by Zoe Pollock
Lawrence Weschler continues to mine life for its never-ending convergences. He asks of Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night:
Is his an attempt to make the vast universe seem cozier (like a galactic outdoor café) or rather the café more galactically lonesome, the guests scattered like far-flung nebulae?
And then finds a similar thread in a David Hockney vignette (pictured), roughly 100 years later:
at the height of the AIDS epidemic, as it happens, at a time when Hockney used to have a beach house overlooking the occasionally quite wild surf off Malibu Beach: a dainty porcelain tea set in the foreground against the backdrop of the roiling sea. Where, one is given to wonder, is the true drama?
The Dish 