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Guy YedwabWriting the EssayWalking Fifth Avenue to 2001 (Ex 5) Ngugi, in his essay “Power in Performance,” discusses the performance of power  by the state and the performance of power by the artist, and how they are often in directconflict. On my way to my second visit to
2001
, I found myself in a strange netherworld between the two. Normally, Occam’s law of direct travel (the quickest route is the one most likelyto be taken; an adaptation of Occam’s Razor) would have me getting off the N or R trainat W 60
th
Street, literally within sight of the sculpture I was after. But for a second visit, Idecided to shake things up, to listen to a little Robert Frost and take “The Road NotTaken.” In this case, the road not taken was not “the road less traveled by”; in fact, theroad I was walking along was 5
th
Avenue, one of the world’s largest shopping districts.5
th
Avenue proper extends the length of Manhattan, but the average Americanreferring to 5
th
Avenue is referring to the strip of 5
th
Avenue through Midtown, which endsroughly at 60
th
Street (my destination). This is the 5
th
Avenue known for its priceyclothing stores. Window displays line the streets, aiming to draw in the unwary passersbyinto an abyss of merchandise.I am not a materialist. I haven’t gone shopping for clothes since last year, and thenI didn’t buy anything because I didn’t want to. But I have a personal vice: I enjoywatching television ads. Not all of them, of course: just the good ones. I will frequentlyturn to my roommate after certain ads and discuss to him why it was a well constructedwork: sometimes I prize the simplicity, or a particularly striking moment. Television hasthe potential to be either art, entertainment, or commerce. Television ads, usually, fall
 
fairly under the ‘commerce’ heading: thirty seconds of someone trying to sell yousomething. As a result, the average advertisement has the same effect on the watcher as astreet vendor barking his goods—at best, ignored, and at worst, hated. Some ads,however, add in the entertainment element, drawing in the viewer with a joke and a punchline. A very precious few (most notably, of late, the viewer generated internet videoads for the Microsoft Zune) cross the threshold into being artistic. It is no small feat tosell a product, entertain, and be artistic in thirty seconds. Ad images on billboards havethe same challenge. Perhaps it is a fascination with that often overlooked potential artspace that led to Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement: to tell society that the barrier  between artist-generated public art and commercial-generated public art is not as wide asone seems.I’m standing on 5
th
Avenue now. For most of my way, I have tuned out the stores.Lifeless mannequins fill shop windows, bedecked in fashionable clothes that will never seem to look as good on you as they did on the mannequin. There is something mute, blank, and alienating about the mannequins—they try to appeal to the everyman, but thelack of identity portrayed by the blank-faced (or worse yet, headless) dolls lends a creepy post-industrial feeling to the streets. I don’t like to look at them. I wouldn’t have stopped, but one storefront has caught my eyes.I had almost reached
2001
, unenlightened by the eerie capitalism of 5
th
Avenue, but now I was confronted with one of 5
th
Ave’s newest stores, and one which looks likethe future in many ways. It is the Apple Store. The store itself is not visible—consumersgo downstairs, below 5
th
Ave, as though descending into its core. But what is visibleabove-ground is a huge glass cube broken up into individual panes. Despite its fairly
 
straightforward design, its elegance and glasswork recall the cathedrals of the 1600s; itstrikes the eye impressively and stands out from the buildings around it, from all of the buildings in Manhattan. In the middle, a large Apple Corp. logo is suspended, glowingwhite in the sunlight. It would not look any more impressive if it had been a cross.Just across the street is
2001
, a piece which Ngugi would call a performance of  power by the artist, and
General Sherman
, a piece which Ngugi would call a performanceof power by the state. What is so striking to me about the Apple Store, and its latticedwindow cathedral? It seems to be, to adapt Ngugi’s vocabulary somewhat, a performanceof power by the corporation. In the way that television advertisements can be either artistic (breeding thought), entertaining (breeding contentment), or commercial (breedingdesire), public performances can be by the artist (breeding thought), the state (breedingcontentment), or the commercial (breeding desire).And yet, can we truly say that all three of these spheres are separate?
2001
is builtof space-age plastics, which were probably developed through the government research;it also relies on the production power of the corporation. The Apple Store shows thecorporation as an artist; it is creating an aesthetically pleasing structure for only indirect benefit. It is attempting to benefit the passersby, and hopes that its benefit will bereturned to it in the form of commerce.As the Pop Art movement showed, or the development of the iPod, or countlessother examples of the ways in which commerce becomes artistic, or art becomescommercial, or both intersect the realm of the government. In a democratic society, theinterests of art, commerce, and governance are locked constantly in the give and take and
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