Gates of Paradise, snapshots of perdition

I can find the unicorn hidden in the painting after...a Two Brothers Heavy Handed IPA, the Beaujolais Nouveau of beer. This local beer is brewed once a year with fresh hops (as opposed to the dried hops usually employed) immediately upon the hop harvest. The biggest difference for me was a piney resin taste and mouthfeel that gave the bottled beer a cask finish.

A few days ago I visited the Art Institute, mainly to see Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise. I saw the replica panels in situ in Florence while the originals were being restored, and man, did they do a great job! I caught most of a docent's talk, and really enjoyed it.

I then went downstairs for the Richard Misrach On the Beach photo exhibit. I'm a fan of large format photography, and I thought that the curator put together a good program. The copy made the obvious and necessary link to the post-apocalyptic novel and movie of the same name, but one passage (follow the link above) continues to bother me:
"Although sunny and colorful, these photographs are informed by the events of September 11, 2001. They evoke a postapocalyptic world; the title On the Beach explicitly references Nevil Shute’s Cold War novel about nuclear holocaust. In some images, individual poses reference hostages or people jumping from the World Trade Center buildings, while in others, lone figures or clinging couples appear to be the last people on the planet."

The 9/11 reference here is contradictory and lazy. I was living and working in NYC at the time and I don't remember anyone outside the media business saying that we were on the brink of the apocalypse. It was an act of terrorism, which by definition uses an act of limited, intense, and horrific violence--thousands of lives on 16 acres in the case of NYC--to spread fear to millions of people in a massive nation. Above 14th St, the city did its best to get back to business by the end of the week. In On the Beach (or more recently, Cormac McCarthy's The Road), the destruction of civil institutions, and humanity, is all but inevitable, and the narrative deals with how the characters choose to live out their remaining days. I certainly believe that academics, artists, and policy-makers should continue to consider the causes and consequences of 9/11, but employing it for cheap points, whether on the election trail or in even in a museum, at best hinders clear thinking about an important event and further contributes to fear and poor decision-making.