It’s easy to see this in Cole Porter and the sophisticated sets and characters of 1930s Hollywood, but what about in the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center and many of the luxurious apartment buildings soaring above Central Park West? Secondly, Art Deco may very well be the gayest and perhaps even ultimate and defining gay art movement. First, my eye tends to prefer architectural and design elements of the Art Deco movement. I went back to my copious files of Manhattan photographs and quickly noticed two things that I’d not noticed before. Within a certain time and place, does a popular artistic style reflect or herald a burgeoning social movement and cultural shift? How much does an art movement actually influence culture and human behavior and how much does culture influence art? The answers to these questions often seem simple enough but never really are. I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between art, culture, politics, social movements and human psychology.
