starchitect-gadfly Peter Eisenman in discussion with Catherine Ingraham at Pratt and arrived a few minutes late, after the hall was full.  Three burly, uniformed guards explained the situation and asked to me wait in line to be admitted.  (This, the security detail, impressed me much more than it should have.)  After twenty minutes I was ushered into a classroom full of fashionable, sleep-deprived architecture students.  There was a video monitor with a live broadcast of the event, showing murky, slow-moving images of the two speakers and their slides.  Eisenman and Ingraham spoke about “autonomy” and “contingency” in form, and then about “speculative realism,” a notion Eisenman dismissed heartily.  Then the architect told a terrific story about meeting a donor for the Wexner Center who explained that he was contributing 25M because, “The people of Ohio are going to hate this building."  Before long I realized that this might be the best way to experience Eisenman: as a talking head, on a video screen, without a clear image of his work, as he was egged on by a spirited, quick-witted companion. I’m not big on architectural theory, or on architects talking about their own work, but Eisenman is a terrific speaker and, in discussion, has the ability to describe unorthodox ideas in vivid, straightforward language that pushes one to think more deeply about what architecture is.  I heard him speak at the Guggenheim Museum last year and, after presenting a well-prepared academic paper, he opened the floor to questions and the affair heated right up.  Eisenman proclaimed, "Architecture can’t really do anything” in response to the first question, and that was just the beginning.  I ended up leaving last week’s lecture at Pratt early, lured away by a dinner invitation, but I wondered whether one needed to see Eisenman’s work to understand his ideas.  I don’t think so; I think he is all there in his words. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/austerity-architecture-economics monthly 0.5 2012-03-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515112916-S21CN4KPMH2DHCKYZN0Z/tumblr_m08814SZrx1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY After the splash of Bjarke Ingel’s career-making monograph Yes is More, Thomas de Monchaux explains, in the op-ed pages of the Times, Why Less Isn’t Always More.  Is it Mies van der Rohe backlash? A sign of the times?  Or one architect’s (very real) fear that as a culture we don’t properly value formal invention and creation? While I’m excited to see an architecture debate carried out in such a popular forum, I’m wary of conflating architectural aesthetics with economic policy.  The image illustrating de Monchaux’s essay, a photograph of the all-white interior of a John Pawson house, is terribly seductive.  And, in its overzealous denial of profile, color and texture, it’s not austere at all; it’s excessive.  I’ll wait for Paul Krugman to weigh in on the advantages of economic austerity, although he too, for the record, seems to be opposed to it.  But I’m all for aesthetic austerity, the act of seeing past appearances to something deeper, and striving to make things that are timeless and permanent by building what absolutely needs to be, of which ornament might be an essential part.  De Monchaux points out, correctly, that it takes a lot (of time, materials, and effort) to make architecture look as if it is doing very little.  But what if we as a culture build fewer things, and if the act of architecture becomes more special.  Would we build things in a finer, more thoughtful way?  Would each thing be more beautiful?  And would we value them more?  https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/amar-chitra-katha-cartoon-beauty monthly 0.5 2012-02-28 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/gehry-new-york-tower monthly 0.5 2012-02-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515113504-GUC78N6D19R6YNML2ANO/tumblr_m02alqNHsh1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY How long does it take a new building to settle into a city?  Frank Gehry’s condominium tower at 8 Spruce Street, which is called, ridiculously, New York by Gehry, has been open for about a year and I believe it’s done just that.  I was suspicious at first.  It’s a starchitect-designed property with units that rent from 6K to 18K.  It’s just a few blocks east of the World Trade Center site, where the first tower there is just now, sluggishly, taking shape.  And at a time when austerity is the buzzword, in architecture and everything else, it’s dressed in gleaming, flame-shaped stainless steel panels. But the tower looks smashing when seen from City Hall, where it’s a fine, assertive presence among low-lying blocks.  And when seen from Brooklyn Heights it brightens the skyline, catching and throwing daylight surprisingly.  It’s taller and slimmer than the glassy Wall Street towers behind it but doesn’t draw too much attention to itself.  I’ve heard the building badmouthed by architects, architecture critics, and laymen, who all observe that only two of its sides are covered in the sculpted panels, and that it’s all a bit too much.  In its unapologetic glamor and fine metal ornament, the tower reminds me of the Empire State Building.  Gehry was able to adapt his very personal language of twisted, spinning shards into a system of mass construction, which is no mean feat, and to shape a building with a unique image.  88 Spruce is a much needed super-tall building downtown.  Since 9/11 I’ve missed the Twin Towers badly; they were a continual, peripheral presence, marking the way downtown.  Each time I pass a ten-for-a-dollar postcard rack I look for updated shots of the skyline.  It’s not long before Gehry’s tower finds their way into them, and into the mythology of the city. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/pina-bausch-dance-3d monthly 0.5 2012-02-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515113807-VE3S737BMS42HBWAXGMV/tumblr_lz985zsj2F1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The dancers at Das Tanztheater Wuppertal, unlike those in many ballet companies, are crazily diverse in age, height, shape and color.  We meet each one close-up in Pina, the acclaimed documentary about the late choreographer Pina Bausch and her work at Tanztheater.  The dancers have surprisingly expressive, eccentric faces; they reminded me of characters in Maira Kalman’s drawings.  My favorites were Andre Berezin, a tall Russian who takes stoic, heroic male roles, and Ditta Miranda Jasjfi, a young woman with a tempestuous, kinetic energy.  The dancers perform on stage at the Tanztheater, and also at locations (on a traffic island, inside a tram, along the edge of a cliff) in and around Wuppertal.  These outdoor segments dispel pretension and bring a special poignancy to the choreography, much of which mimics and elaborates gestures from daily life (walking, embracing, kissing).  But the best part of the movie was seeing Bausch herself dance a part in Cafe Muller, one of her best known works from 1978.  (It was also performed, with Bausch dancing the same part, in the opening of Pedro Almodovar’s film Talk to Her.)  In a white gown that looks like it’s been lifted from Martha Graham’s closet, and with her long hair loose, Bausch walks into walls, hurls herself across the stage, and turns her arms in huge, looping gestures.  Bausch’s body is fine and sinewy, and her movements conjure anguish.  Contorted, roiling, she offers a classical image of grief that doesn’t need to be tarted up with 3D. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/camel-coat-max-mara monthly 0.5 2012-02-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515114005-U8HOYKQS0CFUK5WMZCHB/tumblr_lzsyu5WJOU1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The model roaming the floor at the Max Mara store on Madison Avenue during their Atelier coat collection presentation cut a figure that was both both Ladies-Who-Lunch and Byzantine.  She wore a trapeze camel cashmere coat over a slim fur vest, with a jeweled collar tied on top.  It was a look that was both simple and dramatic, a sensibility that carries through the capsule collection of twenty-four coats. Each piece is in a neutral color (camel, charcoal), crafted from luxurious fabrics, cut in simple profiles, and enhanced with dramatic details.  And each one feels fresh and also timeless, as if it had been imagined a long time ago. It’s fitting because Max Mara practically invented the contemporary camel coat for women.  Their 101801 design from 1981, a loose, double-breasted overcoat with long, hand-stitched lapels was the first of its kind for women.  On their website the Milanese fashion house illustrates how the coat can be styled in different ways (left open in front, belted, with the sleeves folded back) for radically different looks.  My favorite has got to be a sporty look called Denim Remix, that gives me a fit of 80’s nostalgia.  Today the camel coat is one of those key pieces, like a black v-neck pullover, that every grown-up lady has got to have.  My own camel coat is a secondhand vicuna with three-quarter-length sleeves and a gold lining that I purchased in college to wear, ironically, over torn jeans and Doc Martens.  When I wear it now, unironically, over businesslike skirts, the coat’s rich color and fabric automatically make me feel more glamorous.  That gets at the appeal of camel, and of fashion itself. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/downton-abbey-frick-collection monthly 0.5 2012-02-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515114803-N47ZYFKTE2BJMN24VX58/tumblr_lzrz04bxeh1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I swoon for Mr. Bates, I swoon for Lady Mary’s drop waist gowns, and I swoon for the house itself, Downton Abbey.  The show is filmed at Highclere Castle, the real-life home of the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon, a young couple who look alarmingly non-royal.  The current structure was built between 1838 to 1878 on an historic site that has been continuously occupied since the 800’s.  Like Downton, Highclere served as a hospital during WWI and, in the happier times before and after, as a venue for highly glamorous parties.  The house has neo-Gothic facades with a storm of crockets and finials disguising its hearty stone walls.  But its interiors, cavernous halls furnished with dark orientals and spindly tables and chairs, embody a restrained, anglophilic glamor. An American equivalent might be the Henry Clay Frick mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York, which houses the Frick Collection.  This grand limestone house and its gardens fill and entire block above East 70th Street, yet still feel intimate, like a family’s home.  The rooms are finely scaled and spin off a skylit courtyard that’s a bit like Downton’s entry hall, although much smaller.  Just the room names themselves – Garden Court, West Gallery, Oval Room – conjure a finer life.  On a weekend afternoon the museum is filled with visitors plugged into their audio guides, focused so hard on the docent’s recorded voice that they’re inattentive to the stupendous artwork in front of them, including several iconic Vermeers and Rembrandts.  As I made my way through the galleries, rediscovering a Whistler here and an El Greco there, I felt an incredible sense of ease.  It could imagine that this place was still a house, and that it was entirely open to me. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/aeron-chair-herman-miller monthly 0.5 2012-02-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515115113-8PGXGDUVNI9KVB0KBC1U/tumblr_lzevk2OPAB1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY At a Q&A session at SVA last week New York Times chief architecture critic Michael Kimmelman talked about his beliefs, his writing, and the role of the architecture critic.  He was voluble and charming (think Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer), and got things started by proclaiming, joyously, “I don’t care about criticism."  We were gathered in a small conference room lined with bookshelves and filled with rows of grey Aeron chairs.  Just as Kimmelman took his seat up front, a woman in back cried out in alarm; she was sliding out of hers, which was tilting and spinning precariously.  The gentleman sitting next to her offered a steadying hand and explained, calmly, "Don’t worry.  The chair is supposed to do that.” The Aeron chair has become a high design cliche.  Too often it’s specified to communicate fabulous taste, without regard for its proportions or dimensions.  At a  corporate design office where I once worked the entire floor was fit-out with grey felt carpet, long black counters, and black Aerons to dazzle potential clients.  The chairs have sophisticated ergonomics, with knobs at the back and bottom to adjust the tension and height.  Yet mine always felt wrong, as if it been designed for a creature several times my girth.  And I never felt sheltered by the chair, as I do inside that other great corporate office chair cliche, the Eames.  Instead I felt as if my Aeron was about to catapult me directly into my (chic, flat, black) computer screen.  Along with the horrid office coffee, that chair kept me in a continual state of over-alertness.  In addition, the Aeron takes up more space than you think – it’s high and wide.  At the Kimmelman event I couldn’t see beyond the chair in front of me and barely found room to set my bags on the floor.  Though set out neatly, the chairs were twisted this way and that, and gave the room a strong sense of disorder.  These chairs don’t work in groups, they don’t work in small spaces, and they don’t work for some body types.  Have the designers specifying them spent time in them? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/andy-warhol-shoes monthly 0.5 2012-02-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515115534-4NE41T7F88TNPU3N4K8Y/tumblr_lz98vcsWxX1qdm8ato1_r1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY At L&M Arts there’s a show of Andy Warhol’s illustrations titled, cheerfully, Who’s Who in Holiday Hats.  Framed and hung, in a profusion that calls to mind Allan McCollum’s installations, are two folios of ink and watercolor illustrations: one of the aforementioned hats from a 1964 McCall’s spread, and another from 1955 called A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu.  The drawings of the hats, each one named after a historical or literary character, are witty, but the drawings of the shoes are super sweet.  Rendered on large sheets of stiff, slightly bruised, yellowing paper, with wavering India ink outlines and translucent candy-colored washes, they feel a bit like pages torn from an illuminated manuscript, one all about shopping and dressing.  And the drawings are brilliantly condensed, without a single errant gesture.  Warhol the illustrator gives us only what we need to see each shoe. The show proves to me once and for all that while Warhol had a prescient flair for self-promotion and not-ironic detachment, he was at heart a superb graphic designer.  The shoe drawings will be familiar to many museum-goers because they’ve been reproduced on Warhol Foundation-licensed merchandise: a children’s book, tote bags and note cards.  But I wish that you all could see them in person, framed, on the wall.  The artist has rendered each shoe with tremendous precision and attention.  These drawings are small, true gems. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/metropolitan-museum-plaza monthly 0.5 2012-02-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515115310-7WNHHON9BWT4OIS3E31H/tumblr_lzeuasptuZ1qdm8ato1_r4_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Don’t fix what’s isn’t broken is my response to New York City’s plan to improve the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Philanthropist David H. Koch, who’s donating $60 million to finance the work, saw the refurbished fountains at Lincoln Center and then prodded the Met to do something about their “crummy” ones.  The new design, by Philadelphia-based landscape architects OLIN, replaces the long, low fountains at each side of the museum entrance with smaller square ones, and frames the two underused, street-level side entrances with stands of trees.  The plan of the project released to the Times has a hollow prettiness, filling the space with trees, cafe tables and umbrellas.  The amateurish quality of the drawing certainly doesn’t help. The plaza, as it is, is a vibrant urban space.  On cold days, like today, there are groups of visitors gathered on the entrance steps, some waiting for others and some just sitting there.  On warm days it feels like a festival, the entire length of the plaza thick with artists, food vendors, tourist and park-goers.  On the final evening of the Alexander McQueen show last summer, just before midnight, lines of brilliantly turned-out scenesters and fashionistas snaked around the fountains for a final entry, a spectacle of crazy, urban glamor.  True, the fountains are dismal, and rarely offer anything beyond a burble.  But that only keeps the area clear for small children and dog walkers.  Why can’t the Met keep the plaza they’ve got, which works, and clean and light the fountain properly?  The two side entrances that the new plan highlights are awfully small.  To turn them into proper entrances will require significant architectural work (larger openings, windows, some interior replanning) and not just rows of flowering trees out front.  There’s something nice about leaving this monumental public plaza in this, the city’s toniest precinct, unadorned, rather than turning it into an open air food court.  The real magic, after all, happens after you step inside the building. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/beginners-montage-movie-illustration monthly 0.5 2012-02-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515115717-5DFO9UOC8BA98ZYIG0SW/tumblr_lz9j00VHNg1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Is there a difference between watching a sequence of images and watching a movie?  The movie Beginners tells the tale of a man coming of age romantically (at 38) and grappling with the recent death of his father.  It’s told in a disarmingly straightforward manner.  But its director Mike Mills, who’s an accomplished graphic designer, enlivens the central narrative with a handful of montages, streams of still images narrated by the hero in voice-over.  The images are culled from stock photographs, vintage postcards and the director’s own loopy illustrations.  These sequences are visual knock-outs – my eyes literally opened wider to take them in – and also deeply effecting, perhaps even more so than the live-action portions of the film, which are played out skillfully by the actors but sweetened with hopelessly sentimental touches, like a dog with subtitles to broadcast his thoughts. While I loved the montage sequences I can’t help feeling they were out of place, that they were graphic design rather than movie.  It’s the same way I feel about Ray and Charles Eames’ movies like Top and Powers of Ten.  They’re constructed from moving images, but each retains its iconic power as an image without giving itself over to the life of the movie.  Like the montages in Beginners, these sequences are governed by the logic of graphics and text – the logic of illustration.  The montages in Beginners achieve a kind of graphic poetry but they’re powerfully disruptive, and take away from the rest of the movie.  I almost wish Mills had done away with the actors altogether and constructed the entire movie from still images.  It would have made this small, touching movie enthralling. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/doug-wheeler-infinity-room monthly 0.5 2012-02-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515116006-KGUJQ5VQJBASKPZFORI7/tumblr_lz992tix3U1qdm8ato1_r2_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY I came home late one Saturday night and stayed up even later watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind on basic cable.  Like most movies that you watch on television without really intending to, in a state of semi-distraction, it was rich in incidental pleasures and held my attention all the way through.  I liked the way the Richard Dreyfuss character’s suburban home is depicted (airless, crammed full of knick-knacks), and I liked that half of the NASA astronauts selected for a high-security mission are women.  There’s a lyrical moment at the end of the movie when [Spoiler Alert]  Dreyfuss boards the the alien spacecraft.  As he walks toward the portal the long-armed, big-bellied aliens gather around him in wonder, caressing him, and lead him inside.  The last you see of him is in profile, against the cloud of light spilling from the spaceship’s inside.  You are right there with him.  You don’t feel that he’s running away from his life and his family, but that he’s entering a finer world. Stepping from the bare concrete floor at the David Zwirner gallery into Doug Wheeler’s much buzzed-about installation The Infinity Environment, I felt what Richard Dreyfuss must have felt.  My friend and I, along with a bunch of other artsy types, had put in a two-hour wait beforehand, first queuing on the sidewalk outside, and then slumped in folding chairs in the gallery vestibule.  Finally we were asked to remove our shoes and put on white slippers, and then led inside the installation in groups of ten.  The space is small, about the size of a grade school classroom.  At first it’s a bit of a disappointment – a sterile, bright, white box.  But then, as you move further inside, away from the other visitors, you feel disoriented and then trapped and then liberated.  The space seems to stretch out far in front; you cannot find a limit.  In it all there’s a moment of indisturbed bliss.  You’ve left all of your world behind and know nothing of what lies ahead. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/miguel-adrover-fashion monthly 0.5 2012-02-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515116820-SLSS2NEI1VKHTKQ4UXCJ/tumblr_lzcbb7DLcg1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY New York fashion designer Miguel Adrover just showed his first collection in eight years, which is called (without irony) Out of My Mind.  Each garment is crafted from things he found in his own closet.  Adrover took his old t-shirts, sports jerseys, suit trousers, beach towels, and stuffed cats, and trimmed, tailored and recombined them into pieces with an arresting, punkish, and vaguely Medieval sensibility.  Sometimes you have to look hard to recognize the original pieces.  Even when it’s obvious what Adrover is up to (turning a jacket into a skirt, wearing a keffiyeh as a collar) the clothes are never gimmicky — their cut and silhouettes make drama.  If a lady walked into a restaurant wearing one of these outfits, you would look up from your goat cheese salad, and away from your conversation, to get a better look. Textile mills have used reclaimed materials in their textiles before.  Retailers have sold organic fashion lines before.  And designers like XULY.Bet have made used clothing into high fashion.  What makes Adrover’s project  unique, aside from its very particularly, piquant artistry, is his impassioned refusal of material.  As an amateur dressmaker I know that sewing virtually any garment creates waste: there’s more yardage purchased than is needed, unusable lengths at the end of the bolts, and scraps left over after cutting.  And there’s the endless waste of fashion itself, which proscribes new looks to buy and wear each season when our closets are already teeming.  The entire industry is driven by perpetual newness and Adrover is putting the brakes on it, confusing cycles of production.  The only way these clothes can be sold is as one-off pieces, like sculpture.  If, say, Barneys orders a quantity of pieces, then each one, sourced from different existing garments, will be an entirely different, unpredictable thing.  Adrover’s project calls us look again at clothes we set aside because they’re worn, stained, out of style, and just plain old.  It’s highly refined fashion, and a highly refined political position too. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/female-figure-fashion-durer monthly 0.5 2012-02-10 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/fur-coat-men-joe-namath monthly 0.5 2012-02-09 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/wilhelm-lehmbruck-modern-sculpture monthly 0.5 2012-02-08 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ugly-buildings-brutalist monthly 0.5 2012-02-07 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/madonna-superbowl-treacy-givenchy monthly 0.5 2012-02-06 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/rodarte-vincent-vangogh-fashion monthly 0.5 2012-02-03 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/miles-davis-workin-jazz-album-cover monthly 0.5 2012-02-02 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/rushdie-satanic-verses-jaipur-modern-furniture monthly 0.5 2012-02-01 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/fashion-sundance-rubber-boots monthly 0.5 2012-01-31 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/brasil-burle-max-niemeyer monthly 0.5 2012-01-30 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/fashion-dress-galliano monthly 0.5 2012-01-25 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/interior-clodagh-toilet-sink monthly 0.5 2012-01-24 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/gagosian-damien-hirst-spot-paintings monthly 0.5 2012-01-23 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-gentleman-who-introduced-architect-kevin-roche monthly 0.5 2012-01-20 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/last-week-after-lunch-at-a-purposefully monthly 0.5 2012-01-19 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/when-i-was-in-younger-i-looked-to-eva-hesse-just monthly 0.5 2012-01-18 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/file-under-wish-id-kept-mine-its-socially monthly 0.5 2012-01-17 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/last-night-was-a-giddy-night-for-tv-watchers-with monthly 0.5 2012-01-16 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/at-a-reception-at-the-university-club-earlier-this monthly 0.5 2012-01-13 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/vision-impaired-temporarily-from-dilating-drops monthly 0.5 2012-01-12 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/stepping-into-the-living-room-of-frank-lloyd monthly 0.5 2012-01-11 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/im-a-girl-who-is-in-love-with-her-books-all-her monthly 0.5 2012-01-10 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-subscribe-to-the-myth-still-i-believe-that monthly 0.5 2012-01-09 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-shard monthly 0.5 2012-01-08 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/although-i-missed-the-display-of-elizabeth monthly 0.5 2012-01-06 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-movie-melancholia-opens-with-what-director monthly 0.5 2012-01-05 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/a-few-years-ago-thomasville-launched-the-ernest monthly 0.5 2012-01-04 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/eva-zeisel-the-great-ceramic-designer-died-last monthly 0.5 2012-01-03 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-movie-margin-call-tracks-over-one-crucial monthly 0.5 2011-12-30 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/my-first-toehold-in-new-york-city-was-a-summer monthly 0.5 2011-12-23 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/years-ago-for-a-second-semester-project-in monthly 0.5 2011-12-22 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/one-afternoon-last-week-i-saw-something-on-the monthly 0.5 2011-12-20 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/at-the-public-library-searching-for-a-copy-of monthly 0.5 2011-12-18 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/architects-will-say-that-the-only-way-to-represent monthly 0.5 2011-12-16 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sabina-speilrein-was-a-famous-early-twentieth monthly 0.5 2011-12-14 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/in-a-dangerous-method-viggo-mortensen-subdues-his monthly 0.5 2011-12-13 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sigmund-freuds-office-has-been-wonderfully monthly 0.5 2011-12-12 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/after-admiring-so-many-of-john-updikes-short monthly 0.5 2011-12-11 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/what-does-it-mean-when-a-girl-goes-to-see-a-george monthly 0.5 2011-12-10 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theres-no-time-when-music-meant-as-much-to-me-as monthly 0.5 2011-12-09 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-carpenter-center-is-le-corbusiers-only monthly 0.5 2011-12-08 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/if-i-had-my-own-girl-band-i-would-call-it-the monthly 0.5 2011-12-07 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/like-movies-stars-buildings-from-our-past-are monthly 0.5 2011-12-06 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/in-1996-damien-hirst-displayed-two-sliced-up-cows monthly 0.5 2011-12-05 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/a-tour-guide-leading-a-group-of-visitors-through monthly 0.5 2011-12-05 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theres-been-much-ballyhoo-about-the-new-galleries monthly 0.5 2011-12-03 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-had-a-fight-with-a-friend-this-summer-over-lunch monthly 0.5 2011-12-02 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/one-of-my-high-school-english-teachers-an-amateur monthly 0.5 2011-11-28 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/pbs-just-aired-a-two-part-five-hour-pleasingly monthly 0.5 2011-11-23 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/whats-the-difference-between-graffiti-and monthly 0.5 2011-11-22 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/an-artist-i-know-who-is-also-an-accomplished monthly 0.5 2011-11-19 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/its-easy-to-forget-that-we-have-our-own-piece-of monthly 0.5 2011-11-16 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-oversized-postcard-announcing-the-new-robert monthly 0.5 2011-11-16 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/years-ago-i-traveled-into-the-city-each-day-from monthly 0.5 2011-11-10 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/in-windswept-granite-paved-plazas-across-the monthly 0.5 2011-11-09 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/when-tap-dancer-maurice-chestnut-took-the-stage-at monthly 0.5 2011-11-08 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/a-few-years-ago-i-took-a-friend-who-was-visiting monthly 0.5 2011-11-04 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/hot-on-the-heels-of-the-show-of-bob-dylans monthly 0.5 2011-11-03 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sometimes-i-think-that-new-york-city-is-becoming-a monthly 0.5 2011-11-02 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/no-artwork-manufactured-before-the-nineteenth monthly 0.5 2011-11-01 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/fluxus-was-not-really-about-art-objects-so-much-as monthly 0.5 2011-10-28 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/once-i-met-a-man-from-the-cote-divoire-and-as-he monthly 0.5 2011-10-27 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/for-a-very-long-time-what-inspired-envy-more-than monthly 0.5 2011-10-26 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/seeing-a-photograph-of-a-building-is-really monthly 0.5 2011-10-25 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/until-recently-the-only-willem-de-kooning monthly 0.5 2011-10-24 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/there-are-flower-fabric-umbrellas-at-the-cafe monthly 0.5 2011-10-21 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/was-there-a-celebrity-subject-better-suited-to monthly 0.5 2011-10-20 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/what-puzzled-me-most-about-steve-jobs-was-the monthly 0.5 2011-10-19 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/id-like-to-think-that-im-more-sophisticated-than monthly 0.5 2011-10-18 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theres-a-great-description-le-frak-city-the monthly 0.5 2011-10-17 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/christmas-came-early-to-chelsea-when-two monthly 0.5 2011-10-13 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/im-no-animal-lover-but-when-attending-an-event monthly 0.5 2011-10-12 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theres-an-informative-piece-on-the-history-of monthly 0.5 2011-10-11 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-facade-at-storefront-for-art-and-architecture monthly 0.5 2011-10-10 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/is-there-anything-left-to-say-about-apple-chairman monthly 0.5 2011-10-07 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theres-been-a-brouhaha-about-bob-dylans monthly 0.5 2011-10-06 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-watched-last-nights-television-documentary monthly 0.5 2011-10-05 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ive-referred-to-karim-rashid-before-with-less monthly 0.5 2011-10-03 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/right-now-im-immersed-in-jennifer-egans-novel monthly 0.5 2011-09-30 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-just-learned-the-difference-between-helvetica monthly 0.5 2011-09-29 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-title-of-agnes-martins-show-at-pace-gallery monthly 0.5 2011-09-28 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-western-pennsylvania-conservancy-wpc-who monthly 0.5 2011-09-27 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/richard-serras-two-new-steel-works-junction monthly 0.5 2011-09-26 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/lust-for-life-vincente-minellis-1956-movie monthly 0.5 2011-09-23 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/can-you-build-a-building-without-a-program-the monthly 0.5 2011-09-22 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/when-selecting-photos-to-post-with-a-piece-about monthly 0.5 2011-09-21 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-was-at-ps-1-in-astoria-this-weekend-to-attend-a monthly 0.5 2011-09-20 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-dont-do-event-dressing-because-every-day-is monthly 0.5 2011-09-19 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/every-building-supports-a-certain-kind-of-life monthly 0.5 2011-09-14 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-just-updated-my-internet-setup-and-replaced-my monthly 0.5 2011-09-07 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/patti-smith-begins-just-kids-her-book-about-her monthly 0.5 2011-09-06 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-bought-the-hype-for-watch-the-throne-the monthly 0.5 2011-08-30 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theres-a-small-exhibit-of-photographs-at-peter monthly 0.5 2011-08-26 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/people-who-hover-about-the-fashion-industry monthly 0.5 2011-08-25 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/as-it-is-with-life-it-is-with-museums-running monthly 0.5 2011-08-24 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-saw-u2-twice-once-in-high-school-when-they-were monthly 0.5 2011-08-23 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ten-years-after-the-world-trade-center-wtc monthly 0.5 2011-08-22 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/there-are-painters-whose-work-lies-on-the-surface monthly 0.5 2011-08-19 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/in-1992-the-metropolitan-transportation-authority monthly 0.5 2011-08-18 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/whats-going-on-our-train-stations-look-like monthly 0.5 2011-08-17 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/walking-down-the-most-rarified-stretch-of-madison monthly 0.5 2011-08-16 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/a-few-years-ago-i-saw-a-broadway-revival-of monthly 0.5 2011-08-12 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-have-a-lower-than-average-tolerance-for-art monthly 0.5 2011-08-11 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-american-photographer-phyllis-galembo-is monthly 0.5 2011-08-10 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-new-york-times-used-their-hallowed-op-ed-page monthly 0.5 2011-08-09 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/a-crucial-element-of-good-product-design-is-not monthly 0.5 2011-08-08 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/is-a-great-subject-all-that-it-takes-to-make-a monthly 0.5 2011-08-05 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-keffiyeh-might-be-the-perfect-summertime monthly 0.5 2011-08-04 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/just-before-the-explosion-and-shootings-in-oslo-i monthly 0.5 2011-08-03 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/nicholas-de-monchaux-an-architect-and-academic monthly 0.5 2011-08-02 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-metropolitan-transportation-authority-mta-is monthly 0.5 2011-08-01 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/for-reasons-i-dont-really-want-to-go-into-i monthly 0.5 2011-07-29 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/there-are-found-objects-but-are-there-found monthly 0.5 2011-07-28 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-great-painter-lucian-freud-died-and-the monthly 0.5 2011-07-27 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/earlier-this-summer-i-admired-the-logo-for-the monthly 0.5 2011-07-26 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-ann-demeulemeester-boutique-in-antwerps-lower monthly 0.5 2011-07-25 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/we-arrived-at-brugge-on-an-early-morning-train monthly 0.5 2011-07-24 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theres-a-certain-fatigue-that-sets-in-after monthly 0.5 2011-07-23 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/when-does-marketing-and-merchandising-overwhelm monthly 0.5 2011-07-22 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-think-of-churches-as-medieval-structures-built monthly 0.5 2011-07-21 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/driving-back-and-forth-along-the-avenue-de monthly 0.5 2011-07-20 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/rome-has-the-trevi-fountain-new-york-city-has-the monthly 0.5 2011-07-19 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/its-hard-for-structures-that-try-to-capture-the monthly 0.5 2011-07-18 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/on-my-last-day-in-germany-i-visited-sanssouci-the monthly 0.5 2011-07-15 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/7612589932 monthly 0.5 2011-07-14 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theres-a-new-temporary-museum-at-the-former-site monthly 0.5 2011-07-13 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/does-art-always-have-to-go-deep-the-kohlhaas monthly 0.5 2011-07-12 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/since-i-know-classical-architecture-primarily monthly 0.5 2011-07-11 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-went-to-babelsberg-a-hamlet-just-outside monthly 0.5 2011-07-10 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/in-germany-ive-learned-preparing-and-eating-a monthly 0.5 2011-07-09 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-escaped-the-midday-heat-last-tuesday-inside-the monthly 0.5 2011-07-08 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/architect-peter-behrens-aeg-turbine-factory-in monthly 0.5 2011-07-07 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-gold-trinkets-and-bowls-on-display-at-the monthly 0.5 2011-07-06 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/7262420377 monthly 0.5 2011-07-05 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/walking-down-unter-den-linden-in-berlin-one monthly 0.5 2011-07-04 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-neues-museum-berlins-museum-for-classical monthly 0.5 2011-06-21 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-visited-berlin-for-the-first-time-in-1996-seven monthly 0.5 2011-06-20 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/after-an-early-morning-doctors-appointment-in monthly 0.5 2011-06-17 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/last-week-i-finally-made-it-to-savage-beauty monthly 0.5 2011-06-16 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/its-fairly-simple-to-get-to-commodity-and monthly 0.5 2011-06-15 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/is-expanded-polystyrene-eps-foam-the-new-black monthly 0.5 2011-06-14 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/on-a-sunny-afternoon-accompanied-by-a-very-very monthly 0.5 2011-06-13 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/michelle-obama-made-waves-this-week-wearing-a monthly 0.5 2011-06-12 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/last-week-portuguese-architect-alberto-souto-de monthly 0.5 2011-06-10 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/there-is-yawning-gulf-between-drawing-and monthly 0.5 2011-06-08 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-dont-believe-as-many-architects-do-that-the monthly 0.5 2011-06-06 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/there-are-always-all-sorts-of-real-estate monthly 0.5 2011-06-03 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/prt-personal-rapid-transit-systems-which-convey monthly 0.5 2011-06-02 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-just-saw-the-construction-site-for-the-crystal monthly 0.5 2011-06-01 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/im-reading-eudora-weltys-memoir-one-writers monthly 0.5 2011-05-31 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-museum-of-liverpool monthly 0.5 2011-05-29 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-novelist-don-delillo-one-of-my-literary monthly 0.5 2011-05-28 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/we-know-how-to-get-to-carnegie-hall-but-do-we monthly 0.5 2011-05-27 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-william-j-clinton-presidential-center-in monthly 0.5 2011-05-26 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ive-been-streaming-morning-becomes-ecclectic monthly 0.5 2011-05-25 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-memphis-motel-where-dr-martin-luther-king-was monthly 0.5 2011-05-24 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/there-is-nothing-that-distinguishes-one-waffle monthly 0.5 2011-05-23 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-turner-contemporary monthly 0.5 2011-05-22 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/for-many-years-along-with-melville-and-proust monthly 0.5 2011-05-21 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/what-makes-a-city-a-city-gives-it-an-indelible monthly 0.5 2011-05-20 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/im-not-a-big-one-for-city-planning-believing monthly 0.5 2011-05-19 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/for-her-last-appearance-on-oprah-michelle-obama monthly 0.5 2011-05-18 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/charleston-is-a-sunny-city-full-of-pretty-old monthly 0.5 2011-05-17 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/driving-south-through-the-carolinas-in-may-long monthly 0.5 2011-05-16 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/much-fuss-has-been-made-about-the-fascinator monthly 0.5 2011-05-15 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-wright-brothers-field-isnt-located-in-kitty monthly 0.5 2011-05-14 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/an-andy-warhol-painting-a-1963-four-pane-acrylic monthly 0.5 2011-05-13 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/food-lion-is-my-new-favorite-grocery-store-based monthly 0.5 2011-05-12 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/george-vanderbilts-great-and-grand-home-in monthly 0.5 2011-05-12 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-have-all-the-typical-preconceptions-about-other monthly 0.5 2011-05-10 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/my-journey-south-is-in-one-sense-a-pilgrimage-to monthly 0.5 2011-05-09 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/thats-india-preservationists-architecture monthly 0.5 2011-05-01 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-thought-i-had-seen-everything-that-could-be-seen monthly 0.5 2011-04-30 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/yesterday-i-passed-the-new-statue-of-andy-warhol monthly 0.5 2011-04-29 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/both-book-lovers-and-building-lovers-feel-the-loss monthly 0.5 2011-04-28 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-current-show-at-the-guggenheim-a-selection monthly 0.5 2011-04-27 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/what-is-the-architecture-of-insanity-benthams monthly 0.5 2011-04-25 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/occasionally-the-extremes-of-the-manhattan-real monthly 0.5 2011-04-24 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/in-1985-architect-michael-graves-designed-a monthly 0.5 2011-04-20 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/in-2005-the-tram-to-roosevelt-island-made monthly 0.5 2011-04-19 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/do-people-grow-up-or-do-they-get-older-and-stay monthly 0.5 2011-04-16 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-gagosian-gallery-on-west-24th-street-is-a monthly 0.5 2011-04-14 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/rachel-whitereads-show-at-luhring-augustine-is monthly 0.5 2011-04-12 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/whats-the-difference-between-a-townhouse-and-a monthly 0.5 2011-04-09 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/guy-de-maupassant-claimed-that-his-favorite-spot monthly 0.5 2011-04-07 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-saw-this-ron-galella-picture-of-robert-redford monthly 0.5 2011-04-04 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-movie-vincere-tells-the-story-of-ida-dalser monthly 0.5 2011-04-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515181697-S17FWCSXP4JSVQ6AME36/tumblr_lidylmXLlZ1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The movie “Vincere” tells the story of Ida Dalser, one of Benito Mussolini’s lovers.  Mussolini abandoned her, his people silenced her, and she died in an insane asylum, asserting until the bitter end that she was Mussolini’s wife and the mother of his oldest son.  The film exposed two passions of mine, both unsavory:  The first for the romantic figure of the young Il Duce, at least as embodied here by Italian actor Filippo Timi.  The second for fascist architecture. The most famous monument of the Mussolini era is the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in the exurban Roman precinct EUR.  It’s a textbook example of fascist architecture: scaleless, textureless, simplistic, and imagistic.  Yet it’s forms are strongly suggestive, evoking Surrealism and antiquity.  The Palazzo doesn’t feel as if it were assembled from steel and stone but as if it fell fully formed from someone’s (in this case, perhaps Mussolini’s) dreamscape.  How can a brutal government produce an architecture so strangely appealing? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theres-no-shortage-of-spectacular-imagery-in monthly 0.5 2011-03-30 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/can-prefab-be-pretty-fabulous-brooklynites-think monthly 0.5 2011-03-28 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/my-first-job-in-new-york-was-at-an-office-across monthly 0.5 2011-03-26 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-new-york-times-posted-the-sad-news-about monthly 0.5 2011-03-26 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/john-chamberlains-work-has-always-struck-me-as monthly 0.5 2011-03-24 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/like-everyone-else-im-stunned-by-the-devastation monthly 0.5 2011-03-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515183326-WOSI8G4KFQWQ7DR17CNF/tumblr_li4ru7tPiE1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Like everyone else I’m stunned by the devastation in Japan.  But I’m puzzled by those who believe that sharing video and photos of the disasters constitutes sympathy.  This weekend one of the local news programs ran footage of the tsunami and compared it to computer-generated imagery from one of last summer’s Hollywood movies.  It just wasn’t right. The sense of physical loss made me think of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, from 1923, which survived the great earthquake of that year only to sink steadily on its own foundations until it was razed in 1968.  Known mainly through a series of grainy black and white photos, the structure looks like a splendid mash-up of Craftsman, modern and Mayan styles.  It’s gone but still present. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theres-a-series-of-eight-soup-can-prints-on monthly 0.5 2011-03-16 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/if-a-camel-is-horse-designed-by-committee-then-a monthly 0.5 2011-03-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515183907-XJF6YTUARBPTHXNL6MSR/tumblr_li2tmr9nbv1qdm8ato1_r2_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY If a camel is horse designed by committee, then a zebra is a horse designed by someone with a lot of pent-up creative energy.  Is there another pattern –or anything– in nature as exuberant, as extroverted, or as obvious, as zebra skin?  What Darwinian advantage, precisely, do these stripes confer?  They make the zebra the most fabulous, and conspicuous, animal. The new Michael Kors flagship on Madison Avenue in New York, which opened just last week, is a glowing, gleaming temple to modern American glamor.  There are glass stairs, floating stainless steel railings, and a giant plasma video screen playing an endless loop of the designer’s Spring runway show.  There are also zebra-patterned carpets.  (Most likely they’re dyed and printed cowhide, which is, for whatever reason, less offensive than zebra.)  The zebra skins evoke safari, certainly, but also Op Art, punk fashion, and Rorschach blots.  They’re the perfect jolt of warm-blooded energy. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/people-are-hoarding-incandescent-light-bulbs-in monthly 0.5 2011-03-14 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/if-there-is-anyone-more-annoying-than-an monthly 0.5 2011-03-11 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/last-week-in-a-building-designed-by-mckim-mead monthly 0.5 2011-03-09 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/on-saturday-i-walked-down-park-avenue-to-see-will monthly 0.5 2011-03-07 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/terence-koh-is-at-the-mary-boone-gallery-right-now monthly 0.5 2011-03-04 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/it-snowed-on-thursday-night-it-was-just-a-few monthly 0.5 2011-03-02 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/architects-are-fascinated-with-the-sculpture-and monthly 0.5 2011-02-28 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/new-banksy-works-have-been-spotted-in-la-which monthly 0.5 2011-02-25 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-typically-race-through-the-egyptian-wing-of-the monthly 0.5 2011-02-23 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/some-contemporary-buildings-look-exactly-like monthly 0.5 2011-02-21 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-attended-an-event-last-week-at-a-contemporary monthly 0.5 2011-02-18 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-just-read-ghostwritten-by-david-mitchell-a monthly 0.5 2011-02-16 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/rihanna-won-worst-dressed-accolades-from-several monthly 0.5 2011-02-15 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-sharpie-ultra-fine-point-is-my-writing monthly 0.5 2011-02-10 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/im-working-now-from-an-office-on-the monthly 0.5 2011-02-09 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/when-i-was-young-my-mother-told-me-that-red-was-my monthly 0.5 2011-02-07 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/one-evening-at-dusk-to-research-an-upcoming monthly 0.5 2011-02-04 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/my-friend-natasha-is-visiting-india-for-the-first monthly 0.5 2011-02-02 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/in-the-movie-please-give-a-well-heeled-new-york monthly 0.5 2011-01-31 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/building-brasilia-is-photographer-marcel monthly 0.5 2011-01-28 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/due-to-a-string-of-back-to-back-snowstorms-ive monthly 0.5 2011-01-26 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/last-week-i-passed-an-electronics-recycling-event monthly 0.5 2011-01-25 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/2916719861 monthly 0.5 2011-01-25 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/long-before-the-house-of-balenciaga-got-hot-for monthly 0.5 2011-01-21 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/right-now-im-helping-clients-install-a-new monthly 0.5 2011-01-19 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ive-had-mixed-feelings-about-frank-gehrys-iac monthly 0.5 2011-01-18 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/how-ridiculous-do-people-who-arent-masai-look monthly 0.5 2010-12-03 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/in-last-nights-dream-i-was-walking-outside-an-old monthly 0.5 2010-12-02 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-visited-venice-once-four-years-ago-in-late monthly 0.5 2010-12-01 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ive-become-addicted-to-the-predictable-but monthly 0.5 2010-11-30 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/someone-recently-suggested-to-me-that-one-of-the monthly 0.5 2010-11-27 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/given-our-nostalgia-for-mad-men-era-manhattan monthly 0.5 2010-11-26 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/a-very-fine-20k-house-prototype-from-small monthly 0.5 2010-11-25 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/an-essay-in-the-op-ed-section-of-tuesdays-paper monthly 0.5 2010-11-24 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/nowadays-theres-a-citywide-contempt-for-new monthly 0.5 2010-11-23 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-skyscraper-has-lost-much-of-its-allure-so monthly 0.5 2010-11-22 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/say-what-you-will-about-the-tackyporno-subject monthly 0.5 2010-11-21 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/not-since-the-1960s-when-americans-were-lounging monthly 0.5 2010-11-20 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/there-was-such-a-fuss-about-adding-a-fourth-tower monthly 0.5 2010-11-19 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-watched-woody-allens-manhattan-last-night-for monthly 0.5 2010-11-17 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/if-the-inauguration-of-the-guggenheim-museum-in monthly 0.5 2010-11-17 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/friday-night-on-a-panel-about-housing-for-the monthly 0.5 2010-11-16 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/lee-friedlanders-new-photos-confound-the-notion monthly 0.5 2010-11-15 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/i-first-saw-damien-hirsts-cabinets-ten-years-ago monthly 0.5 2010-11-14 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/this-thursday-artist-mary-ellen-carroll-lifted-and monthly 0.5 2010-11-13 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/last-night-at-a-soho-showroom-kansas-based monthly 0.5 2010-11-11 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/sometimes-i-think-ikea-is-the-end-of-scandinavian monthly 0.5 2010-11-10 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/at-a-time-when-our-culture-seems-to-have-become monthly 0.5 2010-11-09 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/true-confession-while-ive-walked-by-soms monthly 0.5 2010-11-08 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/aricocos-amazing-garments-they-were-on-display monthly 0.5 2010-11-07 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/most-publicity-about-the-powerful-paul-thek monthly 0.5 2010-11-06 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/theres-zaha-and-denise-and-liz-and-the-lady monthly 0.5 2010-11-05 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/last-month-at-the-guggenheim-peter-eisenman-our monthly 0.5 2010-11-04 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/intoxicating-runway-and-street-clothes-at-japan monthly 0.5 2010-11-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515200209-ALRV0YNZIV9XHJ08R1L1/tumblr_lbbfd0Kq1j1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Intoxicating runway and street clothes at “Japan Fashion Now,” The Museum at FIT. Comme des Garçons, dress, autumn/winter 2009-10, Japan, museum purchase. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/ugly-can-be-fascinating-33-leonard-street-by monthly 0.5 2010-11-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515200406-Q9XM3BJXPD7STV8E4TVJ/tumblr_lb7qboVYM91qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Ugly can be fascinating. 33 Leonard Street by John Carl Warnecke, 1974. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/gorgeous-things-at-the-james-coviello-store-on monthly 0.5 2010-10-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515200923-EQCEJJ0XRELM6J3FNRJ9/tumblr_lb07cmGxKK1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Gorgeous things at the James Coviello store on Orchard Street. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/lyrical-minor-works-at-the-gagosian-gallery monthly 0.5 2010-10-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515201213-8ZJ1HUY57ZAXGHL3UVLQ/tumblr_lauwjm1Fn51qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Lyrical minor works at the Gagosian Gallery, uptown.  Femme étendue lisant by Picasso, 1952. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/no-14-horizontals-white-over-darks-no-14 monthly 0.5 2010-10-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515202122-AZJEU8J6RIOXSRHY0YFC/tumblr_lanqesevTe1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY No. 14 (Horizontals, White over Darks) No. 14 (horizontals, White over Darks, by Mark Rothko at MoMA. Are the really murky Rothkos the best? https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/paul-rudolphs-1967-drawings-for-the-lower monthly 0.5 2010-10-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515202322-UGAHVU1KIA0HV84D6P59/tumblr_lanptb2xuR1qdm8ato1_640.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Paul Rudolph’s 1967 drawings for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, on view now at Cooper Union. Just pencil and paper.  A love song to the axonometric. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/madison-square-park monthly 0.5 2010-10-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515202616-QVIOQM4ERTSQW1PT5YOF/tumblr_laleh2P3vE1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Madison Square Park. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/city-of-culture-of-galicia-santiago-de monthly 0.5 2010-10-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515202718-SXDD98AKP6C8LKEGUFD8/tumblr_la8vnqhmlJ1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY City of Culture of Galicia, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, by Peter Eisenman. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/maxxi-rome-by-zaha-hadid monthly 0.5 2010-10-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515203406-EP1FC01018XI7IYZS940/tumblr_la8vdbBsPK1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY MAXXI, Rome, by Zaha Hadid. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/city-hall-station-new-york monthly 0.5 2010-10-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515203116-5YDZ26L1S6ZLE7M8Y73P/tumblr_la4ob8fE9V1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY City Hall Station, New York. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/cinecitta-photographed-by-gregory-crewdson monthly 0.5 2010-10-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515203511-6V5Q828GMYQD9SCW81V3/tumblr_la4nmlEi181qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Cinecitta, photographed by Gregory Crewdson. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/vakko-fashion-center-istanbul monthly 0.5 2010-10-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515203620-YU3C91ZE6O6P2Z48M66W/tumblr_l9x9auCitn1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Vakko Fashion Center, Istanbul. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/lever-house-new-york monthly 0.5 2010-10-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515204007-SZK9M1EZ2H9M47XO3EU0/tumblr_l9x98snYzr1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Lever House, New York. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/mr-blandings-builds-his-dream-house monthly 0.5 2010-10-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515204321-XYJ3OB3Q8MMFGBZZJYKP/tumblr_l9vgfhXK5E1qdm8ato1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-trouble-with-turbines monthly 0.5 2010-10-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515205318-WWGYO389BFL1T1G9KS42/tumblr_l9vfy4V99B1qdm8ato1_r1_500.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The trouble with turbines– https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/washington-square-new-york monthly 0.5 2010-10-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515205421-K7S7N8IK87YYQ8Q1C2LB/tumblr_l9tue7jW9v1qdm8ato1_r1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Washington Square, New York. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/shim-sukkah-by-tindertinker monthly 0.5 2010-10-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515205820-PI577LIVUE8EY6Q1ENYI/tumblr_l9tu5xIPYw1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY “Shim Sukkah” by tinder.tinker. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/philippe-petit-at-the-world-trade-center-1974 monthly 0.5 2010-10-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515205513-XPGZ2OHOKYOQ0S6MJPC2/tumblr_l9rpt5pxjA1qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Philippe Petit at the World Trade Center, 1974. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/man-walking-down-the-side-of-a-building-at-the monthly 0.5 2010-10-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515206021-MWSVSHCACQ8UG73YM6O8/tumblr_l9rpoeVkgc1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building” at the Whitney Museum, 2010. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/bowery-belle-norman-fosters-new-tower-for monthly 0.5 2010-10-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515206609-DTD86SJU0TQ6TIJNHAK8/tumblr_l9opqqlDc31qdm8ato1_400.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY “Bowery Belle”: Norman Foster’s new tower for Sperone Westwater. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/friday-night-second-avenue-and-10th monthly 0.5 2010-10-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515206413-US3L7Q04ZGSCZ2T91T29/tumblr_l9opkuaAkZ1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Friday night, Second Avenue and 10th. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-geography-of-west-egg-and-east-egg monthly 0.5 2010-10-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515206704-NTM6EYHCLD3I58BW3G3J/tumblr_l9mf471p0h1qdm8ato1_540.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The geography of West Egg and East Egg. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/the-hearst-tower-on-a-rainy-night monthly 0.5 2010-10-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515206807-GNZARM0OPEJQU3R6TEZ7/tumblr_l9mbrsocep1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY The Hearst Tower, on a rainy night. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/since-were-no-longer-building-buildings monthly 0.5 2010-09-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515207013-80FCHJTG1P68XQ8GBGVG/tumblr_l9kr6bRlOr1qdm8ato1_250.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY Since we’re no longer building buildings– https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/a-well-capped-red-brick-tower-at-broadway-and monthly 0.5 2010-09-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606515208108-C8CRNOP9DWCWMAEVXLEW/tumblr_l9kqmoFZOw1qdm8ato1_1280.jpg DROWN ME IN BEAUTY A well-capped red brick tower at Broadway and 19th. https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/i-d monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Giotto monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BBC monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Museum+at+FIT monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/michael+maltzan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/orchard+street monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CABIN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/England monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nicholas+de+Monchaux monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sari+saree monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/postman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/legs monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pere+Lachaise monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hi+mom monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MetMuseum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/POPMUSIC monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pelle monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cy+Twombly monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RTC_NYC monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/shtreimel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MarkHartman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mulberry monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/costumes monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AlicePennefather monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/honeycomb monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CooperUnion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cellular monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/David+Chipperfield monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ORNAMENT monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Berlin+Sun+Theater monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/movie+sets monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SalvadorDali monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Howard+Zinn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Scandinavia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NYCDOT monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/gold monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Yayoi+Kusama monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/trilby monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alice+Neel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Antoni+Gaudi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Love+and+Rockets monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hand monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Henry+Wallace monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/salt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RPBWARCHITECTS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Joseph+Roulin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Shakespeare monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bernard+Tschumi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/oscar+niemeyer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/world+trade+center monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Stranger+than+Paradise monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/paul+rudolph monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Parthenon monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NYCBallet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lars+von+Trier monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/crosswalks monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BOOK+COVER+ART monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/the monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/microwave+oven monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/blue monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Morgan+Library monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/infinity monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/WEBSITE+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nam+Jun+Paik monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/I+M+Pei monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/broadway monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/United+Nations monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Downton+Abbey monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Martin+Luther+King monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jodi+Melnick monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Toyo+Ito monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hamburger+Banhof monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Margaux+Williamson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kamala+Harris monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Beats monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/camel+coat monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Roundabout+Theater monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/renewable+energy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LeighBowery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/memphis+design monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/speakers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Corinth monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JEWELRY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Max+Mara monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/David+Bowie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Prairie+House monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/rome monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/east+egg monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fantasy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tin+TIn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Barcelona monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HammershoiNYC monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Karim+Rashid monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fashions monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CEMETERIES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ryue+Nishizawa monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/William+Butler+Yeats monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Javitz+Center monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/West8 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pop+Mart monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ron+Galella monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NOTATION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/John+Pawson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alan+Cummings monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Top+of+the+Lake monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nordic+design monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jake+Tapper monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Johnson+Wax monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ossie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Broadway monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Paul+McCarthy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Brooklyn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/KenHermann monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/representation monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/paparazzi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ARTIST monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/flannel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EXHIBITION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Juliette+Longuet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/paintings monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/F.I.T. monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Georges+Braque monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/east+village monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BIG monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/New+York monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/roof monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Philip+Treacy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/WHITE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EXHIBITION+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Bronx+Museum+of+the+Arts monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Marion+Square monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Park+Avenue monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Agnes+Martin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/uniforms monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/West+57th+Street monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/rapp+and+rapp monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sidney+Paget monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/marcel+breuer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/New+York+Public+Library monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Reed+Seifer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/crematorium monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SCULPTURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Apple monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Spike+Jonze monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Olson+Kundig monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BEAUTY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sharpie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/60s monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cancer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Richard+Avedon monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Benin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/de+Kooning monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/WTF monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Herb+Greene monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hats monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/inception monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PORTRAITURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mick+Taussig monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Romanovs monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Roxane+Gay monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/milliner monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/medicine+cabinet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/pen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Microsoft monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/IKEA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ThePencilisaKey monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bjorn+Norgaard monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bureau+Spectacular monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Xuly+Bet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/light+fixture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vanderbilt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/STYLE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mark+Twain monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/High+Line monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/masks monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Game+of+Bowls monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/iPOD monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/elizabeth+streb monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/John+Singer+Sargent monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sts.+Peter+and+Paul+Cathedral monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gordon+Bunshaft monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Shayne+Oliver monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sari monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/marcel+gautherot monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bring+It+On monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Givenchy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Dan+Graham monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/spots monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Burghers+of+Calais monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/brooklyn+bridge monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Miu+Miu monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/women monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/iPhone monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Akihisa+Hirata monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Fogg+Art+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SNL monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Yoshio+Taniguchi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JOY+Designs monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FANTASY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Labrouste monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Scenes+from+a+Marriage monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Michele+Obama monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Adam+Curtis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bridgemarket monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Eye+Has+To+Move monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TEXTILES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/gothic monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HISTORICAL+RESTORATION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Paul+Rudolph monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/drugs monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lallo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/automobiles monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Dior monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/center+for+architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Impressionism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ucsd monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BMW monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Junya+Watanabe monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SOM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Scream monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Diller+Scofidio+and+Renfro monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tom+Wolfe monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Perry+King monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Frank+Stella monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Madonna monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tote+bag monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Richard+Serra monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/guggenheim monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Estonia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/POP+MUSIC monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kevin+Roche monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ett monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/South+Park monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PORTRAIT monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/pantyhose monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cor monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Paul+McCartney monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ralph+Rapson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Elizabeth+Taylor monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rijksmuseum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/New+National+Gallery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pawe%C5%82+Pawlikowski monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PORTRAITS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/gown monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ice+cream monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Yoko+Ono monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/pin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HubbardStreetDanceChicago monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Radiohead monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tower monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CharlesDarwin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/playing+cards monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Turner+Contemporary monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/elaine+scarry monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mannerheimintie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/George+Condo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/gregory+crewdson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bruce+Goff monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Beyer+Blinder+Belle monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/keffiyeh monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Metropolitan+Museum+of+Art monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/plywood monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ewa monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CARTOONS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GERMANY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Richard+Meier monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Girl+with+the+Dragon+Tattoo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/road+trip monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Parade+of+Nations monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/design monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/skull monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pontiac+GTO monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/exhibition monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alexander+Mcqueen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Blondie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lamp monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Washington+DC monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Femme+%C3%A9tendue+lisant monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/crowns monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/detroit+1-8-7 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ettore+sottsass monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Wolfgang+Tillmans monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Los+Angeles monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Abraham+Mignon monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/playgrounds monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Edge monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Patkau+Architects monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/japan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ergonomics monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NEUROSCIENCE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alexander+Calder monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/COSTUME monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Western+Pennsylvania+Conservancy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ETHNOGRAPHY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/japan+fashion+now monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Bling+Ring monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PROCESS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ILLUSTRATION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Racine monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tomasville monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/OMA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Africa monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/paintstick monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/site+art monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Saul+Bellow monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/midtown monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Wilhelm+Lehmbruck monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tate+Gallery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Korakrit+Arunanondchai monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LCT3 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/starchitecture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Any+Day+Now monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mushroom+cloud monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Indian+Ink monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/National+Civil+Rights+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Delirious+New+York monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hella+Jongerius monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eva+Zeisel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bruce+Silverstein monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/civic+architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Spike+Jonez monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Met+Breuer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/H.+R.+Giger monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Signature+Theatre monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ANATOMY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Brasil monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sweden monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ada+Louise+Huxtable monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Juan+de+Pareja monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cherry+red monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eating+Breakfast+with+your+Partner+on+a+Wagon monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Oahu monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Helsinki monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EXHIBIT+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fussball monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MUSIC monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vermeer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sprinklers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Noah+Davis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sandal monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/manhattan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fishs+eddy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Valentino monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/religion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Woody+Allen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Brad+Pitt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Joshua+Silver monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tragedy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/brian+de+palma monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Robert+Rauschenberg monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HISTORY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fashion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EttoreSottsass monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/San+Giorgio+Maggiore monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Twine monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Schiaparelli monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/coome+des+garcons monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EeroSaarinen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MOMA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ada+louise+huxtable monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Villa+Churchill monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/school monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/feathers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sharpstown monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tile monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Polly+Mellon monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hat monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/glass monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jonathan+Ive monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kaui monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CharlesJames+CostumeInstitute+MetMuseum+FASHION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/COUTURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Optimism+Project monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Fluxkits monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/memory monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Palais+Stoclet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Fascism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sheila+Heti monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/row+houses monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/house monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Albrecht+Durer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Freemans monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bruno+Taut monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Thorncrown+Chapel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Urs+Fischer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rosenborg+Castle monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/30+Rock monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Veruschka monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lorraine+Motel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DRAFTING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LINGERIE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/IBM+Pavilion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Glyptotek monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/city+of+culture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PRODUCT+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Muller+House monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Red+Sox monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/2+Columbus+Circle monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/libraries monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Michael+Kimmelman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Buffalo+Rising monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mid-century+Modernism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gary+Shteyngart monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/windows monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/bowery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Malick+Sidibe monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Miami monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TOYS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TheMet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hotels monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NEWS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RACE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/knapsack monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/pop-up monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/time monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Clodagh monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/nordic+design monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/skeletons monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Atomium monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/facade monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FASHION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Victor+Horta monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/trains monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Greece monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Fountainhead monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/saddle+shoes monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Teddy+Roosevelt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/restoration monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Walt+Disney monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Amsterday monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/street+art monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Michael+Graves monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/flowers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nan+Goldin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MetUnfinished monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Savannah monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pierre+Chareau monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PERFORMANCE+ART monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Food+Lion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/light+bulbs monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Helvetica monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pritzker+Prize monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TheBroad monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Athens monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/kansas monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DRAWING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EricGaskins monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Maison+de+Verre monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/analog monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Thom+Browne monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Miles+Davis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PRINTING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/light monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Killer+of+Sheep monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jamaica monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lawn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eero+Saarion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/adaptive+eyewear monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Industrial+Design monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lucio+costa monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JOURNALISM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Guaranty+Building monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Unter+der+Linden monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Whistler monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/gowns monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/psychoanalysis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/queen+sofia+spanish+institute monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SANAA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cardigan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/minimalism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ornament monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Seoul monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Le+Frak+City monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/iPad monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/oma+totem monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Romanesque monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TRADITION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NASA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/chair monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/turbine+farm monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cz%C4%99stochowa monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tennis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MUSEUM+OF+MODERN+ART monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/stage+sets monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Newbury+Street monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Exit+Through+the+Gift+Shop monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Elizabeth+Jane+Howard monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RENDERINGS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ICFF monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Freud+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pace+Gallery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/james+coviello monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/green+architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TABLETOP monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Herbert+Muschamp monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Edvard+Munch monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/wind+turbine monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Shutter+Island monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CANDY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/THEORY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Chris+Parnell monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Airblade monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Highway+Beautification+Act monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ExMachina monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MetroPictures monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Chelsea monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MEDIA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Third+World monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Memphis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Will+Ryman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/art+film monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/jewelry monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/financial+industry monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cupertino monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vincente+Minnelli monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CAD monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ANIMATION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rosemary+Harris monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tree monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Robert+Smithson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Arial monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ThomBrowne monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/history monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/grocery+stores monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/water monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Stockholm monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/New+Zealand monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Modigliani monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Basilica+Koekelberg monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MINIMALISM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gunnar+Asplund monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/barmacy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SagradaFamilia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/brutalism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fur+hat monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mussolini monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alexander+McQueen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PSYCHOLOGY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/metropolitan+life monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/David+Lynch monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Signature+Theater monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/David+Gladys+Wright monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hospital monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Crystal+Tile monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/park monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Damien+Hirst monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/utopia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Folk+Art+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/masai monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/product+design monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/planet-mag.com monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/COSTUMES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Asheville monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Trevor+Noah monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MenilCollection monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Satya+Paul monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/white+on+white monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MINIATURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Thorne+Miniature+Rooms monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Under+the+Radar monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Charleston monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/electronics monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sukkah monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Peter+Behrens monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bill+Clinton monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/asylum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GovernorsIsland monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/WMJ+Turner monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Frank+Gehry monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/drag+queen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/George+Clooney monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Anna+Piaggi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/swastika monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ALBUM+ART monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DavidBowieis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Leo+Stein monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/memoir monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Princeton monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Arthur+Conan+Doyle monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Skogskyrkog%C3%A5rden monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/banks monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Matilde+Cassani monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/POLITICS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mourning monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LIBRARY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Andy+Warhol monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Branagh monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/California monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Luc+Tuymans monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/chapel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Marlene+Dumas monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/frank+lloyd+wright monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mississippi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NinthWard monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/garage+sale monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CONCEPTUAL+ART monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Villa+Urbig monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PANTONE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/denim monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/William+Morris+Hunt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mascot monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/IsaacMizrahi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nagakin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Harry+Bertoia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Edward+Durell+Stone monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/skyline monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DANCE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CLOTHING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/man+walking+down+the+side+of+a+building monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/journal monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/composition monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/philadelphia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/grass monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/concert+hall monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/farming monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NewYork monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AUTOMOBILES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/french+garden monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rem+Koolhas monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pop+art monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Art+Institute+of+Chicago monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/medieval monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Union+Square monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MARKETING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/grand+projets monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/scarves monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/malachite monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Thom+Yorke monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/shoes monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CNNSotU monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Arrival monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LANDSCAPE+ARCHITECTURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hunters+Point+Library monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Disney monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Duro+Olowu monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Odillon+Redon monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FOOD monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Guggenheim monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Czech+Cubism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ubu+Gallery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Martin+Creed monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HenryJames monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/brasil monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BAROQUE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Swan+chair monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vik+Muniz monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ChristopherWheeldon monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cinderella monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rome monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HANDWRITING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/limestone monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/COLOR monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gaudi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Barbara+Gladstone monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Edouard+Vuillard monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Atelier+Bow-wow monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eric+Owen+Moss monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PRISON monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Viv+Albertine monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jackie+Kennedy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lebbeus+Woods monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/INTERIORS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FURNITURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LLBean monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sundance+Film+Festival monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Twin+Towers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/INDEPENDENCE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Karolina+Kawiaka monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/War+Horse monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ACCESSORIES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CindySherman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Fj%C3%A4llr%C3%A4ven monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MENSWEAR monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Stanford+White monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/billboards monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hans+Scharoun monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cazalet+Chronicles monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Paula+Cooper+Gallery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/optics monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Williamsburg+Bridge monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vatican+City monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/santiago+de+compostela monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Apollo+11 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/houston monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kazuyo+Sejima monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Masaba+Gupta monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SEXUALITY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Koloman+Moser monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Korea monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Karl+Lagerfeld monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Perry+Street monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Argo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Skarstadt+Gallery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/gaslight monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/new+york monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/home monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mayor+Bloomberg monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/postage monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Anna+Sui monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vincent+Scully monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sever+Hall monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eltiville monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rei+Kawakubo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CharlesJames+FASHION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/the+Face monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Melancholia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hut monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ikhlas+Khan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Worishofer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HerzogandDeMeuron monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/historic+preservation monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Deyrolle monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/royalty monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Public+Theater monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gandhara monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fluorescent monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/america monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/opium monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tablet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ABSTRACTION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tables monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/INTERIOR monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tablewares monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/khaki monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vitra monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mid-century+modern monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Google monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/framing monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/aerial+photography monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SICFashionTour monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/west+egg monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fabrication monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/iPod monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hiphop monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/White+Sun monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/E.+Faye+Jones monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Darwin+Martin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/danh+vo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/townhouses monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sabina+Spielrein monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RickOwens monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/field monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mary+ellen+carroll monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/wilderness monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hudson+Valley monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/baseball monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/physicality monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FondazionePrada monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/INDIA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/beekman+place monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/suburbs monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CNN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PHOTOGRPAHY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MOVIE+SETS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/stamp monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CINEMATOGRAPHY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DSRNY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/obsession monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/David+Zwirner monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HAUTE+COUTURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tom+Stoppard monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SCIENCE+FICTION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PastAsPrologue monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Saul+Bass monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Carl+Sagan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alien monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Polyphonia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/APPAREL monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Amie+Siegel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ettore+Sottsass monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Old+Slave+Mart monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Patti+Boyd monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Spain monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Barack+Obama monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/She+Stadium monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vibram monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pussy+Riot monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/McKim+Mead+%26amp%3B+White monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rachel+Maddow monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Marina+Abramowic monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/URBANPLANNING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Meta-Monumental+Garage+Sale monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mail monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/homeless+shelter monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Taxi+and+Limousine+Commission monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cary+grant monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Refuge+Tonneau monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/International+Style monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FLUXUS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Belfast monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/World+Trade+Center monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Knoll monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GyorgiLigeti monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/philadelphia+art+museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jennifer+Egan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/National+Museum+of+Finland monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Berlin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Apollo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pina monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ART+HISTORY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Plaza+Square monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Just+My+Type monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sancho+madridejos monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/INSTALLATION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mel+Williamson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bishakh+Som monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Edward+Weston monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LITERATURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/record+player monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Neues+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/stair monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/polshek monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Schlieman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MCNY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Goncharova monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Grand+Central+Station monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/incandescent monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/galicia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Dodge+House monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ann+Demeulmeester monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Carpenter+Center monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gertrude+Stein monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FITNYC monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AnUnrulyHistory monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Michelle+Obama monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Walter+Van+Beirendonck monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vincent+Van+Gogh monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/China+Through+the+Looking+Glass monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Polaroid monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LED monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Murmur monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gage+Clemenceau monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Asia+Society monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Marcel+Breuer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Joe+Namath monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Norway monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Auguste+Rodin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cadbury monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Greenwich+Street monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fence monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/villa monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SPORTSWEAR monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Korento monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Art+Deco monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Barbie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Shepard+Fairey monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/originality monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cambridge monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LeCorbusier monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mies+Van+der+Rohe monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Christopher+Plummer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Zaha+Hadid monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Assumption+Cathedral monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Billy+Beane monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Calixte+Dakpogan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Little+House monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FONTS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HaasBrothers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Koln monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/taxi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Flux monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Victorian monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MUSEUM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GARMENTS+ACCESSORIES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Francesco+Clemente monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/IDENTITY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Michael+Jackson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/crazy+dream monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Academy+Awards monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SOCIAL+MEDIA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hicks+Stone monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Matthew+Barney monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/totemic+sculpture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lady+Gaga monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Georgia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/George+Stacey monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rudolf+Stingel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PPE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CRITICISM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Stanley+Donwood monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mid monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/peter+eisenman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RHEINLAND monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/profane monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rose+Hall monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/plants monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/butterfly monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/social+architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/boots monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/perspective monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/self+portrait monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sou+Fujimoto monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Armory monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BIOGRAPHY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HOTELS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/childhood monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Chipp monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/COMPUTERS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hawaii monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Salman+Rushdie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/transportation monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/airplanes monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Main+Street+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/3D monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sears monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Watch+the+Throne monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Massive+Attack monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DS%2BR monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/geometry monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HAT monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/eyeglasses monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pixies monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Erechtheum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Warhol monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Frick+Collection monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GRAPHIC+NOVELS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Dream+Hotel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ATHLETIC+SHOES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Robert+Ryman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Belgium+Six monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/american+radiator+building monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/UPPER+EAST+SIDE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RETROSPECTIVE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PS1 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/motorcycle monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MACHINES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PRT monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HBO monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/1980%27s monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PedroGuerrero monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Wizard+of+Oz monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Asian+American+Writers+Workshop monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GraphicDesign monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Angela+Garcia+de+Paredes monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/balaclava monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Close+Encounters+of+the+Third+Kind monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/abstract+expressionism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Oslo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Liverpool monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hollywood+Hills monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Marimekko monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PUNK monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MuseumOfTheCityOfNY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/top+hat monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/H3+Hardy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/rhinoplasty monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Crown+Hall monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gap monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lantau monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LosAngeles monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Iittala monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NYCMTA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Smithsonian monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/appliance monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Fallingwater monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cartesian monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Russia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/auction monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GraceFarms monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TheDaliMuseum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/apple monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Barcelona+Chair monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Astoria monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/friedlander monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/China monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jacob+Lawrence monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Quentin+Tarantino monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/organic monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mansion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Columbus+IN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TheWorldofAnnaSui monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PACKAGING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/A+Dangerous+Method monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Keith+Olbermann monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/refuge monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/leprechaun monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/My+Little+Pony monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/icons monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SHoP monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LOT-EK monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/garment+district monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Oprah monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mid-century+modernism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Maureen+Footer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ORNITHOLOGY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/nothingtodoterencekoh monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DIA+Beacon monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/zaha+hadid monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Scandinavia+House monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/folding monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FrankLloydWright monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Watts+Towers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CollectiveDesignFair monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Yves+Saint+Laurent monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Wang+Shu monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Roosevelt+Hotel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Heydon+Hall monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/town+square monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Antwerp monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/slavery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/dresses monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/supermarkets monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/decoration monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nepal monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Michael+K.+Williams monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Boston monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ali+Farka+Toure monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/99 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Margin+Call monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tristram+Shandy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EXHIBIT monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cindy+Sherman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PUBLISHING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/A+Subtlety monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Arne+Jacobsen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pina+Bausch monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/doors monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/paul+thek monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hugh+Hardy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/books monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/robert+de+niro monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LP9 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Belgium monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/imac+g3 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Louis+Kahn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hairstyles monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/coneptualism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Maurice+Chestnut monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Time+Warner+Center monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Thomas+Alva+Edison monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/washing+machine monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/steel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/spain monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Richard+Rogers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ROCK monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alessi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/signature monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/green+design monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/church monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Richard+Burton monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TheJewishMuseum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Secret+History monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/birds monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vitruvius monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Robert+McLiam+Wilson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Perriand monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/uniform monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Les+Yeux+Clos monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Buddha monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/polysterene monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Modernisme monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tutankhamun monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/parking+garge monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/neons monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/twin+towers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/facebook monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lowboy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/junya+ishigami monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MOSAIC monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DOLLHOUSES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ABSTRACTART monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/University+Club monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/URBAN+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/embellishment monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/craft monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JOYDesigns monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/textiles monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Back+to+Back+Theatre monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/vacuum+cleaning+robot+malaysia. monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Luck+of+the+Irish monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/space monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Wallander monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bilbao monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Anton+Chekov monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Archigram monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rachel+Feinstein monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/theater monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/flagship+store monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/silver+towers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/los+angeles monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Queen+Elizabeth monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Prada monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mitt+Romney monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Chanel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Brussels monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Japan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rachel+Whiteread monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RESTORATION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/art+museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Louie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Basquiat monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CooperHewitt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Diana+Vreeland monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Melnikov+House monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alibis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Macbeth monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Chalmers+Street monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/death monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Beatles monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Grace+Farms monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/winter monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/factories monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Moneyball monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/live+oak monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Armand+Bartos monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/rubber+boots monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BRANDING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Worlds+Fair monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mr+blandings+builds+his+dream+house monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bjarke+Engels monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Robert+Wilson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Banksy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CHOREOGRAPHY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kyle+Bukhari monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/A+Moveable+Feast monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JanPalach monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/damien+hirst monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Scottsdale monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/union+square monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ganesh+versus+the+Third+Reich monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lapis+lazuli monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Clash monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sylvester+stallone monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/communist monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/smartphone monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/bicycle monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Oscar+Niemeyer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sterling+Ruby monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bjarke+Ingels monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Roland+Reisley monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Amateur+Architectecture+Studio monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Stephen+Meisel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/enclosure monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/iMac monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/farm monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/black+and+white monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Arnaldur+Indri%C3%B0ason monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/grief monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sanctuary monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/scaffolding monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Illuminated+Metropolis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HOK monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/POLITICAL+ACTIVISM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MetKawakubo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/handwriting monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GUCCI monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HOSPITALITY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Manitoga monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/French+workers+jacket monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Yves+Klein monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Exposed monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Islam monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/promenade monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Keira+Knightley monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Finland monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/panopticon monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Malia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/detail monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Morphosis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PRINTMAKING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/holland+tunnel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Terence+Koh monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Musuem+of+American+Folk+Art monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CasaMilla monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/STREET+ART monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/COMEDY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nrityagam monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Teresa+Saldana monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Francoise+Gilot monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/STADIUMS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alvar+Aalto monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SaraBermansCloset monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/World%27s+End monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hussein+Chalayan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Charlotte+Perriand monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Philip+Lim monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MONOCHROME monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/grey+suede monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pablo+Picasso monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Ballad+of+Sexual+Dependency monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DIA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/computers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Weejuns monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nevada monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Commes+des+Garcons monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Heydon monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GuggenheimMuseum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TRANSPORTATION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Norman+Foster monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Delhaize monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Robert+Mapplethorpe monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Azzedine+Alaia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Henning+Mankell monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Roosevelt+IS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/YSL monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sara+Vide+Ericson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Runaway monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/john+wray monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/80s monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Franz+Hals monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Brugge monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mies+van+der+Rohe monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bob+Dylan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lytro monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/VIDEO monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Haider+Ackermann monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/INDUSTRIAL+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lower+manhattan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Donald+Judd monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TABLEWARE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jackson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mansard monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hood+By+Air monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/classical+architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/red monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Worth monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Miguel+Adrover monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/shack monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AESTHETICS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Esther+McCoy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tokyo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/microphone monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Wendell+Bernette monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/thonet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Painted+Rocks+at+Revolver+Creek monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/rex monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/meena+kadri monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/newspapers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/typewriter monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BOOK+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/subway+maps monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Domus monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Robert+Plant monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MEMOIR monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Michael+Werner+Gallery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/De+Rotterdam monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Grand+Jet%27e monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nagasaki monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vermont monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MODERN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Black+Madonna monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sperone+westwater monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ariadne monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eureka+Street monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tallinn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/landmarks monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/jeans monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Aeron monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RELIGIOUS+ARCHITECTURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Harvard monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Christopher+Payne monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Honolulu monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bea+Akerlund monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tribeca monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GEOGRAPHY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/michigan+theater monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Karl+Knausg%C3%A5rd monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kanye+West monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Christian+Louboutin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/leonard+street monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/woody+allen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lever+house monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Huckleberry+Finn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/URBAN+PLANNING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EYEWEAR monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ganesh monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sandro+Botticelli monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Asia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Francois+Mitterand monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/feminism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GRAPHIC+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Marc+Maron monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/North+Carolina monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cristobal+balenciaga monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/aerialist monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/saree monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ambassador monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Harpers+Bazaar monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Dutch+painting monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Storefront+for+Art+and+Architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ikea monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PUPPETS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mark+Cohen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bach monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/scandinavian+design monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/self-representation monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/J+M+W+Turner monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/eggs monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/John+Galliano monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jimenez+Lai monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ruins+of+Windsor monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/New+School monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lazy+Sunday monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Troy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sigmund+Freud monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Olympics monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/spot monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cooper+Hewitt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Snow+White monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Toronto monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Typologies+of+Terror monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Amar+Chitra+Katha monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/chelsea monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Denys+Lasdun monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/optimism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tower+Records monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/POETRY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Met+Breuer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CostumeInstitute monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MP3+player monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/aiany monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BOOKS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Moscow monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/natural+history monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/South+Carolina monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PLANNING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SPORTS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Target monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DIORAMA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Charles+Barnett monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MarcelBreuer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/acrylic monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Samuel+Beckett monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Architectural+League monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AdriaanGeuze monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nigeria monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/macaques monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ProustsMuse monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/coronation monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sacred monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cathedral monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eureka+Springs monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Trisha+Brown monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sony monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Diamond+Head monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/STANDUP monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/television monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CONCEPTUALART monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/aesthetics monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PS+1 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Archie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/How+Should+a+Person+Be monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Dante+Ferretti monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/penn+station monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sainsbury+Center+for+Visual+Arts monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ReiKawakubo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Finlandia+Hall monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Henri+Matisse monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Comme+des+Garcons monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/please+give monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/venice monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/polka+dots monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Joan+Mitchell monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/IrvingPenn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/THEATER monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/bondi+blue monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jimmy+Zombie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ARCHTECTURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Brooklyn+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cooper+union monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Harry+Harlow monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DrawingCenter monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/makeover monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MODELS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TheMetropolitanMuseumofArt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Barcelona+Pavilion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Louis+Sullivan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ingmar+Bergman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NEWSPAPERS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LANDSCAPE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CharlesJames monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Herman+Miller monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MFA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Otis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/media monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/McQueen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Das+Racist monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Romanov monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CRAFT monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ireland monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/70%27s monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/France monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TECHNOLOGY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/bilbao monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Patti+Smith monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ICFF2015 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JacquelinedeRibes monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/biscuits monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/paperbacks monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Frank+Lloyd+Wright monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/abstraction monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/quartz monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Waffle+House monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Beaux+Arts monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/John+Lennon monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Starship monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/UpperEastSide monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cremorne+Gardens monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/soup+can monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MetropolitanOpera monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ray+and+charles+eames monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Houston monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Renzo+Piano monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Led+Zeppelin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vija+Celmins monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Potsdam monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/new+york+studio+gallery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lady+Bird+Johnson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SURREALISM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/couch monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gaultier monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/shim monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mrinalini+Mukherjee monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mali monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sint+Salvator monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/f+scott+fitzgerarld monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/normcore monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Dieter+Rams monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sweater monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/models monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hunter monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/theodor+geisel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kloster+Eberbach monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ghostwritten monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/vakko monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Comedy+Central monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RandCompany monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/corporate+logos monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/toilet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/John+Dinkaloo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Don+DeLillo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mystery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/chock+full+o+nuts monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/office+tower monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Perez+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kiasma monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Saucier+Perrotte monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TYPOGRAPHY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Manhattan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/female+figure monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/photography monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/James+Melvin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/John+Chamberlain monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/New+York+Post monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MODERNISM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/housing monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/appliances monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SPECIAL+EFFECTS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TELEVISION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PicassoSculpture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RemKoolhas monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FUTURISM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GROTESQUE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/IBM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Brutalism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MuseumatFIT monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/signage monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Acropolis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cemetery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Uniformity monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/apps monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PORNOGRAPHY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MetropolitanMuseum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ICONOGRAPHY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/art monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EXHIBITIONS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lincoln+Center monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JFK+Airport monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Chandigarh monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/My+Bloody+Valentine monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/black monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/vaults monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Steven+Holl monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Liam+Gillick monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Le+Corbusier monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GRAPHICDESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/jonathan+kirschenfeld monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/madison+avenue monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Paredes+Pedrosa+Arquitectos monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Timberland monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/U2 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MUSEUMS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LANDSCAPEARCHITECTURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/moma monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/jazz monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BRIDGES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Martha+Rosler monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pergamon+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JohnJeremiahSullivan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SecondAvenueSubway monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/First+Love monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mad+Men monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/white monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/furniture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ragnar+Kjartansson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Frederick+Law+Olmsted monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Diller+Scofidio+%2B+Renfro monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Naeem+Kahn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/commercialism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/train+station monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Albert+Souto+de+Moura monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Falling+Man monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Whitney+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/engineering monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lucky+Louie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/small+scale+big+change monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/nudes monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/National+Museum+of+the+American+Indian monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/signals monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Wright+Brothers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/architects monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Countryside monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Picasso monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/otto+kahn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/clothing monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Midnight+in+Paris monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MASKS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/atomic+bomb monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ruscha monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/John+Updike monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Barclays+Center monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rigoletto monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/color monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/New+York+Times monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rudi+Gernreich monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mitte monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Dries+van+Noten monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SKETCHING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/kimonos monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Thomas+Kirkbride monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lipstick monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Metropoitan+Museum+of+Art monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Workin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FIGURATION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bentonville monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/A+Cock+and+Bull+Story monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TAILORING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/philippe+petit monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DEITIES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/atomic+testing monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Maison+Domino monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/memorial monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alice+Walton monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/WS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jack+Shainman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RETAIL monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/department+store monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/warehouses monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sculpture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hancock+Tower monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Exhibition monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/grey monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Steve+Schapiro monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MoMA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Her monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Edward+Degas monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Michael+Kors monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/gaultier monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Joanna+Hogg monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/john+currin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ben+Affleck monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cape monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Meindl monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/typography monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/yard monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Siouxsie+Sioux monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/egg+timer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Parle-G monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Michael+Stein monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RECONSTRUCTION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Princess+Beatrice monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sharp monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Helsinki+Central+Railroad+Station monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Be+Here+Now monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PHOTGRAPHY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jay-Z monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/carriages monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Suzy+Menkes monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Seydou+Keita monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HOUSE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HIKING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ralph+Lauren monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Modernism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Madison+Square+Garden monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/VBN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mark+rothko monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/surrealism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CountessGreffulhe monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eiffel+Tower monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/downtown monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/THEBODYINPAIN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Abraham+Lincoln monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eliel+Saarinen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/rhinestones monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/american+standard+building monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Beasts+of+the+Southern+Wild monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Balenciaga monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SCRAPBOOKING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NationalGeographic monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Robert+Graham monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Olivetti monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kolumba monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/suit monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/necktie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Issey+Miyake monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lupita+Nyong%27o monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/chocolate monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Russell+Wright monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nefertiti monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gary+Winogrand monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/portraits monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Fashion+Week monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jim+Jarmusch monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Christopher+Columbus monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Winterfeldplatz monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rem+Koolhaus monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Highclere+Castle monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Christopher+Dresser monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pollock monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SCIENCE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vali+Export monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mid-century+modern monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/city+hall monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FEMINISM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/souvenir monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Princess+Katherine monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eva+Hesse monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/one+madison+square monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/chandelier monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/heels monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/climate monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Adam+Clayton monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/APPLIANCES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Boscobel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PAMM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/grid monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Katrina monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/stockings monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kermlin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MTA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Louis+CK monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LANDSCAPING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Royal+Mail monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Francoise monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cinecitta monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Visit+from+the+Goon+Squad monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Guastavino monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/red+brick monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Arbaty monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AIArchitect monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/STAGE+SET monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MIDCENTURY+MODERN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/psychedelic monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Great+Britain monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Robert+Redford monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Phyllis+Galembo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JohnHeyduk monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/James+Perse monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nick+Cave monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/National+Theatre monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NeuerPavilion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gagosian monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BeyondFashion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Simpsons monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/As+Little+Design+As+Possible monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cathy+Horyn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EEG monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/COMICS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Irving+Gill monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Beats+by+Dr.+Dre monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alessandro+Michele monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/glen+cove monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/gagosian monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/McKim+Mead+and+White monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/new+york+university monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/resin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SET+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/marker monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/home+remodeling monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Postmodernism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lucian+Freud monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/studio+804 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Queens+Public+Library monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Steve+Jobs monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/yellow+cab monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nirvana monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/diagrams monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Usonian+Houses monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/condominiums monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fascinator monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/rocky monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TARANTINO monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fonts monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Konstantin+Melnikov monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GENDER monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HOUSING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/POSTERS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/soccer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BOFFO monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Roxbury monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mckim+mead+and+white monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/futurism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Merce+Cunningham monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Satanic+Verses monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gray+Art+Gallery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jeff+Koons monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Miuccia+Prada monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/long+island monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Turner monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CONSTRUCTION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Denmark monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Doris+Duke monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/OtakarNovotny monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Fluxus monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/upper+east+side monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jewish+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BlingRingMovie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/paul+goldberger monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PERFORMANCE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Teddy+Tinling monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mike+Mills monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/WNYC monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pudong monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/assemblage monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DRESSES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gordon+Matta-Clark monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hinrich+Baller monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eero+Saarinen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fit monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Andre+Leon+Talley monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Herzog monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AtlanticOcean monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hearst+Tower monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AMERICA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/disasters monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/apartment+building monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ramp monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/vernacular monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Morning+Becomes+Ecclectic monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GALLERY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Surrealism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SekouCooke monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hippy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/plastic monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kazan+Cathedral monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tinder.tinker monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/2012%E2%80%932555 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/8+House monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PREFABRICATION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Greg+Lynn monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Massimiliano+Adami monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pop+Art monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/manufacturers+hanover monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/public+space monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Arkansas monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ARCHAEOLOGY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sex+and+the+City monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Brooke+Astor monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nike monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sigmar+Polke monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/masonry monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MuseodelasAmericas monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/animal+prints monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lower+east+side monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tracy+Austin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Raimund+Abraham monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cardboard monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/precast+concrete monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rodarte monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hand+dryer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Norwegian+Opera+and+Ballet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Galleria monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Leigh+Bowery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pauline+Kael monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/couture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/column monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Home+Sweet+Home monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/biography monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/City+hall+station monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/bryant+park monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Aldo+Van+Eyck monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Medieval monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/bryant+park+hotel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Insecurities%3A+Tracing+Displacement+and+Shelter monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Faro monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/REM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Duncan+Phyfe monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/font monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cubism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/panties monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Peter+Zumthor monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Taxi+of+Tomorrow monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Zwrirner monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Roberto+Burle+Marx monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Puvis+de+Chavannes monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/museums monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Peter+Schjeldahl monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/KaraWalkerDomino monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Halston monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Buffalo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Andy+Samberg monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Boullee monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Django+Unchained monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/caricature monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AEG monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MOVIES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/INSTALLATIONS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/IwanBaan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/1930%27s monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/rihanna monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Prague monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Metropolitan+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GREEN+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Joy+Mitra monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/refrigerator monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ARTISAN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ivy+Style monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LingerieHistory monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/opera+house monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Scotland monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/exhibits monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/india monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GRAFFITI monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rotterdam monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Food+Emporium monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/williamsburg+bridge monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ric+Owens monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Maori monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ed+Kienholz monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FairyTaleFashion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Penelope+Tree monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Chiwetel+Eliofor monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/digital monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cote+d%27Or monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cross+dressing monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/football monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gothic monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SOFTWARE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MasabaG monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/david+mitchell monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Odissi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Royalton monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sugar+Sugar monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RUSSIA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mary+Boone monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CHOCOLATE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/dior monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Surupa+Sen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Five+Car+Stud monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Copenhagen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/COLLAGE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/astronaut monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/l+%26amp%3B+m+arts monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Proust monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DeliriousMet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/drag monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/animals monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Romauld+Hazoume monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/myrna+loy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hitler monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/costume monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LANGUAGE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/KarlFriedrichSchinkel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Karolia+Waclawiak monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NYPL monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Santiago+Calatrava monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Seven+Woolly+Mammoths monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JOURNAL monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/metal monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Henry+Leutwyler monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Girls monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/India monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/chalice monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Dorothea+Lange monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Maurizio+Catellan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/VOYAGER monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NicolaBateman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/W57 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Michelangelo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Germany monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Fenway+Park monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/George+Harrison monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/public+art monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/noses monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/emotionalism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EXBHIBITION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Madison+Avenue monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sherlock+Homes monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Newtown monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/West+Village monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/library monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/woodworking monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/burqa monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jeffrey+Kilmer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Museum+of+Fine+Arts monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/trisha+brown monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Biltmore monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/S+C+Johnson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Constable monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MetBreuer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/italy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DonnaTartt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/finland monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/preppy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Edward+Hopper monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rabindranath+Tagore monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Doris+Salcedo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/restaurant monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/peep+toe monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/comfort monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vilhelm+Hammershoi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DRAWINGS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/National+Design+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Imperial+Hotel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Black+Fashion+Designers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ARCHITECTURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MEMES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/African+American+history monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Andrew+Carnegie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/po+lin+monastery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AlbertoGiacometti monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/vicuna monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DOLLS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/modernism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/New+York+City monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/plaza monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/som monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/deli monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CasaBatllo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/skirt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/communication monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/portraiture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Guggenheim+Museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AMO monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EUR monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FILM monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/poker monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FICTION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Antonio+Lopez monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Suzanne+Geiss monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/UNHCR monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Boat+and+Tote monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ren+Ri monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eksa monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Viking+Press monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LANDSCAPE+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Eudora+Welty monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Upper+West+Side monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/graffiti monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/gordon+bunshaft monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Met monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tablets monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/KCRW monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Golden+Record monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Shaker monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fairytales monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Digital+Shorts monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Philip+Goodwin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hipster monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Winter+Palace monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MSNBC monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/White+River+Junction monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Anders+Olin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/On+Architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/preservation monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Helen+Day+Art+Center monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/adaptive+reuse monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Just+Kids monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ParkAvenueArmory monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Florine+Stettheimer monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PAINITING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/brick monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Dough+Wheeler monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BOOK+COVERS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/homeless monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/recycling monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/graphic+design monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Daily+Show monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lucio+Costa monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vivienne+Westwood monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/painting monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kinky+Boots monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Alvernia+Studios monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hiroshima monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Van+Alen+Institute monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Paris monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nissan monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/taxidermy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cashmere monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hamsa monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Narcopolis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/paint monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/pilgrimage monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Stieg+Larsson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/architectural+model monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/greenwich+village monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/William+J.+Clinton+Presidential+Center monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Museum+of+Modern+Art monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mad+men monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hilma+af+Klint monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kevin+Kieran monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/henry+bertoia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Personal+Rapid+Transport monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Frances+Ha monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/spacesuit monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/McCarthy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/lower+manhattan+expressway monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gunne+Sax monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Atlantic+Heights monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mel+Gibson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/balenciaga monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/St.+Petersburg monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hong+kong monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/turbine+factory monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Savage+Beauty monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Britain monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/skyscraper monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Madelon+Vreisendorp monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ernest+Hemingway monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EXHIBITS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/POPCULTURE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/horse monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/frank+gehry monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/monumentality monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Margate monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/London monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/brasilia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/John+Cage monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/DeborahBerke monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/80%27s monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ART monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sauerbruch+Hutton monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nils+Karsten monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/IrmaBloom monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Simone+Rocha monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jo+Nesbo monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hilary+Clinton monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/McDonalds monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Charleseton monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/bookstore monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Spring+2014 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/glass+flowers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Base+Station monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/detroit monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/International+Herald+Tribune monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Viggo+Mortensen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AntoniGaudi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/garage monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MetSargent monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/subway monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mortality monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ChronicTown monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SHOES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/prefabricated monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/A+Moon+Shaped+Pool monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/storms monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Long+Lines+building monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/United+Architects monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NND monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/abc+home monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Samir+Bantal monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/headphones monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sistine+Chapel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ida monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ADVERTISING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/porkpie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/niqab monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LANDSCAPE+PAINTING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PHOTOGRAPHY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JFK monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FOLLY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/jkmm monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Nathalie+des+Bois monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Americanah monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/postcard monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/austerity monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Banister+Fletcher monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jazz+at+Lincoln+Center monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Harvard+Club monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tapestry monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kitty+Hawk monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/grands+projets monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bob+Mackie monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/design+competition monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/GAMES monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/coffee+shop monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/istanbul monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hauptbahnhof monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/turtleneck monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/One+Writer%27s+Beginnings monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Glass+Project monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hindustan+Motors monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Cyclops monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MAPS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/IFPDA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/POP-UP monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/punk monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/carpet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/great+gatsby monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Adolf+Loos monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sans+Souci monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Carl+Jung monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/One+Day monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tableware monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mimi+Lien monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vikram+Chatwal monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HOLLYWOOD monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MEDICINE monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Museum+of+the+City+of+New+York monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/tekserve monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Shakuntala monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/album+cover monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Leap+Into+the+Void monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/drawings monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/International+Tennis+Hall+of+Fame monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mackay+Lyons+Sweetaple monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ICONS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/compulsion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/grunge monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Pieter+Brueghel monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CHINA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/NewOrleans monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ledoux monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/reading monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sukkah+city monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/SplendidIndiaCloset monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/WRITING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/technology monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/arcade monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rabbit+Run monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Polshek monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ben+Aine monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Scandinavian+design monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/stone monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Polshek+Partnership monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bono monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Riita+Ikonen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TWA+Terminal monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/BIOLOGY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/EARTH+ART monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/STAGE+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/CommedesGarcons monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/China+Through+The+Looking+Glass monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mannequin+pis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ART+BOOKS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/corporate+architecture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gerhard+Richter monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Josef+Albers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Soundsuit monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ESPN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Princess+Cadence monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FredandGinger monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Larkin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/dr.+martens monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Calvin+Klein monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PAINTING monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/menstruation monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/INTERIOR+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/weather monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/VenusWilliams monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Emily+Arkin monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Arizona monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/the+museum+at+fit monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/picasso monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/skin+color monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Design+Museum+Gent monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sneakers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/plagiarism monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Velazquez monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Chitra+Ganesh monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Biyajini+Satpathy monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/william+pereira monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/flatiron monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Brooklyn+Bridge monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Converse monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Raf+Simons monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/whitney+museum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RenzoPiano monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ookie+Doll monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ceramic+tile monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/mural monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Hermitage monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/skeuomorph monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/botany monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Dyson monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/closer+to+god monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Levi%27s monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bog+Gruen monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/STORE+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Vogue monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Yellow+Birds monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/prosthetics monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PerezArtMuseum monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/beeswax monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kevin+Powers monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/rural+studio monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ThomBrowneNY monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mr.+Blackwell monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/spanish+moss monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Descendants monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gent monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ringo+Starr monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Marlon+Blackwell monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/norman+foster monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/grammy+awards monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/step+dancing monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TheHills monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Mississippi+River monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/emotion monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Acquavella+Gallery monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/i+m+pei monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/MANIFESTO monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Humboldt+Box monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/crime+fiction monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/fur+coat monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/RADIO monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Josef+Hoffman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HenkWildschut monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Antonio+Martorell monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Chaos+to+Couture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/dress monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Lady+Peeps monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kenneth+Branagh monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Philippe+Starck monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/washington+square monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/aricoco monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Marcolini monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/router monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/madison+square+park monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/TENNIS monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/dan+rockhill monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/JanPalachMemorial monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tracy+Chapman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Columbus+Circle monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/plaid monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Braun monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/pacoca monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Cramps monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/James+McNeil+Whistler monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Jeet+Thayil monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ugly monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bleu+de+Travail monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/9%2F11 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Bill+Cunningham monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Helene+Binet monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Walker+Evans monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rosamond+Bernier monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/keith+de+lellis monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/modern+furniture monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Laurence+Ratner monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Winter+2014 monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Rembrandt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/eminem monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/concrete monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Highline monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/cab monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Egypt monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/crop+irrigation monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/OPERA monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/scandinavia+house monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Porpentine monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Marilyn+Monroe monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/AT%26amp%3BT monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hair monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Handspring+Puppet+Company monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/marimekko monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Tatzu+Nishi monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/The+Visitors monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kodak monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Ram+Dass monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/ScanHouse monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Daphne+Guinness monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Temple+of+Dendur monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/sportswear monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sherlock+Holmes monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Paramount monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Peter+Eisenman monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/LIGHTING+DESIGN monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/HerzogdeMeuron monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/FIT monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/PRESERVATION monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Museum+of+Liverpool monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kristen+Greenidge monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Gandia monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Sussex+Street monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/hearst monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Kai+Althoff monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Danish+modern monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/drownmeinbeauty/tag/Window+Shopping monthly 0.5 https://www.nalinamoses.com/about daily 0.75 2020-12-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1548766578428-6EEPCCOCMLSU0XYKDLBW/Flower_01_BW.jpg About https://www.nalinamoses.com/singlehandedly daily 0.75 2024-01-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/b7840fdb-a7d2-4acb-954e-4f05f976f4df/SINGLEHANDEDLY.jpg SINGLE-HANDEDLY https://www.nalinamoses.com/blog daily 0.75 2025-09-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/f93f54a5-287c-4cdf-b276-b42829ead8e0/SQUARE+02.png BLOG - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771474515319-7BUR4D4XJ16PWBS1N52E/RICHTER%252BMEADOWLAND%252B1985.jpg BLOG - TRICKSTER https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771474131520-JP2ZRJJCQEQGPWDF090E/RUTH%25252BASAWA%25252BWATERCOLOR.jpg BLOG - PATTERN LANGUAGE Ruth Asawa’s drawings and paintings, overshadowed by her iconic wire sculptures, are more resolutely modern and more complex. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771474550180-IS2LQ9723QR4O7IPN42D/ANTHORA.png BLOG - ANTIQUITIES The graphic design of a familiar object stirs memory. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771473566132-GB5RNFTXNS6LQFK9G0EB/Screenshot%2B2026-01-31%2B6.43.54%2BPM.png BLOG - DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDER Design proposals for New Gaza that are predicated on the removal of Gazans are simply obscene. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771473727353-3GZKUIG3YYF8L2U5R34P/LAURIE%252BSIMMONS%252BLYING%252BBOOK%252B1990.jpg BLOG - OUT OF THIS WORLD When the act of writing becomes as immersive, disorienting, and pleasure-giving as the act of reading. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771474600645-5JTDV3MCDYD53RCZBDBC/LUNAR.jpg BLOG - LUNATICS The World Monument Fund’s project to preserve the sites of the Moon landings seems entirely misbegotten. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771473754304-JCKD3JR01SL1RQ24Z9CS/FLESH.png BLOG - MORE IS MORE The novel “Flesh” leaves this reader wanting basic human emotions. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771473821270-ORB50PIYO7TPQTND9Y6Z/SOUTH%252BPARK%252BWHITE%252BHOUSE.png BLOG - FRIENDLY FACES EVERYWHERE In the current political climate, the delinquent juvenile absurdism of “South Park” hits the spot. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771474043137-SCHKGAEON7FI1YHMY63Z/Gabriele%2BM%25C3%25BCnter%2BHofImSchnee1911%2B02.png BLOG - LAYING IT ON The paintings of Gabrielle Munter are physical constructions, built from layer upon layer of paint. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771472317224-G7CZ0SE653ZE06R8PXC4/BRANDENBURG+CONCERTOES.jpg BLOG - IT'S COMPLICATED A live performance of Bach’s six Brandenberg Concertoes suggests that chaos is an element of great music. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771474249451-OA7U6ZJ1LMG1WWQ1ANEI/MIRALLES%2BPARLIAMENT.jpg BLOG - SHAKEN AND STIRRED The agitated architecture of the Scottish Parliament Building suggest a new kind of government. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771474690423-JY5S5WG20MKB9VHXDUY9/VANDA%252BSTOREHOUSE.jpg BLOG - EVERYTHING AND The pleasure of the V&A Storehouse in London lies in its radical lack of discrimination. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771474452690-RY5I1UC0PIN708GD7H0T/SALON%2B94.png BLOG - READY FOR MY CLOSEUP At a popular new gallery, contemporary artworks are appreciated as a backdrop for cellphone photography rather than objects in themselves. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771472854405-6I04HRFW4LIW438X54V5/CHAGALL+LA+PARADE+AU+VILLAGE+1964.jpeg BLOG - SEEING GREEN At a certain kind of art gallery, artworks are treated like currency. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1771474454389-SB5NGHAPUV15UTSG5U1K/ANN%2BRAY%2BNO%2BGAME%2BALEXANDER%2BMCQUEEN.jpg BLOG - IN SEARCH OF A play about the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen plumbs his tragic personal history without examining his extraordinary work. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1757882527064-SKOAMT3T2SP7FUWUY89W/THOMAS+DEMAND.jpg BLOG - ENTER HERE A series of lithographs by acclaimed photographer Thomas Demand don’t have the immediate optical sizzle of this photographs. Instead they draw on in gently, slowly, through personal narrative. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1757806828516-SX2T8SNT0GUH1Z4VK635/ARBUS%2BTWO%2BWOMEN.jpg BLOG - FRAMED In capturing subjects at moments of vulnerability, does Diane Arbus betray a fundamental personal obligation? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1756775327426-QD86D1MHSHZ9VEKBJNT3/STORM%2BKING.jpg BLOG - THE LAY OF THE LAND What information is a map obliged to communicate about the landscape it represents? More than distances or landmarks, its overall contours would be fundamental. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1756390533753-8SSJOBOY1IRG6Y9DND4X/JACK+WHITTEN+WOODSHED.jpg BLOG - HYPERGRAPHIC The author’s compulsive list-making and journal-writing are habits that keep her firmly planted in the present and keenly attentive to the future. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1756386900970-ZVS7CNW0YRH6OPH3S6O4/RASHID%2BJOHNSON%2B01.jpg BLOG - ANYTHING GOES The assured, pitch-perfect composition of Rashid Johnson’s work, across all media, quiets its political content. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1756390716623-2A25I5I74URPZLJ2UMG4/PICASSO%2BTETE%2BA%2BTETE%2BSHEET%2BMETAL.jpg BLOG - TIME AND AGAIN At a show of Pablo Picasso’s work curated by his daughter Paloma, small steel sculptures capture the complex movements of physical and personal time. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1754365167788-7I2H5O9MI27WIRDEY1ED/SUPERFINE.jpg BLOG - SPOTLIGHT The exhibit design at the Met's Costume Institute 2025 show, Superfine, obscures much of the spectacular fashion on display. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1754365082009-LPEAWJOBACL55WA6OZF7/SARGENT.jpg BLOG - WHO'S THERE John Singer Sargeant, the reknowned portrait painter, quietly guards the identity and privacy of his subjects. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1750342992256-JUO59UY9ODNX4OIAEV2G/THE%2BMET%2BROCKEFELLER%2BWING%2BBRUCE%2BSCHWARZ.jpg BLOG - SPINELESS New displays at The Met’s just-unveilled Michael C. Rockefeller wing rob works from Africa, Oceania and the Americas of much of their magic while evading questions about ownership. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1750033520640-7HT11644700MEXA30HG9/GETTY%2BMUSEUM_AERIAL%2B01.jpg BLOG - IT TAKES A VILLAGE The campus of the Getty Center in Los Angeles allows for relaxed, informal exploration. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1750033539605-HGSCZZXTILUXX83P8X5T/GAMBLE%252BHOUSE%252B02.jpg BLOG - STANDING UP The Gamble House in Pasadena, by Greene and Greene, expresses a history of its own making in its dazzling timber frame. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1748703885325-E36B0C1W6S4LV3O4S8MU/image.jpg BLOG - FLOORED In the newly renovated galleries of the Yale Center for British Art, a painting by J. M. W. Turner possesses a charisma that overpowers the building. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1748703871337-LRCPAHCVO4KOPCYGL5KH/JACK%2BWHITTEN%2BPINK%2BPSYCHIC%2BQUEEN.jpg BLOG - ENCHANTED The Jack Whitten retrospective at MoMA showcases paintings that hold all power meaning within their extraordinary surfaces. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1747250604934-JCTPDO0CTC1NY15DBGM7/PISTOLETTO_GREY%252BMAN.jpg BLOG - PICTURE THIS An early portrait by Michelangelo Pistoletto, oil on burnished metal, flickers masterfully and quietly between representation and abstraction. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1746362684319-YF45F77FKSIOARBI8KJB/CONCLAVE.jpg BLOG - THE SAME OLD The movie Conclave outlines a potentially powerful system of voting, but yields predictable results. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1746360841335-3NZVWZ9YSCCWJQQSK5QG/THE%2BBRUTALIST.jpg BLOG - SPECIAL EFFECTS The Brutalist is a movie melodrama about a man who is an architect, without real insight into architecture or Brutalism. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1746360626102-K6DV9WFT2HLOK61WOODY/AWAAL_01.jpg BLOG - CITY OF DREAMS In the movie All We Imagine is Light , Mumbai is a city whose enchantments remain out of reach. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1740889377535-KHT0ZAQF09ZAC9448F0N/ANORA%252BHOUSE.jpg BLOG - MODERN TIMES Does modernism mean anything specific to anyone anymore, or has it become just another decorating style? A look at the Anora house. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1738014465346-UCYQ8L1CKI51XQS1R4SR/Screenshot%2B2025-01-27%2B4.18.09%2BPM.jpg BLOG - DRAWN IN A selection of mid-century drawings on display at New York School of Interior Design suggests that the most powerful renderings have an intentional open, unfinished quality. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1735869053585-NISPCAMZ6P58F4TSZD5V/BARAMA_Gawirrin%2BGumano_Before%2B1967.jpg BLOG - PROPERTY LINES In paintings of dazzling line work, Yolngu storytellers assert their community’s elemental, inextricable connection with the land. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1734883239764-8Y040C3EEEWQ63QGGBQM/241117_RG%2B02.jpg BLOG - THINKING ABOUT THE BOX Visionary architecture is an essential practice, and can bring real life to new buildings. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1734825987139-DMSAFM7Q2NP0HWEJX0U8/241117_ISS_BBC.jpg BLOG - UNGROUNDED The architecture of the International Space Station, from 2000, does nothing to glamorize space science or travel. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1732484696867-IPB4LGZ4ZKTHPIZD6XBX/Albert%2BEckhout%2BMixed.jpg BLOG - WHO'S WHO Can we give portrait artists from previous, less enlightened times a free pass ? Or can we expect them to present their subjects with humanity? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1731285747901-1SIML1Z7O31071ZDZTVB/MoAI%2BHat%2B01_223722_900.jpg BLOG - PICTURE THIS Frederick Douglass used photography strategically, to craft a powerful public identity. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1731285763999-Q0DUUAZDC6UKWHAQ4T2Q/PAUL%2BRUDOLPH%2BFORT%2BLINCOLN.jpg BLOG - IN EVERY DRAWING A HEARTACHE Every one of architect Paul Rudolph’s drawings offers a dream of the life that will unfold inside. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1730167797883-DWOGCO5249WKHSGRO117/RObERT%2BPOLIDORI%2BFRA%2BANGELICO.jpg BLOG - POINTS OF VIEW Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco in Florence open fictional views more compelling than the real ones that surround them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1728835130666-5H5GGLT63FVKPP05GO21/PANINI%252BPARTHENON.jpg BLOG - DEMOCRACY BY DESIGN Is there something fundamentally undemocratic about requiring neoclassical architecture for new civic buildings? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1728169180524-2N463GOTEAF28DQKKAAT/DESSAU%2BMASTERS%2BHOUSE.jpg BLOG - HOUSING PROJECT Is it possible to rebuild a historic house without remembering the people who lived inside? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1724530877343-AF8D8KEV91M8DKI7PVV0/1870+RED+MULLETS+CLAUDE+MONET.jpg BLOG - THE LOVE YOU PAINT What does what we paint say about us? And why does early modern painting still resonate? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1725912989851-UIQXEE48WLJ6C4Q38476/BINGHAM%252BFUR%252BTRADERS%252BDESCENDING%252BTHE%252BMISSOURI.jpg BLOG - DRIFTING In so many stories about America, race is present and left unspoken. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1725219264291-UX151UV46WLL8E5YQXZS/JENNY%2BHOLZER.jpg BLOG - WORDY The Jenny Holzer exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum gets swallowed up by the museum's architecture. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1724535674842-6RS26NM50HO1J6AMRJHV/ES%252BDEVLIN%252BWEEKND.jpg BLOG - CHEWING THE SCENERY What happens when the stage set becomes the primary source of drama? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1724531972456-FAOPX6NU7KPJOSWSPE1I/A%2BTASTE%2BOF%2BCHERRY.jpg BLOG - FACE TIME How much can a face tell you about a person? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1724531718317-GAGYLJEWXWIKBWJYMSUU/MOORE+TIFFANY+TEAPOTS.jpeg BLOG - ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE What is the distinction between cultural appropriation and artistic inspiration? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1724532131951-F08AP2G4970YY73Z31FG/HOOVERVILLE.jpg BLOG - LOSING GROUND What kind of places are lost as a city grows, and who loses most dearly? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1718471705392-LXWQ91Z63RLZCBFBT63I/SLEEPING%2BBEAUTIES_NORELL%2BDRESS.jpg BLOG - LONG AND WINDING This year's Costume Exhibit at The Met, Sleeping Beauties, puts some spectacular garments on display, but doesn't make a point about them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1718471740338-WZM121Q39CKBZD10JOGO/PASSAGE.jpg BLOG - LIMITED ACCESS E. M. Forster's A Passage to India falls flat as a novel, failing to grant Indian characters the same flawed and robust humanity it depicts English characters. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1718480662696-IIW8SI012MNGWWGTJAL7/ANGKOR.jpg BLOG - FAR, FAR AWAY The rich fantasies surrounding Angkor Wat lend it the stature of real place, even for those who have never visited. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1718471780206-Z8XSFLLX253I5M3NS42J/JOAN%2BJONAS%2BORGANIC%2BHONEY%2BGALLERIA%2BTOSELLI%2BGIORGIO%2BCOLOMBO.jpg BLOG - A LIFE'S WORK The Joan Jonas retrospective at MoMA works better as a consideration of her day-to-day artistic process than as a sweeping review of her ouevre. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1718566201409-EJ56TNBBPXW7ZJUN8JES/CASA%252BPORTUALE.jpg BLOG - AFTER-SHOCK Photographs of Casa Portuale, an abandoned brutalist building from 1978 in Naples by Aldo Rossi, show a structure with a vivid, animalistic physical charisma. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1709177210405-8PO41C0A4GCCZ5079FBQ/DESSAU%2BBAUHAUS.jpg BLOG - JUST LIKE OLD TIMES The Bauhaus school building in Dessau, an icon of modern architecture, has been renovated with historical fidelity and contemporary verve. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1709176850473-ZAU9Z0CE5T5SKRA9GPHX/DERAIN.jpg BLOG - UNGROUNDED A show of small paintings by Derain and Matisse at The Met leaves a viewer feeling pleasantly disoriented pictorially and aesthetically. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1705188936613-1TWRXI16TVS0FTR6OHG1/GUGGENHEIM%2BGOING%2BDARK.jpg BLOG - FIGURING IT OUT A show at the Guggenheim, Going Dark, examines the not-always-full presence of the black figure in contemporary art. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1705188846461-PDCLW9O7PT4HGPJ6QYBF/Ed%2BRuscha%252C%2BNorms%2BLa%2BCienega%2Bon%2BFire%252C%2B1964.jpg BLOG - LIKE FRED ASTAIRE The supremely elegant paintings of Ed Ruscha unsettle a the mid-century icons they depict them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682791759050-IYK28DO1S5THVSO6NIGN/Jones%2BBeach%2BEnergy%2BCenter.jpg BLOG - LITTLE TOWN BLUES What’s ever happened to monumentality? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1705189278144-QSPGXLPEA9DRSZZ7K7RN/HUMBOLDT%252BFORUM.jpg BLOG - THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE The new galleries of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin are packed with ethnographic treasures whose provenance raises thorny questions. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1705189320385-305WRK19RIWHW0B45PK3/MOMA%2BSIGNALS%2BVIDEO%2BSHOW.jpg BLOG - ALL OVER THE PLACE A broad, inclusive survey of video art at MoMA sidesteps aesthetics. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1705189818918-VM74LBGI3D4ZRWCFACWI/DOROTHY%2BLIEBES.jpg BLOG - DREAM WEAVING A fine, small exhibit at the Copper Hewitt honors the work of textile artist of Dorothy Liebes while side-stepping questions of appropriation. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1705189936348-BKNVN6IVMCIL41T0HEN9/AND%2BJUST%2BLIKE%2BTHAT.jpg BLOG - A SEAT AT THE TABLE Women of color remain mostly at the margins in the second season of HBO’s And Just Like That. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1705191328665-IYM1DDFT14A7Q1ZIRNFO/GAGO.jpg BLOG - THE SHOWS GO ON The work of South American sculptor Gago loses some of its punch in a poorly-conceived installation at the Guggenheim. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1705188049807-K7LPOAHFVIIX5DKXMMBF/ALT.jpg BLOG - ALL YOU NEED At the heart of Andre Leon Talley’s autobiography, set in the ultra-fabulous fashion world of the 1970’s and 1980’s, there’s a poignant search for love. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682792072418-7OPU82WX5SN7VW2G1TBU/RAFIK.jpg BLOG - IS THAT ALL THERE IS? Rafik Amadol’s video installation at MoMA dazzles the senses, and leaves one searching for something else. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682792626177-ALBQ6NREL2B0H7572RVW/LOUIS%2BKAHN.jpg BLOG - PICTURE THIS Fidelity and accuracy are not compulsory when drawing architecture. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682792449477-2UUKZTNHM0Q02ESE9SJ5/ALEX%2BKATZ%2BTHE%2BBLACK%2BDRESS.jpg BLOG - JUST THE WAY YOU ARE Alex Katz’ remarkable paintings stir up intriguing formal questions that are left unexplored. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682792806224-367I0E1N37LRN59AXKQ8/RONALD%2BLAUDER%2B01.jpg BLOG - THERE'S JUST ONE THING The Ronald S. Lauder Collection of art and antiques is brilliantly cohesive while also allowing each object within to shine. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682793325967-K6JKBX1QCMW18YS0X7S1/60S.jpg BLOG - FRESH AIR A show at the Jewish Museum celebrating the New York City art scene in the early 1960’s highlights the still-visionary work of Robert Rauschenberg. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682793570801-C74VRAW3MYSKHG695Z93/MACHINE%2BDAZZLE%2BBY%2BJENNA%2BBASCOMB.jpg BLOG - THE PLAY'S THE THING It’s difficult to appreciate the costumes designed by Machine Dazzle on display at the Museum of Arts and Design without seeing the plays that they are part of. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682794249080-8TPA8MRJU9IMPFGQZVCJ/Baldassarre%2BPeruzzi.jpg BLOG - HEAD SPACE Architectural drawings offer an imaginative and intellectual pleasure that the building they represent simply cannot. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682794442831-XLUFE1UD6DX8HEGI6849/MUGLER%2B01.jpg BLOG - COSTUME DRAMA Thierry Mugler used couture to make physical, without compromise, the extraordinary visions he had in his head. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682794965183-ZIEGYE1CKBPYY522PI6O/HOPPER.jpg BLOG - INNER CITY Edward Hopper’s paintings are less a representation of any city than a fictional backdrop for his iconically isolated characters. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682795310425-U0TZSK5524F2PZ3U3YO0/WARHOL%2BBASQUIAT.jpg BLOG - LIVES OF THE ARTISTS The play “The Collaboration” tells us nothing substantial about Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, their work, or their relationship. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682795626452-L16LBG98539KXXH63HUE/JOYCE.jpg BLOG - READING IS FUNDAMENTAL In an extraordinary essay in The Atlantic, novelist Sally Rooney explains, in an examination of the novel “Ulysses,” the pleasures and purposes of reading fiction. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682795794835-L5JBI4E4GDSXQ2XFM6JW/MOMA.jpg BLOG - MY MUSEUM WAS GONE A visit to MoMA prompts musings about museum architecture, nostalgia, and the modern canon. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682795991362-NBB0CVRWRYXGR4FE29WP/MOMA%2BSOUTH%2BASIA.jpg BLOG - NEW BEGINNINGS An exhibit at MoMA focusing on twentieth-century architecture in Asia shows how fully and productively these new countries embraced modernism. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1682796146896-W97U7AFGP6LMCMTKHN5H/BELNORD.jpg BLOG - APARTMENT LIVING The show “Only Murders in the Building” captures perfectly the physical and cultural geography of an old New York City co-op. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1666467794217-2TIW9LWAYVVS65X2J20W/2022%2BFAIR%2BAND%2BLOVELY.jpg BLOG - THE BEAUTIFUL ONES A new short film by Tan France looks personally at the persistent, nearly universal, preference for light skin. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1666467809592-UB1BQSYFPY3RWU91QCDQ/2022%2BBASQUIAT.jpg BLOG - A PORTRAIT OF THE YOUNG MAN A vivid new exhibit about Jean Michel Basquiat focuses on the man rather than the exit. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1666467528593-PWSQQ3R2AJD1WKS4C46G/2022%2BWHITNEY.jpg BLOG - ANOTHER LOOK A visit to the Whitney Museum of American art wipes away non-so-great first impressions. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1653173539023-NOGP865R09CDZC2W8XSD/AA.jpg BLOG - THE BIG PICTURE The best architectural photography captures the life of the building. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1650886907706-BSMOK5HDY7COLTZAG6Q0/FIT%2BFASHION%2BIN%2BTHE%2B90S.jpg BLOG - OLD GOOD TIMES How can we periodize the 1990’s in fashion? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1650886707627-MF0Q8BJFREARGK18HUZJ/Assembly%2B01.jpg BLOG - AND THE KITCHEN SINK On the virtues of maximalism https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1647122221164-173ZLULEJM9LEEZWI72H/Raja%2BRam%2BSharma_Palace_of_Solitude_2014.jpg BLOG - AS IT IS What’s the value of perspective? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1647122673222-7LA50I73S890SVU5GKH7/Robert%2BGober%252C%2BUntitled%252C%2B2017.jpg BLOG - FLATTENED Does a picture need to open a fictional space? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1636833926212-B95Z6CAORAY3CPBD6URB/NOBODY%252BFIGHTS%252BALONE%252BRILEY%252BBLAKE%252BCAMO.jpg BLOG - BLENDING IN What does wearing camouflage mean? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1634482991246-UZWRIORVGUHRHEOI25DT/Alice%2BNeel%252C%2BJackie%2BCurtis%2Band%2BRitta%2BRedd%252C%2B1970.jpg BLOG - PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE Alice Neel’s portraits foster an intimacy between subject and viewer, which is not typical in fine art. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1634482952249-U8XQQDXGQNM3AYKS5X85/The%2BLawn%2BLincoln%2BCenter.jpg BLOG - GREEN SPACE Set designer Mimi Lien’s simpler, superficial intervention at Lincoln Centerl offers deep pleasures. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1634483950036-I25MT1HK4LFK1G9QG3PZ/LITTLE%2BISLAND_01.jpg BLOG - LITTLE PLANS Thomas Heatherwick’s new cultural park Little Island would have benefited from a reduced program, and more intimate planning. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1612397869115-44NXYX730SWGKQTV9GVI/GORDON%2BLISH%2B02.jpg BLOG - AS YOU LIKE IT https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1629052301186-9JNQSH7T6JXUUHT5O64V/Kokona%2B04.jpg BLOG - WELL SUITED Women skateboarders summon both boy and girl energies freely. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1612040110964-1VGX0ENX1HRI6LM70W8J/House%252Bsenate%252Bchamber%25252C%252BBenjamin%252BLatrobe%25252C%252B18XX_NON.jpg BLOG - A CAPITOL IDEA https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1611424708308-9B2E7BAVQG7YYMGEU82L/MIES%2BFARNSWORTH%2BHOUSE_INSTA.jpg BLOG - WATERLOGGED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1611259399902-0C9FEUQ52Y5CY6ZFSH3B/IAMM.jpg BLOG - SPEAK NO EVIL https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1608406653818-EOFB6P3HOHUNI3QJYXXW/Ramy+Title.png BLOG - YOU NAME IT https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606785605641-41SX5SK8NBVJSPD2UQ1H/WORD+MAP.JPG BLOG - THE GIVING TREE https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606786425811-75PUFATH2NIIUDI72XZ5/JAKE%2BTAPPER_03.jpg BLOG - ALL THE NEWS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606786375908-1HO2X3BHTWV0CEYHAQBX/COUNTRYSIDE.jpg BLOG - TAKE ME HOME https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606786402172-YG1RSQCXATNO23LDQ5J1/Hanifa%2BAbdul%2BHameed%252C%2BKamala%2BAunty%252C%2B2020.jpg BLOG - STATEMENT DRESSING https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606785613097-4BGMON1082CBZ7JPAUOK/REM.jpg BLOG - THEY'RE PLAYING OUR SONG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606786486499-AGJMU1Y9TNEOMIP8KFFJ/PANTONE%2BPERIOD.jpg BLOG - AND RED ALL OVER https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606785631495-UUVGX2B6LRRK0V9TPV4X/04.jpg BLOG - AND A MICROPHONE https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606786645081-TA8GKTIGZ7ORUOTTZT98/Kengo+Kuma%2C+Moleskine%2C+2009.jpg BLOG - JOURNALISM https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606786981307-X5UQE2HAAL6FOXDOHFDN/IRWIN%2BUNION%2BBANK%2BCOLUMBUS%2BIN%2BDEBORAH%2BBERKE%2BPARTNERS%2B2009.jpg BLOG - FIRST LOVE https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606786588495-KF4X4ZPLBX1XY0DVUP6S/4f8ebf37e928290223d01e1ae1af8a1e09324f1e.jpg BLOG - PLAYING DRESS UP https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606786638156-0XGB4668NXJEHGWNMXQG/Fu+Mask+Pattern.jpg BLOG - MASQUERADE https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606787802872-HI4QC0XZ372VC7QEZNMG/1789a540056b49d397c8783042301695f9796e28.jpg BLOG - TALKING OF MICHELANGELO https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606786642275-W32KPWAWS4SKXIFLAAZD/OMA+GWANGGYO.jpg BLOG - A BRAND NEW UGLY https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606788228508-LHNRTK0S08TSO9IKI56V/78fb66bca152613084d9aa159b0cc33ecea0aac3.jpg BLOG - MEDIA SAVVY https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606788386552-CRTNYQLL5KKMMPBN57RA/9f8b507fe21c57b857907b3bbd89c46b75798b2a.jpg BLOG - IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606788055224-5I2RXKQ2FRL8L54C5ZRM/ec41147dbf98449b396ed858e01e26d1a4d9f910.jpg BLOG - BOOKISH, BLINKERED https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1606788057499-OE0IW9O84MTLV71X8627/f5d1a3ca503c04f5aa6a0a8c4a6396462ad04c18.jpg BLOG - IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1636834026971-LX9CPG943EQ864YD5QA7/bc10ba3757225c3278e5b675f1870cbcaef0e96c.jpg BLOG - IT IS WHAT IT IS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1725219225124-NW9CTCMAAFDHWMRRW1WP/1884%2BSARGEANT%2BTHE%2BBREAKFAST%2BTABLE.jpg BLOG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1724531740049-80BEEMO36HVXWBP90CT2/MoAI+Hat+01_223722_900.jpg BLOG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1746362501863-HKIH1V1AF3NBXAQXFIBX/GAMBLE+HOUSE+04.jpg BLOG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1756386468373-U46KM8SYTIPIFWO8M26U/MIRALLES+PARLIAMENT.jpg BLOG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1756386473813-Y0O0Y2BEM5NEQ9PD4ITC/JENNY+SAVILLE+ALEPPO.jpg BLOG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1756386480326-GBCGBRA8TESNOI2MYZCQ/Andrew+Testa%2C+Allercombe+tree+village%2C+on+the+route+of+the+proposed+A30+Honiton+Bypass%2C+Devon%2C+December+1996+%C2%A9+Andrew+Testa.jpg BLOG https://www.nalinamoses.com/contact daily 0.75 2020-12-01 https://www.nalinamoses.com/resume daily 1.0 2025-05-04 https://www.nalinamoses.com/links daily 0.75 2020-12-01 https://www.nalinamoses.com/writings daily 0.75 2021-06-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623632381783-FCINUQQJOTTOO4SL26ZG/BSA+COVER.JPG WRITINGS - Architecture Boston https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623503737857-QF0Y2W1V7REKYZJC0CP0/WEBSITE_BAUP+00.JPG WRITINGS - Training Station Architect Michael Graz (University of Buffalo ‘72) has managed design for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, guided by lessons learned at UB https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623529599764-YAJGT9WE6PJV04WT9H19/TRA+COVER+CROPPED.jpg WRITINGS - Design Bureau https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623558162136-6Y507WHCDMGEL49RLSKR/ARTWRIT+00.JPG WRITINGS - ARTWRIT https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623529734613-NZ9Y21A7ULAU4N0VA3YM/HDM+COVER+CROPPED.jpg WRITINGS - Harvard Design Magazine https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623529582583-SGB08K7ZVUZZGF8NLEVA/VI+COVER+CROPPED.jpg WRITINGS - Building Desire https://www.nalinamoses.com/omargandhi daily 0.75 2021-06-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623530033865-V7CP2I25NCXU7FNST8AH/OG+SPREAD+00.jpg Omar Gandhi - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.nalinamoses.com/buildingdesire daily 0.75 2021-06-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623530679198-QKZMLVAXQ5NE3W7VP1BT/01+EDIT.jpeg Building Desire https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623530680441-CDH4TK7K5JCDMMRKWQAS/02+EDIT.jpeg Building Desire https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623530683262-JUJ66P5QRDXZ4KQIJZ3T/03+EDIT.jpeg Building Desire https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623530685620-ZY4HDIMW92JYIZYKFU8Q/04+EDIT.jpeg Building Desire https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623530688320-56WU8YXFI4PLN4EC4EGG/05+EDIT.jpeg Building Desire https://www.nalinamoses.com/trainingstation daily 0.75 2021-06-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623531197266-DMPQVYJ7SD8CBLIFGDB5/ISSUU_02.JPG Training Station https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623531197815-R2WT5MV17MMQV498C4KR/ISSUU_03A.jpg Training Station https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623531198300-78E19T6KQZO21EYX5CRQ/ISSUU_03B.jpg Training Station https://www.nalinamoses.com/artwrit daily 0.75 2021-10-17 https://www.nalinamoses.com/hdm daily 0.75 2021-06-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623559922521-35EY6Y5FIZDDC571JFOX/HDM+30+NEW+ARCHITCTURE+IN+INDIA_Page_1.jpg HDM https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623559996705-D57V4DAHXF86PYASE1L3/HDM+30+NEW+ARCHITCTURE+IN+INDIA_Page_2.jpg HDM https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623559934452-CCHU1BZSZPR384FJINTP/HDM+30+NEW+ARCHITCTURE+IN+INDIA_Page_3.jpg HDM https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623559940188-E7PD45SE0QCXK3YRPCTK/HDM+30+NEW+ARCHITCTURE+IN+INDIA_Page_4.jpg HDM https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623559947386-RPD0LC907JTLEI9VOKS6/HDM+30+NEW+ARCHITCTURE+IN+INDIA_Page_5.jpg HDM https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623559954973-B7I41106GIST8WCNJ5PV/HDM+30+NEW+ARCHITCTURE+IN+INDIA_Page_6.jpg HDM https://www.nalinamoses.com/designbureau daily 0.75 2021-06-14 https://www.nalinamoses.com/vanessakeith daily 0.75 2021-06-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c36a4bcee1759c4fe90adff/1623632915317-6YY2AH3CKETJTW538EUK/VK+SPREAD.JPG Vanessa Keith - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.nalinamoses.com/aiarchitect daily 0.75 2021-06-14