Part of the beguiling preposterousness of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York’s paean to medieval times (those of the bubonic plague, capricious beheadings and a church that stifled science), comes from the unexpected transport one feels not only meandering through the mini-cosmos of its “two football field”-sized nave, but even before entering when, gazing from Broadway across 112th, you spy what appears to be an entire Notre Dame or Chartres seemingly airlifted out of ancient France and plopped down in, pretty much, Harlem. Sure, some of it apparently broke off when they dropped it (why only a bell tower on the right?

You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, you’re even a killer of laughter.
– Willem de Kooning to Andy Warhol.

In 1917, when Marcel Duchamp walked into a hardware store on Fifth  and 17th, bought a porcelain urinal and tried to place it in an art show (failed; damn selecting committee rejected it), his funny idea created something more influential and enduring than readymades or conceptual art. That pisspot and its ultimate acceptance as art begat the art critic: the augur society trusts beyond its own common judgment to divine what art is and how it should be valued.

“The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down, the people ride in a hole in the ground.”

Well, don’t they now…

Say you’re going to dig a hole in the ground. A tunnel you’ll be asking people to go into. Lots of people, and they’ll be spending time down there, maybe an hour or two each day.  Would you…make your tunnel as narrow as possible and give it low ceilings? Keep it dimly lit with no glimpse of the sun above? Would you let runoff rainwater drain in so your tunnel becomes sewer-like, in the lanes where rats run at people’s feet?

When I was a young lad in Texas, second grade, my fellow kiddies and I hopped a school bus one rainy day and rode through gloomy Dallas streets for a field trip to the Museum of Natural History. It was no less gloomy inside as our little group wandered dim-lit pre-war halls picking noses and loosening wedgies, our galoshes squishing past dioramas that imprisoned, beautifully, sadly, both nature and history.

The spot-lit fake deserts and fake woodlands and painted streams somehow conveyed a ghostly, spiritual quality – an ancient way tied to moon or sun or fire – that our patterned Dallas suburbs didn’t.