Today I was invited by the supermarket project owner to assist him bargaining with the contractor. I had written the bill of quantities and the contractor filled it but the owner wanted to pay less. We went over item by item and succeeded in reducing the price about 5%. The owner decided to ask for more offers. The alternative is a semi-Judaized contractor from Kafr Kassem, sure to be cheaper but the quality of the work will be lower. 
The project is in Savion, possibly the most expensive neighborhood in Israel. The houses are big and the building density is the lowest in metropolitan Tel Aviv area. The neighborhood was created in the late fifties near the abandoned Arab village and ma'abara (Jewish refugee camp) of Kyriat Ono (see the historic watch tower against Arab attacks). Then it was considered far from Tel Aviv and to attract buyers, the plots were extra large. Aharon Wiener and other bosses from TAHAL bought plots and built their homes there. It was the best investment of their lives. The other pic shows an environmental sculpture of the rusty iron style pioneered by Tomarkin. It looks like someone has forced a big stone in the mouth of the figure. The artist probably intended to protest that he/she was forbidden to say something. The political repression in that millionaires's neighborhood of Savion must be really ferocious, must be ...
3 comments:
In one of the neighborhoods of Mesa just north of the downtown there is a house with a piece of modern art that is as ugly as the one you have pictured in your post. The neighborhood that has been defiled by that work of art is easily one of the prettiest in the city, with lush greenery everywhere, large elevated porches to laze the day away on, and beautiful 50-60 year old houses. Some of the houses may be even older than that.
Such a shame that such people can be surrounded by such order and add something so out of place.
You have to see Israeli street sculpture. Well, we are a young country, we may yet improve.
I'm not a fan of most modern sculpture anyway. For some reason the city of Mesa had a program whereby "art" was placed on the sidewalks in the downtown from some local company and rotated on a regular basis. I don't know what it is, but there is something about living in an urban area, or one that has pretensions of urbanism, that causes public officials (and the fools that elect them) to believe some of the most daft shit. Nothing like this happens in Apache Junction, but give it another decade and it will probably happen there too. But AJ is a topic for another day.
On a related note, when I was a kid the state opened the Dreamy draw Parkway, and after opening it began putting up small sculptures on the sound wall that parallels the freeway. Most of the sculptures/decorations that were placed on the top of the wall were either modern art, or simple shapes. A man living near the freeway got so sick of the attention that the state was placing to these useless decorations that he spray painted a toilet gold and placed it on top of the wall in the middle of the night.
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