Scarred Earth Stark Artistic Images Of An Unromantic West

With often horrific yet eerily beautiful photographic images, Yale University Art Gallery presents a powerful panoramic view of the dark, cancerous, commercially compromised landscape of the contemporary American West.

Before you step from Chapel Street into the New Haven museum, forget all about Ansel Adams and his majestic views of the West. Block all memory of those luminous black-and-white celebrations of a pristine paradise of holy light and transcendent beauty.

With often horrific yet eerily beautiful photographic images, Yale University Art Gallery presents a powerful panoramic view of the
dark
,
cancerous
, commercially
compromised
landscape of the contemporary American West.

Here we go with the West/America/capitalism/progress-bashing ...

Good find. Like Matt Drudge says, "I go where the stink is." Whoo! Open a window! It's amazing how propagandists like this can motivate people to keep partial birth abortion legal. My father is such an environmentalist that even though he's a retired fire fighter, he refused to comment about the four dead Klamath fire fighters. He shut out the issue entirely in his mind, apparently.

2T, you don't think this cretinous sissy of a writer has an agenda, go you?

There's so much here to pick apart it could take the better part of the day, so I'll just point out one of the most egregious examples:

In a somewhat similar study of the banality of boomtown growth and its suffocating impact on the environment, Baltz's 102 images, taken in 1978 and 1979, documents the construction of Park City, Utah. A second-home development and ski resort east of Salt Lake City, Park City was the site of the 2002 Winter Olympics and home to the Sundance Film Festival. Baltz, who takes a flat, tongue-in-cheek approach, portrays the city's birth pangs.

So the dirty old construction, with it's big scary trucks, roughneck construction workers, etc, are both banal and terrifying to the artist and the author, sort of like Adolf Eichmann's banality of evil, yet a little more than twenty years later the site is beautiful enough to be the site of the Winter Olympics and to win the approval of small-footed bad actor, environmentalist Redford as the site of his wearisome film festival.

Luddite nitwits.

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