As an American with Armenian (and Russian) roots, I was given this New York Times article last week. The arts hold such importance for me, and it's wonderful to see others, including fellow Armenian Americans, who feel art and culture should have a vital role in all of our lives. -KT
YEREVAN, Armenia — Some 20,000 Armenians turned up for the opening of thes Cafesjian Center for the Arts last week. They jammed the new sculpture park and the terraced gardens and galleries, including the first exhibition ever in Armenia of the Armenian-born American great, Arshile Gorky. The center, a mad work of architectural megalomania and historical recovery, is one of the strangest but most memorable museum buildings to open in ages. Imagine an Art Deco version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon stretching nearly the height of the Empire State Building, its decorations coded with Armenian symbolism. Did I mention the artificial waterfalls?
Built into a gigantic hill in the commercial heart of this capital city, with a staircase that climbs the outside linking the gardens, the place was originally conceived in Soviet times to be topped by a monument to the Soviet revolution. That it has been turned into a contemporary-art center by a rich American is a twist of history whose symbolism is lost on no one here.
There’s no endowment, no professional board, so it may very well soon fall flat on its face, as so much has in this country where widespread corruption, lethargy and years of isolation have led to an unemployment rate around 40 percent, a crumbling infrastructure and almost no middle class.
But for the time being, at least, it is doing what precious few museums, and even fewer vanity enterprises like it can dream of doing — namely, offering a whole nation a kind of uplift. From morning to evening, as if out on prom night, young Armenians at the opening rode the center’s escalator, in many ways the main attraction, which rises via several grand, plaza-size landings inside to, of all things, a little jazz lounge, where a view of the city unfolds beyond tall windows behind the stage.
Armenia’s president, Serge Sargsyan, surrounded by swarms of security guards (politicians can’t be too careful here) took time out from the debate over opening the border with Turkey. He joined Gerard L. Cafesjian, the 84-year-old Brooklyn-born Armenian-American patron of the center, and the center’s director, Michael De Marsche, among others, to hear the inaugural set. These days Armenian newspaper headlines dwell on the Turkish border opening, which the United States quietly presses for to gain an oil pipeline that can sidestep Russia and Iran. In return Turkey wants to table once and for all any talk about having committed genocide in the killing of more than a million Armenians nearly a century ago. Admitting to genocide has legal ramifications in terms of restitution. So President Obama has lately stopped using the G word, leaving Armenians to choose between desperately needed economic improvement and justice in the defining calamity of their history. (To continue reading, click here.)
