New York Minis

"The Arcades Project: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin" is on view until August 6 at the Jewish Museum. It's about wandering the city, with works by various artists, and poems by Kenneth Goldsmith. Here's a good review to read.

One room features New York City miniatures by Nicholas Buffon.



There's Katz's deli, the "new" Odessa (the old one vanished), Stonewall, and the Coffee Shop on E. 14th Street.

(Buffon has also done a mini of Sophie's bar, but it isn't here.) 



According to the words on the wall, they are “panoramas of the unspectacular: instead of offering escape to a faraway place or time, they radiate tenderness for the careworn, disheveled places in which we live.”

(Although, in the tenement window above Odessa, there's a Hillary for president poster. A faraway place and time.)



I like miniature New York City dioramas. Many times on this blog I've featured the works of Randy Hage, who perfectly captured the dearly departed Mars Bar, and Alan Wolfson, whose gritty little Times Square might make you wish you were Lilliputian.

With so much vanishing so fast, eventually all we'll have left of New York will be this mini city. Maybe then someone will assemble all the miniatures in one room and the people of the dead, glass city will stare in wonder and disbelief at what was lost.