Notes On Now

It Was the City of the Future

I feel an intense sense of foreboding within the enjoyably familiar as I stroll in New York.

It’s a city I made my own in 1962. Today, there is much less steam coming out from the roads while young women with backpacks stride purposefully, drinking coffee from disposable cups, and talking on their phones. Its towering wealth, degraded poverty, and diverse humanity radiate its updated American normality.

New York, the economic capital of the world-transforming energy of might, skill, abundance, generosity, politeness, and ever-present ruthlessness and domination, has shaped my generation. I love it. And four exhibitions in three days bring home the success of the progressive ambitions of inclusion that began in the 60s.

Commanding the huge exhibition space at the top of the Museum of Modern Art is a magnificent retrospective of Jack Whitten. Born in Alabama in 1939, inspired by Martin Luther King, he dedicated himself to painting with exceptional energy and inventiveness. In 2001, he watched the pulverising of the World Trade Centre towers from his studio. His monumental work of witness and memorial, which took him five years to complete and fills a wall, is a Guernica for New York.