Julian Schnabel's Hot Pink Craziness
Artiste, award-winning director and painter Julian Schnabel just exposed his massive West Village building and the neighbors aren't happy. We haven't seen Pink that hot since 2001's Missundaztood. But Schnabel's mind works differently than us normals. Did you really expect the thought process that gave way to his massive plate paintings would debase itself by soliciting neighborhood input? It's not like when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel he was like, "Fellow Romans: better like this? Or better like this?"
The 14 story building has incurred no small amount of wrath, the most colorful of which flows from West Village preservationist crazy [Ed. Note: And total hottie] Andrew Berman, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation's director.
"I don't know for sure — but my fear is that this will be the color," he said. "I think virtually any other color would be more acceptable." Berman called the building — with arched windows and clay roof tiles — Mediterranean style. "What it actually looks like is a house you would see in the hills above Hollywood — if it was two stories. On the Greenwich Village waterfront at 17 stories, it's a nightmare," he said. The preservationist thought this very may well be intentional — that Schnabel wants to punish, with pink, those who opposed him..."It almost looks as though he went to great pains to make this building as ugly as possible and to make it stick out like a sore thumb," Berman observed.
Hmm, isn't that what they said about Picasso too?
