There’s been much ballyhoo about The New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia at the Met.  None of the artwork is new; these objects have been part of the Met’s permanent collection for decades.  But current geopolitics make it important to look at this part of the world (basically, the Muslim world) more attentively.  And as we do we can congratulate ourselves for learning about another culture.  The Times (unintentionally, I’m sure) captured the ambivalence perfectly in the title of their review, A Cosmopolitan Trove of Exotic Beauty.  There’s the same faint condescension in it that there was when taste-makers first looked at African art.

In rebuilding these fifteen galleries, the Met had an extraordinary opportunity to restage works with contemporary museum protocol, and they had an extraordinary inspiration for design – Muslim architecture.  But the new galleries aren’t so different from the Met’s other, older galleries: smallish, squarish, oatmeal-colored rooms, with ceilings cluttered with tracklights.  There are small gestures here and there to the traditions of Muslim architecture: a white marble floor with colored inlay, two rows of hanging glass lamps, a magnificent gilded coffered ceiling, and an eighteenth century house from Damascus.  As some kind of proof of historical continuity, the final gallery has been finished entirely (and handsomely) by eight craftsmen from Morocco.  But none of the displays have the flair of those at the Neues Museum in Berlin, which shroud each object in magic.  A generic all-white environment would have served the work better, and also offered a more sophisticated curatorial view.  Over one of the explanatory wall texts, there’s a grainy black and white photo of the Great Mosque at Samarra, a huge rectangular hall with a cone-shaped ziggurat in front.  There’s more architectural power here, in this small image, than in all of the new galleries combined.

I’m working now from an office on the twenty-eighth floor of a building on Forty Second Street just west of Fifth Avenue.  From the south-facing window I can see a bit of Bryant Park and beyond that, mid-block on 40th Street, the American Standard Building (formerly the American Radiator Building and now the Bryant Park Hotel).  Built by Raymond Hood and Andre Foulihaux in 1924, it’s been overshadowed by its taller, younger and prettier neighbor, the Empire State Building.

From the sidewalk the Standard Building’s elaborate stonework and gilt are dank and oppressively fancy.  But from the office window the building seems stately and finely dressed.  It’s gold-tipped crown captures light on even the dreariest mornings.  Like many first generation skyscrapers, it was meant to be seen from above and afar.

Last night I saw “Inception,” six months after the buzz, but nonetheless excited to lose myself in an elegantly designed movie. But the experience wasn’t visually compelling at all.  The architect in the movie, Ariadne, is a young, hippie-ish woman, which is cool.  But the synthetic worlds that she constructs for her team of dream-invading global super-spies fall flat.  Roads that bend at 90 degrees vertically?  Mirrored Parisian courtyard blocks?  Endlessly looping staircases?  These are adolescent, Escher-like effects.

The one unique design in the film is the Ice Fortress that serves as a backdrop for a captive’s dream.  Its setting reminds me of the snow planet where we find Luke at the beginning of “The Empire Strikes Back."  But the building itself is a dazzling, over-the-top, brutalist concoction that was modeled after the Geisel Library at the University of California San Diego.  That building, by architect William Pereira, was funded by and perhaps also inspired by the work of Theodor Geisel, the writer known as Dr. Seuss.  In turning to this awesome, ridiculous building for inspiration, the movie-makers did something absolutely right.