Posted inArt

The Failures of 1970s Suburban Life

In the film Over the Edge (1979), the worst fears of a suburban planned community come true when the teenage residents of the fictional town of New Granada attack a town meeting being held to discuss just exactly what went wrong with the violent, angst-filled youth of their town.

Posted inArt

The Architectural Is Always Political

New York’s East 53rd Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, is full of nondescript Manhattan skyscrapers. In the courtyard of one of these clinically clean buildings, however, there are five crumbling, old slabs of concrete covered in graffiti. It’s hard to believe that these blocks, so out of place in their surroundings, were once part of one of the most politically charged structures in the world, one that divided the globe in two based on ideology and geopolitics — the Berlin Wall.

Posted inArt

Gay Sex, Art and Nostalgia on the New York Waterfront

While at The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, one question kept popping up in my mind: What is with this obsessive nostalgia for the decaying, destroyed and often depressing New York of the past, particularly as connected to the emerging gay subculture and downtown art scene of the 1970s and ’80s?