Column One

The age of the supersized

Bigger is better. It’s the mantra of our times, whether we’re talking about skyscrapers, superstores, fast food, all-you-can-eat buffets, lottery jackpots, the national debt, presidential campaign kitties, The Donald’s impressive mane . . . or even my own once well-proportioned little neighborhood. Now I can’t walk around it without being confronted by still another tear-down giving way to still another McMansion with too many stories jammed into too small a lot. No wonder people feel crowded. The ziggurat has replaced the bungalow, and it’s no improvement.

They’re disappearing, the little houses that once gave the place its character. They’re going one by one, superseded by prize examples of what Thorstein Veblen, that pioneer American sociologist and provocateur of the last century, called Conspicuous Consumption.

The result is frightening to behold, whether we’re talking about neighborhoods, television screens, multi-screen cineplexes, or even museums, which used to be places for contemplation instead of spectacles. A decent sense of proportion may be the first casualty as American taste comes down with a bad case of elephantiasis.

To quote Daniel Gelernter’s thoughtful piece in The Weekly Standard about the new Whitney museum—now just WHITNEY according to its logo—that has arisen in lower Manhattan’s old meatpacking district:

“The building is, indeed, fascinating—and like so many museums, it would be a tremendous success if it weren’t a museum. Were it, for example, a workspace for a startup company, it would be fantastic. As an art gallery for a large audience, however, it’s a disaster . . . . The best parts of the building don’t have any paintings in them. The view of the Hudson from a fifth-floor glass lobby with comfy sofas is fantastic, even cathartic. The outdoor spaces are magnificent. The paintings, meanwhile, are dwarfed by high ceilings, overwhelmed by empty space, and washed out by blue sunlight from massive windows at the east and west ends of each floor. (Ask artists why they prefer a northern exposure.) The inaugural exhibition, which occupies all four gallery floors, is called America Is Hard to See—and the curators have done their best to keep it that way.

“This perverse approach has one curious benefit: When you finally stumble onto a great painting—and there are perhaps six or seven on the walls right now—it does feel like a moment of discovery, like struggling through the gray and grim-faced crowds on Fifth Avenue and suddenly bumping into a long-lost friend. De Kooning’s 1960 masterpiece Door to the River is one of the century’s greatest works. You might have seen it at MoMA’s masterful de Kooning retrospective in 2011, but the Whitney only very rarely lets it appear on its own walls . . . .”

You have to search all the nooks and crannies of this art museum to find art. If you look hard enough, you might come across across Edward Hopper’s glorious Early Sunday Morning, 1930 by sheer serendipity. But for the most part such simple beauty tends to get lost in the pretentious plans of some big-name architect—in this case, Renzo Piano—with a passion for the huge and a contempt for the small and intimate, for anything on a human scale.

Small is beautiful? Forget it. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here looking for anything like beauty in this age of the supersized.

How did things get so big—and so ugly?

What ever happened to the Jeffersonian grace of the 18th Century, the combination of beauty and utility that marked Monticello? The respect for individual vision and accomplishment that used to be an essential part of the American heritage? It was John F. Kennedy who once told a distinguished gathering of Nobel Prize winners at a gala White House dinner: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Whole teams of architects, designers, and other fashion-setters can now build bigger but certainly not better than the chairs the Shakers made as a matter of course in their time. Name a modern silversmith who can match the everyday beauty of Paul Revere’s pieces with their restrained curves and pistol-grip handles.

Is there a contemporary architect whose work would bear comparison with the art-deco masterpieces of Frank Lloyd Wright? Not to mention the vision yet attention to detail that characterizes the craftsmanship of Arkansas’ own Fay Jones, whose collaboration with Nature produced a masterwork like Thorncrown Chapel in the Ozarks.

Where is the grace, understatement, and humility of classical Palladian architecture? Gone with the rage for size alone. What was once our ideal vision, a fusion of man and Nature like the English country garden, has been replaced by the poured concrete of industrial-strength monuments like the new Whitney. Something ineffable has been lost by our rage for the ever-bigger, the ever less human, the supersized.

If ever a society needed to scale down, it is ours. Think small.

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at:

pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com

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