The End of Bling City, Rejecting Fake Art, and Piano Town
Rounding up interesting ideas outside of Dallas that ran in papers over the weekend:
New York City’s budget is feeling the pinch of the downturn perhaps more severely than Dallas. In City Journal, Steven Malanga wonders if Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s idea of making his city a “luxury product” (read: expensive as hell place to live and do business) isn’t going to last the long term.
There are more casualties during hard times than city budgets. The Telegraph notes a growing impatience with, as this article puts it, “the cultural fraud which began as a decadent joke by Marcel Duchamp nearly a hundred years ago – that anything can be art providing there are enough conspirators who claim that it is, and enough suckers who believe them.”
I’m all for finding good ideas elsewhere and stealing them. Like this London project. The city has scattered pianos in the streets around the city with the hope that people will “come out of their urban insularity and also provide some summertime music.” Since Dallas is short on quaint walking districts, maybe we could adapt the project by hiding cameras near the pianos to record if and when anyone stops to play them, or if drivers-by just assume the instruments have been illegally dumped.
Have your say!