The New Yorker:

Jackson Arn

Public art makes good people do the most fascinatingly bad things. Nicole Eisenman, whose paintings were the subject of a smashing retrospective at MCA Chicago all summer, ends 2024 with “Fixed Crane,” a ready-made sculpture that consists of a rusty, half-century-old industrial crane, hammily tipped on its side in the middle of Madison Square Park—a purportedly devastating critique of “New York City’s impulse for ever higher ascension,” though a robber baronage of board members wasn’t too devastated to commission it. (There is more than one kind of ascension, of course.) Honestly, I’d rather look at scaffolding. Not the bulky green kind—I’m talking about the ones formed from pale, glowy pipes that you see outside a handful of higher-end establishments in the city. They have their own icy beauty on a winter day, and, if you prefer your public art works conceptual, they’re a nice metaphor for how people are better at prettifying problems than solving them. Lest I sound grumpy, or you’ve been feeling so lately, I’ll end this by recommending a stroll by the Jefferson Market Library, in the West Village—a free, outdoor New York experience that never fails to cheer me up. The building seems like a fairy-tale castle, except the castle has free books inside, and the red brick tower looks so good in the snow that you might forgivably pray for a blizzard.

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