BlogBack: Ada Louise Huxtable on Jean Nouvel's Guthrie
The architecture critic of the Wall Street Journal responds to Ada Louise Huxtable Meanders in Minneapolis, saying that CultureGrrl misinterpreted as praise her WSJ review of Jean Nouvel's Guthrie Theater:
Was I too subtle? Too tongue-in-cheek? Too ironic? Please read the piece again! I thought my description made it clear how off-putting and over-the-top I found it. It's not exactly praise to say that a blue glass window upstages nature and turns it into an architectural accessory or that yellow glass gives a relentlessly jaundiced hue inside and out.
Stating that you could be a reluctant, disoriented participant in Nouvel's coercive drama should have suggested that maybe I was (and am): stumbling into that RED theater, with its chain mail walls...the vertiginously rising escalators...the "nightclub style." The site use and building parti [concept for the building's design] are extremely skillful. Any fair-minded critic has to admit that, like Nouvel's style or not (and I don't, anymore than you do).
I guess readers will have to judge for themselves, but I am disappointed that it wasn't clear to you. When we agree, as we certainly did on much of the Guthrie, I am sorry that my way of expressing it was not clear to you.
My highest praise went to Cesar Pelli's Central Library, not the Guthrie. The point of the piece was the extraordinary range of Minneapolis's new architecture.
Point taken.
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CULTUREGRRL SPEAKS on museum issues and ethics, arts journalism.
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LEE ROSENBAUM I'm a veteran cultural journalist with many pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and major art magazines. I have been a cultural contributor on New York Public Radio (WNYC and WQXR) and have provided arts commentary on NPR and public radio stations in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. I am a HuffPost Arts writer. I've been profiled on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer's Art Beat and in the Chicago Reader. I've appeared as an art-market commentator on BBC-TV and have published numerous Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. I am author of The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf) and have lectured on cultural property issues at the New Acropolis Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, on deaccessioning at at Investigative Reporters and Editors 2011 Annual Meeting, Columbia Law School, the University of Iowa and a conference of the Museum Association of New York, on museum governance and cultural property issues at Seton Hall University, on arts blogging at American University and on Smithsonian exhibition controversies at Rutgers University.
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