One evening at dusk, to research an upcoming article, I toured the Otto Kahn Mansion on East 91st Street.  The financial baron’s house, built in 1918, was designed by architects J. Armstrong Stenhouse and C. H. Gilbert in a somewhat restrained, neo-classical style inspired by the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome.  I was suitably impressed by all the things I should have been impressed with: the immaculate French limestone facades, the vaulted and frescoed library ceiling, the raised patio overlooking Central Park, and the pretty, pagoda-like elevator cab.  But what struck me the most was how dark the interiors were and how the darkness diminished my spirits.

Elaine Scarry has written with supreme elegance about the light bulb, and how it answered a deep human desire to see and live differently.  I’m wondering how the light bulb changed architecture, that is, how a building designed with the memory of candles and gaslight might be more shadowed, and less obliging, than a building designed after the advent of electric lighting.  The Kahn mansion was wired for electricity, but it still has the imprint of a building that was designed to be moved through at night only slowly, with apprehension.

Say what you will about the tacky/porno subject matter of John Currin’s work, he knows how to paint.  His new canvases at the Gagosian are rendered with impressive skill.  The soft, luminous surfaces have a sensuality that transcends the imagery.

We could have predicted a great deal of it: voluptuous maidens with cascading curls and cockeyed smiles, pictured singly and in groups. But there are a few paintings that break the mold, offering more complex mises-in-scenes.  In the richness and strangeness of their compositions they evoke Dutch paintings.  And Currin’s handling of the figure in some of the works is so assured that it seems almost classical.  The subject of the paintings might not matter at all.

(John Currin, Hot Pants, 2010.  Oil on canvas)

I watched Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” last night for the first time since I moved to New York over ten years ago.  The opening, a montage of shadowy, black-and-white views of the city, is lovely, but this shot of the Guggenheim made me gasp.

It’s shockingly simple and conveys so much: the slight slope of the ramp as you’re walking it, the relaxed voyeurism of the open balconies, and the jewel-box feeling of the museum at night.  It’s the gentlest, least heroic image I’ve seen of the museum, and the one that I want to keep with me.

I first saw Damien Hirst’s cabinets ten years ago, in London, at Barmacy on a Friday night.  They were the perfect, kitschy and ridiculous background to the happy energy in the lounge. 

Seeing them again, this time at L&M Gallery on East 78th Street, they seemed awfully sinister.  The cabinets are constructed with unnerving precision, and the generically-labeled medicines and supplies inside are arrayed with a devastating, lifeless elegance.  There are half-gallon-size jars of codeine and sudafed, and boxes and boxes of prescription painkillers.  These are the things that keep us healthy. 

(Damien Hirst, The Existence of Nothing Causes Nothing, 1999.)