A new palace of culture is to be built at the site of the World Trade Center. We don’t yet know which culture will be represented there, and jockeying for position is already intense. But “this much is certain: institutions that take the dare and locate themselves at that haunted, contested place will find that a lot more is asked of them than the usual dose of edification and diversion.”
Tag: 08.31.03
Back To What Was?
The World Trade Center Restoration Movement is a group of people who want to retore the World Trade Center to pre-9/11. “In close solidarity with one another, and in opposition to the city’s political establishment, business leaders, academics and civic groups, and just about everyone else whose opinion matters, the W.T.C.R.M. demands that the World Trade Center towers be rebuilt. Not replaced by something new and supposedly better. Rebuilt, hewing as closely as possible to the design of the buildings that were lost on Sept. 11.”
Whose Freedom Gets The Museum?
Should there be a “Museum of Freedom” built at the site of the World Trade Center? The idea has been proposed. But Herbert Muschamp writes that trying to wedge the idea of “freedom” into a building is highly problematic…
Slam-Dancing – Attacking Amis
Tibor Fischer set off a literary storm earlier this month when he slammed Martin Amis’ new book before it had even been published. “Fischer, whose fourth novel, Voyage To The End Of The Room, is published on the same day as Amis’s Yellow Dog, is certainly shrewd enough to know that his column in the Telegraph earlier this month attacking Amis’s novel with apparently unprovoked ferocity would get him talked about far more than any number of press releases for his own; he acknowledged as much in the piece: ‘As a writer, I’m relieved that Amis has produced a novel unworthy of his talent. No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention’.”