Art imitating life?

The people of Appalachia got a lot of bad press during the election campaign (or good press, I guess, if you were an ardent John McCain supporter -- was there such a thing?). Gary Younge's reportorial embed in Roanoke, Virginia, gave us a more nuanced look, but it swam against a tide of stereotype and outlandish hate, some real, some imagined.

So here's something to round out the picture a  little bit. 

The new Taubman Museum of Art has opened in Roanoke, a little city once known as The Big Lick, because it was where mountain people from miles around came to buy their salt. Now the city is home to an art museum designed by a fancy Los Angeles architecture firm, with Gehry-like swoops and gravity-defying curves, built from Appalachian materials. 

If art really does imitate life, what does this say about the people of western Virginia?

Comments

[Pete]

Erm.... they have wings...?