Letters to Artvoice

THE LIVING WAGE

What a disgrace for Buffalo Councilmember Bonnie Russell to act as a cheerleader for Rural Metro Ambulance at the last City Council meeting (“The News Briefly,” Artvoice v6n9).

For her to use those four young people that just finished their training at Rural Metro as an example of the type of job creation scheme that the City of Buffalo wants is outrageous.

If she had any thoughts of actually helping the hardworking members of her district and the city, she would insist that the mayor recognize the city’s Living Wage Law and how it applies to Rural Metro. It is ironic that this mayor wrote the Living Wage Law when he was a councilmember but now that he is the mayor he conveniently forgets about what he had promised the people of this city. What a disgrace for her to applaud a company that flouts the laws that she and the rest of the City Council passes. This company would sooner pay its attorneys to find loopholes and to pay campaign contributions to politicians who support them rather than pay their employees a decent living wage. It is a total disgrace and Councilwoman Bonnie Russell and Mayor Byron Brown should be ashamed.

Joseph Buscaglia

East Amherst

THE FUTURE OF THE AUD

The former Memorial Auditorium and former General William J. Donovan State Office Building should, in fact, both be demolished (“Puckstop,” Artvoice v6n5). In their place, the remainder of the Commercial Slip should be unearthed and rewatered, as should the portion of the former Hamburg Canal to Washington Street, across from the Buffalo News headquarters. Eventually, the rest of the Erie Canal to Tonawanda should also be rewatered, removing Interstate I-190 from the Cobblestone District to the split with I-290, but that will have to wait several years.

The new transportation hub and parking garage, with a new shop for Metro Rail trains should go on the Webster Block. Meanwhile, either a new convention center or Bass Pro should go in the DL&W terminal and new public market should go on the Central Wharf.

Kevin F. Yost

Rush, New York

PANO’S &

THE ATWATER HOUSE

All who care about Buffalo lament the loss of the Atwater House to Pano’s urban vandalism (with the demolition of the Atwater House Pano’s building looks even more hideous).

Individuals will now decide if they want to support a business that has had nothing but contempt and disregard for the neighborhood from which they have derived their success.

However the letter writer is misinformed (Letters to AV,” Artvoice v6n7). Three years ago when the demolition of the Atwater House surfaced, the Buffalo Preservation Board reviewed the demo request, visited the property (inside and out) to see for ourselves the building’s condition (the Atwater House was never a locally designated landmark nor did it exist in a landmark district which would have given the Preservation Board more authority over the property), conducted a public hearing that filed the Common Council chambers and voted 10 to one to deny the request to demolish.

I would say this does not seem to be “sleeping in the corner.”

I fully agree with the frustration and sense of historic loss expressed by the letter writer, however he hurts his cause by not having his facts straight.

Russell E. Pawlak

Buffalo Preservation Board member and President, Central Terminal Restoration Corp.

Buffalo

ON THE ALBRIGHT-KNOX SALE

As a Buffalo resident, Albright-Knox Art Gallery member, art historian and museum professional, I feel compelled to contribute to what has become a public debate on issues surrounding the impending deacessioning and sale of a number of objects from the Gallery’s collection. I wish to underscore certain issues that may have been buried in the mounting pile of half-truths and reckless accusations aimed at the Gallery, its board, its director, and the members who support their decisions.

Insisting that the antiquities and objects of non-Western art in question are vital to providing context for the Gallery’s core collection of modern and contemporary art and crucial to the aesthetic enlightenment provided by the institution is to uphold a long-antiquated notion of what a museum is (or should be)—a large scale, public version of the 19th-century gentleman’s “cabinet of curiosities.” Such a “time capsule” approach to museum collections has proven lethal for institutions that are inherently embedded in an ever-changing cultural landscape. To preserve the objects in question as a historical exhibit on Buffalo’s golden age of largesse would be folly; Buffalo needs to be more than just an exquisite tombstone to cultural history.

The public should consider that the objects in question have long been anomalies in the Gallery collection, with the non-Western objects in particular situated well outside of their original cultural context and function. The irony of the Buffalo Art Keepers’ insistence that such objects are essential to implementation of the Gallery’s mission is that it calls for a sea change in the very institutional mission they seem so passionate about defending. If they indeed want to call for such a revolution, they should at least begin by advocating for curatorial direction and comprehensive, interpretive public programming surrounding the art in question. But, again, such a focus would necessarily be part of an entirely different institution.

Museums have many difficult internal decisions to make on a regular basis, not least of which is the strategic shaping of their collections for the education and enjoyment of future generations. Sometimes, progress must come through an apparently reductive process that is bound to be controversial to those who see only the negative in that process.

Eric Jackson-Forsberg

Buffalo

Though I have moved from Buffalo back to East Aurora, I have been following the war of letters between Bruce Jackson, Carl Dennis and others. I won’t attempt a substantive critique of the letters, but would like to point out a few comments that fall into the category I would call “true but irrelevant.”

One such statement which has long galled me is giving a party’s age when there is no point to doing so. Bruce Jackson informs the reader that Tom Freudenheim is 69, a fact that is totally irrelevant. I just turned 74. So what? Why this revelation? Is it to subliminally plant the image of Freudenheim as a doddering geriatric? Readers can conclude on their own that Freudenheim is in the “third age” as the French refer to it, from his statement that he roamed the corridors of the AKAG for 50 years.

Kenneth J. Rummenie

East Aurora

Emendation

and correction

The emendation: I included in “The War Against the Albright-Knox” (Artvoice v6n8) a brief list of some internationally known creative writers who had been in the UB English department. I omitted one of the most illustrious of that group, the poet and scholar Susan Howe, who has taught her last class at UB and joins the retired roll at the end of this semester. That was an error, for which I apologize. Neither did I mention any of the earlier losses, such John Barth, John Logan, John Wieners, Donald Barthelme, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Haas and John Coetzee.

The correction: I twice referred to Carl Dennis “kvelling” about the Albright-Knox’s sale of rarely-shown antiquities. Two of my friends questioned my Yiddish. “Kvell,” they pointed out, means to gush, to carry on with pride. The word I should have used, both said, was “kvetch,” which means complain at length in cranky fashion. I had been thinking about how cranked-up Dennis seems to be about all this; at a public meeting at Crane Library last week he was more animated than I’ve seen him in 30 years. But his enthusiasm is certainly less important in this narrative than the character of his complaints. “Kvetch” it is.

Bruce Jackson

Buffalo