April 19, 2015

A kockeputzi.

"I remember liking the present Museum of Modern Art before it opened in 2004. For the life of me, I can’t now imagine what I was thinking. An aged New Yorker, visiting from Florida, not long ago happened upon the new Whitney. A 'kockeputzi,' she called it. Yes, it is a mishmash. But buildings take time to reveal their true selves."

From Michael Kimmelman's NYT article about the new Whitney Museum.

I don't know about the museum, but I'm enjoying the word kockeputzi.

7 comments:

J2 said...

It's more mishegas than "mishegas".

chickelit said...

What a kockamayme word!

Carol said...

Oy that article made me dizzy

Hagar said...

or a conflation with a half-remembered kokopelli, "the trickster?"

Michael K said...

I still remember my visit to the London Museum of Modern Art with my daughter a few years ago. I would never go to such a place myself but she was excited to see it. She is now an art gallery employee in LA. Anyway, the exhibits were interesting. One was a piece of wood with nails driving into it in the shape of a fish. String, which looked like common cotton string was wound around the nails. That was it.

I wondered who had to maintain these things. At least it wasn't the rotten shark or the leaking cans of the artist's poop.

Marc in Eugene said...

Michael Kimmelman seems to be praising with faint praise; if I got to NYC more than once a decade, I'd be reading what the other critics had to say. James Panero, a year ago (during a tour of the construction), noted that the design has 'a luxury condo air about it'.

Richard Dolan said...

The review keeps looking back, a bit nervously, to Mrs. Huxtable and her comments about the Breuer building this one is replacing. Even Kimmelman is more interested in what she would have to say about the new Whitney than what he came up with.