High and Low Art | The New York Times

High and Low Art: Leslie Buck’s coffee cup design and Picasso’s Dora Maar

Yesterday’s New York Times really got me thinking about how art of all kinds is in and around our lives and is most often not presented to us as such, but nonetheless is here for us to enjoy and appreciate.

Leslie Buck in 1991   (photo:Todd Heisler/The New York Times)

The front page carried the obituary for Leslie Buck, the man who designed the most recognizable coffee cup to go- as the Times points out, “as vivid an image as the Statue of Liberty, beloved of property masters who need to evoke Gotham at a glance in films and on television.”   The full obituary/article can be found at the following link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/nyregion/30buck.html?scp=1&sq=leslie%20buck&st=cse

Then on the front page of the Arts section, an article about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s massive retrospective of Pablo Picasso. Surely, not one to be missed, the show presents over 700 works from the master.

(photo:Todd Heisler/The New York Times)

The NYT’s full Picasso article can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/arts/design/30picasso.html?scp=2&sq=picasso&st=cse

I appreciated the even hand from which The Times dealt the news yesterday, with both artists receiving a front page article. It would be hard to argue which artist’s work has played a larger role in the grand scheme, but in the day-to-day, compare the amount of times you’ve been in the presence of a Picasso to the countless times you’ve held Mr. Buck’s art right in your hand.