Krista Terrell of the Arts & Science Council just sent along a note revealing that the New York Times’ Frugal Traveler, Seth Kugel, spent a few days in Charlotte and blogs about it, “Making Pit Stops in Charlotte.”
While he wrote a lot about the NASCAR Hall of Fame and that he enjoyed his visit there despite not being a NASCAR fan, he also praises the ASC’s new public art tour and podcast, which is why Terrell was interested in sharing.
Here’s Kugel’s remark about NASCAR: “I know that Nascar is awesome in the same way I know that cricket and Tolstoy novels and contemporary dance are awesome. I personally can’t see the appeal, but enough reasonable people disagree with me that I believe in their awesomeness.”
He’s not exactly kind to the city’s image elsewhere, though (the bold-facing here is mine): “The city — which has experienced rapid growth (with a population of over 700,000, double what it was in the mid-1980s) and at the same time maintained a relative lack of identity (banking center and airline hub, total snoozer) — intrigued me. Something had to be going on there, and I would find out what it was.”
Here’s Kugel’s take on the public art tour:
“Uptown is one of those clean areas that people from grittier cities may at first perceive as sanitized and devoid of character, but the podcast will go a long way to dispel that, pointing out many works of public art, including the four statues that stand at the four corners of Trade and Tryon Streets. (Don’t miss the very odd bust of Alan Greenspan in the statue representing “Commerce”.)”
I wrote about the public art tour in a September op-ed, “The art of a city: more than mosaics.”