posted by Elizabeth Fama
I received a call on Tuesday from Virginio Ferrari's son, Marco. He pointed out an error in a previous post of mine regarding public art. I had incorrectly identified this sculpture as his dad's work:
In fact, the sculpture (which used to live in front of the old Woodward Court dormitory) was created by Israeli-born artist Buky Schwartz. I'm sorry for the error.
The point of that post remains: I was on my usual tirade about how private art can be taken down whenever the owner wants to retire it, but public art often has a difficult removal process (witness Orisha Wall), or no process in place at all (which I believe was the case for Caryl Yasko's 55th Street mural, now slated for restoration).
Marco pointed out that blogs can be flawed news sources because they're not vetted -- that is, anyone can write anything and many people will believe it. That may be true, but there's some great freedom of speech happening on this blog that I wouldn't want to throw out with the bath water. We try hard, but let us know when we've made a mistake and we'll happily correct it.
5 comments:
Elizabeth,
I would argue the blog is indeed vetted. It's vetted by all the readers who can post comments when an error is made.
A newspaper correction is buried on page 2 where no one reads it.
Re: the 55th St. mural. On Tuesday I walked by the mural and saw a group of 4 or 5 people with some art supplies trying to clean up a small portion of the wall. Well, I'll admit they are dedicated. I don't know this for sure, but given that the area they were working on was between the legs of the weird cartoon-face man, I wonder if they weren't removing some vulgar graffiti of some sort.
I am so disappointed to hear the mural is slated for restoration. I'd much rather see something new there--it need not be professional even. How about a group of local art students?
Elizabeth,
You're wrong. They're on page 3, and I read them.
:)
This is a fantastic post. Up front and to the point. While blogs are imperfect and many bloggers refuse to admit mistakes, you show what a good blogger does. In fact, the give an take on this blog sometimes leads to changes in views by the author. We can't think of blogs as a news article, but rather as the starting point of a conversation.
Thanks to Marco for the correction and thanks to Elizabeth for her new post.
You'll never get that job at the Herald now.
too bad the Herald doesn't have this attitude!!!
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