A great museum like The Metropolitan in New York City is civilization’s continuity editor, deflating our self-importance and suggesting we use such words as original and unique with restraint. These words are more appropriate to Madison Avenue than to the history of creativity. They are the words of tabloid headlines, full of it. They characterize [...]
Read More...My albatross as a newspaperman was my habitual dissent from the newsroom’s definition of news. I thought of this the other day as I walked uptown in Manhattan, enjoying hits of pungent newsprint from the vendors and wondering morosely what life will be like without an inky newspaper in my hands. It’s as unimaginable as [...]
Read More...The wall plaque explained that in the Third Century AD Roman society had become sharply divided between a small upper class and an increasingly large poor class with not many in the middle. We were standing in The Metropolitan Museum’s magnificent Greco-Roman gallery, three of us, before this plaque when a young man asked, Sound [...]
Read More...