Notable founding of 1701 / FRI 2-11-22 / Terra's Greek counterpart / 1962 pop hit with a rhyming title / Onetime cable giant acquired by AT&T in 1999 / Subject of the so-called surgeon's photograph of 1934

Constructor: Trenton Charlson

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: GERHARD Richter (21D: ___ Richter, contemporary artist whose painting Abstraktes Bild (599)" sold at auction for a record-setting $46.3 million dollars) —

 

Gerhard Richter (German: [ˈʁɪçtɐ]; born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction. [...] In November 2011, Sotheby's sold a group of colorful abstract canvases by Richter, including Abstraktes Bild 849-3, which made a record price for the artist at auction when Lily Safra paid $20.8 million only to donate it to the Israel Museum afterwards. Months later, a record $21.8 million was paid at Christie's for the 1993 painting Abstraktes Bild 798-3. Abstraktes Bild (809-4), one of the artist's abstract canvases from 1994, was sold by Eric Clapton at Sotheby's to a telephone bidder for $34.2 million in late 2012. (It had been estimated to bring $14.1 million to $18.8 million.) // This was exceeded in May 2013 when his 1968 piece Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral square, Milan) was sold for $37.1 million (£24.4 million) in New York. This was further exceeded in February 2015 when his 1986 painting Abstraktes Bild (599) sold for $44.52 million (£30.4 million) in London at Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Sale. This was the highest price at auction of a piece of contemporary art at the time; Richter's record was broken on 12 November 2013 when Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog (Orange), sold at Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York City for US$58.4 million. // When asked about art prices like these, Richter said "It's just as absurd as the banking crisis. It's impossible to understand and it's daft!"

• • •

Triple stacks puzzles just aren't as fun to solve as more free-flowing grids where the longer answers are scattered throughout. A grid like this, if the short Downs are even moderately gettable, is very easy to dispose of. I've got nine (!) different shots at 3- or 4-letter stuff in the crosses of the triple stacks, and I only need to get a few of those to dramatically increase the likelihood that I'll know at least one of the 15s. With just one 15 in place, I can work on more of the short crosses, and so on, and that's that, really. Then I sort of hack my way through the center, and repeat the process down below. Somehow crowding all the longer answers together like that both makes the puzzle easier to solve and takes the zing out of the long answers. I don't have that rush of a feeling I get when a longer answer sends me careening across the grid, breaking me into a new section. I'm just hemmed in, stacking, until I can move on. As stack answers go, these 15s seem just fine, though I always hear an "O" (or "OH"? or "AH"?) at the beginning of "YE OF LITTLE FAITH," so that one clanked a bit for me. The only answer in the puzzle that really seems worth the price of admission is "IS NOTHING SACRED?" I only ever hear it used hyperbolically and at least semi-ironically, but I do hear it, and it's colloquial and original and good. Everything else is a bit flat. Completely adequate, but not snappy. I don't quite know why a puzzle like this would "tickle" the editor so much that he'd accept it when (he brags) he gets hundreds of submissions a week over there. There's nothing wrong with this puzzle, but there's nothing exceptional either.  

Why is the word "dollars" in the GERHARD Richter clue when the "$"-sign is attached to the monetary figure ("$46.3 million"). Is that not redundancy? Is this an NYT Style Guide thing that I don't want to get into? Probably. I found the clue on GERHARD grating in that it's art-markety, and the art market is the least interesting / most off-putting thing about art (see Richter's own words at the end of the wikipedia citation, above). And the clue couldn't even get the crass commercialism right, in that "record-setting" is meaningless unless you tell me what the "record" is that the auction sale "set." I guess it's supposed to be assumed that, since the clue tells us he's a "contemporary artist," the record referred to is the one for a painting by a "contemporary artist." But the sale was also a record for a "living European artist" (acc. to The Guardian). The way the clue is written, you could easily interpret it to mean that the sale was an overall painting record, which might then make you cock your head and wonder: "Wasn't there a Van Gogh that sold for, like ... way more?" (this is the only semi-art-literate voice in my particular head). Anyway, I'd like to know more about art than just what a bunch of celebrities and investment bankers are willing to pay for it. Boring. It's like you felt you needed to justify having the artist's name in the grid, and this was the most interesting justification you could come up with. Boo. 

Moving through this grid was easy. Here's the opening:

[16A: What friendly opponents may do]

As you can see, I didn't even wait to work all the short crosses before I looked at the long answers up there. I was doing an ENTS / ORCS comparison in that space, so I did a quick check of the Acrosses to see if the letters from one looked any better than the letters from the other and voilà! AGREE TO DISAGREE! The upper section is basically done at this point, to be honest. Even messing up with YDS instead of TDS couldn't keep the other long answer from showing up real quick with just a little help from the short answers. I liked FAN ART (11D: Some unauthorized drawings), which is up there with "IS NOTHING SACRED?" as a real high point (for originality) of the grid. I was not at all sure about LENTANDO but it felt right, and I could sort of infer its parts from "lento" and "glissando" so I figured all was well (5D: Gradually slowing, in music). Biggest screw-up came in the center and leading down from the center. I had GLEAM crossed by FAN and SUR (instead of GLINT crossed by WIN and BEN) (28D: Flash / 33A: Morale booster / 36A: Big ___). That's a lot of wrong answers to put in / take out. I then had WEAR DOWN / SAD instead of WEAR THIN / EAT. I had literally no other problems. SET A GOAL is fine as "[verb] A [noun]" answers go but it still set off the little "EAT A SANDWICH" bell in my brain, which is not the bell that tells me "hey ... you should eat a sandwich" but the bell that wonders "is that really a standalone phrase?" I think it is. But it also feels like a verb phrase that has a whole bevy of siblings that you've crammed into the high-powered wordlist you and your software use to create puzzles: SET A GOAL SETS A GOAL SET GOALS SETS GOALS SETTING A GOAL SETTING GOALS SEEING GOATS SELLING COATS SEA GROATS etc. I mean where does it end? 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. It's Dom DELUISE (37D: Reynolds's co-star in 1981's "The Cannonball Run"), a very familiar comic actor from the '70s / '80s. He worked consistently right up until just a few years before his death in '09, but I still feel like his real heyday was circa 1980, and if you're younger than Gen-X there's at least a reasonable chance you've never heard of him.

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