New York is where I'd rather stay..

  http://www.tvacres.com/food_menus_lisa.htm

City and country are often positioned in contrast to each other. In popular culture, the city presents intelligentsia, culture, fashion, the arts and the countryside offers nature, farming, and “salt-of-the-earth” people. Drawing from the frontier myth and founding of our country, the American narrative romanticizes the countryside (the not city). Urbanity aside, we claim ownership over this idea of a country town where folks are hard-working and honest and nobody needs to lock their door. We know what “country” means. Cities don’t fit into the same neat boxes. They’re modern.

While freezing rural living in time may not be wholly accurate or fair, it is established in contrast to the rapidly evolving city. There’s not really a place for abstraction in our conceived notion of the country. But in New York?

With its masses of people, there’s no  unifying narrative of what New York has always been/is/should be. It’s about the personal experience – coming here with $10 in your pocket and one day owning your own business, going to Times Square, seeing a Broadway show. Art about New York reflects this idea of experience.

http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A5653&page_number=2&template_id=1&sort_order=1

Hedda Sterne’s fittingly titled New York, VII exemplifies the unique nature of the New York experience. I was struck by the activity of the piece. Without a wide use of color, the painting exudes vibrancy and almost glows. Or perhaps that’s just how I feel about New York (sans italics). The beauty of New York, VII as well as New York lies in the daily renewal that the at times frenetic activity of the city provides.

City settings are so conducive to modernity because they remove us from nature. Lacking the waving wheat that sure smells sweet (when the wind come right behind the rain)  and the rolling fields of country life, the city offers looming skyscrapers that serves as hotbeds of innovation. Artists like Sterne are able to represent the city in non-conventional ways because living in the city requires a social contract of agreeing to break with tradition. It feels revolutionary in and of itself. Abstract Expressionism translates this social freedom into nontraditional visual art, facilitated by city life.