There’s something about certain luxury products like glass
and crystal and porcelain where whole styles of the product have become
synonymous with the locality of their manufacture – Murano, Waterford, Meissen,
Sevres, to name but a few . Corning is sort of an American version of that
tradition, where a small town in a fairly remote part of Upstate New York
became such an important name in American glass manufacture. The Corning Glass
Company, now Corning Incorporated, is virtually synonymous with the small city
on a the Chumung River, a tributary of the Susquehanna in western New York’s “Southern
Tier”. The town of Corning is so associated with the glass industry that it’s
nickname is “The Crystal City”.

The Corning Glass Museum is quite a major tourist attraction
as well, featuring highly on many organized tours of the northeastern U.S. I
recall when I was a child having some family visitors from Belgium over who had
just finished a group tour; they were telling about the places they visited and
most were obvious – Toronto, Niagara Falls, New York City, Philadelphia, and
Washington, DC. But then there was also Corning. Corning? I wondered. Yes, they
raved about Corning and its glass museum.

I finally made it to the wonderful metropolis of Corning in
2003 on an autumn road trip with my parents and was quite impressed with the museum .
I thought I’d check out the town and museum again on this trip to the area
since I didn’t make it to the Rockwell Museum the first time around and also
because I read about how the museum has undergone a significant expansion in
recent years vastly increasing its gallery space and live demonstrations about
glass properties and manufacturing.

First I went to the Rockwell Museum and took a walk around
downtown before heading out to the museum campus. One thing I have to say about
Corning is that it’s really quite a nice town having the headquarters of the
Corning corporation. While many small towns and cities in the region like
Elmira have somewhat of an appearance of decline, Corning’s downtown is lively
and prosperous. Maybe I just hit it on an especially pleasant day weatherwise
to be so impressed by it, but it’s both a place that feels prosperous and
modern while still being historic and not overgrown.

The Corning Glass Museum’s expansion has been impressive
since my last visit with huge new gallery space devoted to contemporary glass
art . I think it must also have the largest and best museum gift shop and book
store I’ve seen anywhere other than New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The
exhibitions on glass art and technology through the ages are encyclopedic and
it’s widely viewed as the best and most comprehensive museum devoted to glass
in the world.

I have to admit to generally being unimpressed by most
contemporary art. So much of it has no aesthetic appeal and takes little or no
talent to create, but many “artists” and their critics seem to think that the
uglier and more offensive a supposedly artistic creation is the greater the
merits it contains. I often feel disgusted by what I see in museums of
contemporary art, that I paid a fair fee to be educated and enlightened and
entertained and was let down by the crap they were showing off as “art”.

Glass, though, is an absolutely different artistic medium,
one in which the artists of today may well be surpassing those of the masters
of the past to produce articles of amazing beauty requiring fantastic technical
skill in their manufacture. And art it is because each piece is a unique work
of art. Pretty things in glass can, of course, be mass produced, but so can
prints of paintings and casts of sculptures in more traditional materials. I’m
always impressed by the works by Louis Comfort Tiffany I see in museums as well
as those of modern masters like Dale Chihuly that become part of major
temporary art installations in public places. I really believe the greatest
artistic expression of our current era is in glass, and what I saw I the
Corning Glass Museum only reinforced those feelings. Forget all those
pretentious contemporary art museums like the Whitney (which I visited in
April); if you want to see some top artistic expression of our era, that which
takes some real talent to create items of great beauty, go to the Corning Glass
Museum.