Marriott International has installed a sculpture on the plaza outside its new headquarters at 7750 Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Bethesda. As I reported last month, the art piece is dedicated to the hospitality giant's former CEO, Arne Sorenson, who passed away last year. The twisty, dual-arch sculpture is gold and blue in color, and features accent lighting at the base for night viewing.
How very Rockefeller Centerish. More mini-Manhattan pretensions.
ReplyDelete@9:49 AM: Would you prefer it remain a moribund backwater?
ReplyDeleteThe choice is not binary, @1:05. There exists as well the option of Bethesda setting aside pretentions of grandeur and operating as a more sedate suburban commercial center, without the nickel and dime forays at urban sophistication that, on the limited scale geographically achievable in Bethesda, make the efforts look like nothing so much as –somewhat pathetic-- simulacrums. The massive size of the 22-acre Rockefeller Center (roughly the footprint of Cheltenham Drive to Avondale Street, squared,) affords opportunity for sculpture and public art to have room to breathe and to claim their respective footprints/areas of influence --Atlas, Prometheus, the myriad murals and bas-relief sculptures, the assorted statuary throughout the complex. The Marriott installation is a forlorn, solitary, undersized, undistinguished piece better suited for an elevator lobby.
ReplyDeleteI'll give it this, though: it is in harmony with the "downtown" area's collective delusion of being infinitely grander than objective reality holds. Rather than be comfortable in its civic skin as a suburban commercial district, satellite to D.C, the moderately-sized legitimate urban center of the region, Bethesda's property developers and the naïve arrivistes on whom they prey collude to pretend the area is something it is not: a sophisticated, cosmopolitan epicenter. It's a cargo cult interpretation of Big City Life, and it comes across as such for those not in its thrall.
Lol ok
Delete7:15 breaking out the most pretentious anti-pretention essay ever. No one thinks this cut through is trying to be like Rockefeller Center. Get off the high horse and stop tilting at windmills.
ReplyDelete@7:50, Sadly, my earlier reply to your comment, in which I linked to numerous posts from this fine blog, (each linked-to post remarking on New York style or commerce being brought to Bethesda,) was apparently in violation of some standard, since Robert barred it from being posted. (No profanity or violence, no ad hominems of which I am aware.)
ReplyDeleteIn any event, I stand by my earlier assertion. If you are curious to see past entries on this blog that reference Gotham, use Google's Advanced Search page, and enter this site's main page in the "site or domain name" field, along with the terms you seek -- "New York" Manhattan, NYC, Gotham, etc-- in the "any of these words" field. You will be surprised to see how many posts have linked New York and Bethesda, which supports my theory.
@7:15 AM: That word salad was prepared table-side.
ReplyDelete@10:39 Which part of that post did you have difficulty understanding?
ReplyDelete@10:04 PM: The difficulty lies not with me.
ReplyDelete"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
- Albert Einstein
@9:32
ReplyDeleteIf you can't understand simple explanations, don't blame others.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves"
--Julius Caesar (1.2)