Reception
Metronome, and One Union Square, the building to which it is attached, have not been well received by critics or the public. Kristin Jones, co-creator of the work, complains that it is "the most unloved piece of public art in the city". Among Metronome's critics are New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, who described it as "Pretentious... the artists' basic miscalculation was to assume that a large surface called for comparably big forms... It's just some space in a box with a leaky hole in it." The New York Post put One Union Square at #2 on its "10 Buildings We Love to Hate" list, calling it "a grotesque modern nightmare." James Gaynor of the New York Observer wrote of Metronome, "Fail so big that no one can do anything about it... New York now has its very own Wailing Wall, a site (and sight) of cultural pilgrimage where the death of esthetics can be contemplated."
In various letters to the editor, the public has written of Metronome: "Well-intentioned, but ultimately flat, corporate art. It is a confounding installation based on a contrived theme ('the impossibility of knowing Time')"; " gigantic waste of time, space, and money seems like a satire on all public monuments"; and "a colossal waste of a facade". However, one respondent felt that Metronome was "a large and very elegant digital hourglass; time 'pours' from the numbers on the right to the left... The other elements are likewise very thoughtful and sophisticated ruminations on time, its passage and the ways in which we mark it."
Read more about this topic: Metronome (public Artwork)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)