The House the Sacklers Kept
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, plus hobbit holes at the Noguchi Museum and an East Brooklyn fire station by Peter Eisenman
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The Exsanguinations
Nan Goldin wants to pump you up.
by Sasha Frere-Jones
It starts with a museum and ends with a home. At the beginning of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, directed by Laura Poitras, we see photographer Nan Goldin and other members of the P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) group entering the Temple of Dendur. It is March of 2018, and the name of the Sackler family is still all over the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In fact, the Temple of Dendur is located in the Sackler Wing, or it was on that windy day.
Goldin and a group of activists all younger than her, maybe fifty of them, gather near the shallow indoor pool next to the stone temple. “I’m really nervous,” Goldin says to another activist. After a brief call-and-response of “mic check” with her crew, Goldin starts yelling out, and we hear her words repeated by the P.A.I.N. members as they toss empty prescription bottles (both orange and blue) into the pool.
“Temple of greed!”
“Temple of greed!”
“Temple of Oxy!”
“Temple of Oxy!”
“Sacklers lied!”
“Sacklers lied!”
“Thousands died!”
“Thousands died!”
Tending the Garden
On finding optimism at the Noguchi Museum
by Ana Karina Zatarain
I was initially skeptical of the press release I received for In Praise of Caves, the Noguchi Museum’s latest exhibition. “As the climate crisis accelerates, along with other terrifying signs that we have fundamentally and perhaps irreparably broken our relationship with nature,” it read, “these artists’ visions have never been more relevant.” Grandiose claims are typical of press releases, but this one hit a nerve. As the climate crisis accelerates, it has seemed to me that art exhibitions are losing, rather than gaining, relevance; that meditating on beauty and abstractions in the midst of disaster is as absurd as tending to your garden while your house is on fire.
I’ve been in this state of mind for a long time, leaden with premature grief for everything that has ever excited me about being alive. Though it’s possible that this is a personal problem of mine, related to my history of serotonin deficiency, increasingly it appears that existential dread has come to define this century—in op-ed after op-ed, nihilism is either embraced or succumbed to. “It’s so soothing to conclude that nothing matters,” Emma Beddington declared recently in the Guardian. Back in 2019, Jonathan Franzen posed a provocative question in a piece for The New Yorker, titled “What if We Stopped Pretending?” “I am talking, of course, about climate change,” he wrote, and went on to dismiss the naïveté of those who foster any hope that our world is still salvageable.
From the Heights of Parnassus
There comes a crash.
by Enrique Ramirez
In the future, an intrepid scholar with unparalleled access to archives and a nose for controversy may look at our current moment with some amount of scorn. Blame it on the state of theory and the discipline’s lackluster role in addressing the relationship between buildings, cities, and publics. These were the days when theory carried the unenviable burden of explaining the relations between architecture and other big-ticket, capital-letter items like Capital, Social Justice, Racial Inequality, the list goes on. Form for form’s sake—now that was an enviable endeavor, and fun, too, because it meant that scholars and critics could just let buildings be buildings, nothing more, nothing less. And yet there was something deeply unsatisfying about all of this. This scholar will read transcripts, cached websites, even tattered physical copies of journals of record. And in these artifacts, a breadcrumb trail of sorts reveals how a mode of thinking about the world emerged in texts, was whispered furtively in gallery conversations, became the subject of countless seminars and panels discussions, was declared dead, and zombie-like, resuscitated only to become harder and harder to kill. Because after the dust settled, and when those handful of intellectuals celebrated as the models for critical engagement with architecture are forgotten for only a moment, all that remains is a sense of loss. Architecture has not failed us. Criticism has.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc. For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Thomas Phifer.
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