Aliens Land In Akron

What's interesting is that you shouldn't hide and protect your children; indeed, the whole point of the exercise is to make sure you TAKE your children to the mother ship.

My friends Chuck Collins of AkronNewsNow and Jody Miller of the Bath Country Journal and PBS 45/49's NewsNight Akron program must admit to a degree of frustration with me from time to time.

After all, my first thought on hearing "Guggenheim" is Red Skelton's Crazy Guggenheim, not the world-renowned art museum in Manhattan that makes so many vino-swilling brie-snarfing folks go positively orgasmic with art love. I spell Momma for my mother, not MOMA for the Museum of Modern Art. I love buildings with straight lines, even floors and windows that work.

But I'm not wedded to old buildings that should make way for the new, apparently unlike my art-lovin' buddies. I think the new Akron Art Museum expansion does look like a space ship, not that there's anything wrong with that. So does Inventure Place. So does UA's Polymer Center. So do most of the bus shelters lining South Main. In the greater scheme of things, that's O.K. What isn't O.K. is pretending construction of a one-winged overhang over the old art museum is art. It looks goofy, detracts from the expansion and paints us as a community that can't make up our mind.

Build new but keep the building used for 24 years? Post new tech building looming over the old like an ostrich looking for a hole to plant its head? I don't need some guy from Austria to tell me what I should or shouldn't like, and I don't appreciate being called a neanderthal (I had to look up the spelling on that one; thank goodness for spell check) to be carried screaming into the New World Order of the truly art-inspired. I think the marriage of the three-years in construction new museum and the 108-year old dowager on East Exchange and High is wrong, just flat wrong.

The good news: at least a lot of the wine and cheese set forked over their own foundation money to pay for it. That and the sprinkling of tax money we apparently didn't need to spend on more cops, better highways and more incentives to fix northeast Ohio's job competitiveness.

When the hubub dies down on this design-for-the-ages (and it will; after all, wine-and-cheese lovers are always looking for the next great design to fawn over) it'll be up to Akron's native art lovers and kids to fill the new gallery space. At least, that's the way it's worked for Inventure Place.