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Art indivisible

Cindy Allen -- Interior Design, 8/1/2002 12:00:00 AM

In the life of everyone, even the serial unwilling, art matters. Thirty frames a second, a pause in turning the radio dial, a billboard staring back at us, the facade around the corner—the encounter can be a delectable ambush, a heartrending experience, or reason to head straight for the nearest martini. Not only does art brand us with cherished scars, but we also rendezvous with it daily. To take liberties with Wittgenstein, "The limits of art are the limits of my world."

Thus, just when we thought that last century's retinue of buffoons had gracefully retired, we read sadly of their squeals of rage against Frank Gehry's prospective Guggenheim in downtown Manhattan. True, the planned cost has reportedly been instrumental in the canning of a few mega-retrospectives. True, too, that the vox populi—read "sponsors and donors"—favors new construction over curatorial labors. But why should the birth of architecture mean the death of art? To those high priests of doom, we recommend a restorative taxi ride to Frank Lloyd Wright's little trifle on Fifth Avenue. (To the better heeled, we further suggest taking in the Pazzi Chapel in Florence or the Guggenheim already built in Bilbao.) Art, plainly, is.

We humbly submit our August issue as additional proof of that assertion. Art is alive and well in each of our installations, organically interwoven or playing center stage. Whether in a Berlin duplex, a Spanish sculptor's fantasy tower, or a media giant's headquarters, we found art as the engine propelling singular design expressions. But hard as we tried, what we couldn't find in a single one of our pages were those pesky lines—blurred or otherwise—that keep art and design separate.