Today I joined hundreds of tourists, camp groups, families and local residents who were visiting The Bean<\/a> in Chicago\u2019s Millennium Park.\u00a0 [British artist Anish Kapoor\u2019s\u00a0 highly polished, stainless steel creation is officially titled \u201cCloud Gate,\u201d but\u00a0after its unveiling in 2006, its shape quickly inspired the more popular, descriptive nickname.]<\/p>\n

We walked around it and under it, touched it, and photographed ourselves, our friends, and the skyline reflected in its fun-house-mirror, stainless-steel skin.\u00a0 I watched as children crawled on the ground\u00a0 at the scultpure\u2019s base, seeing themselves appear to be climbing up the inside of the sculpture. I stood underneath The Bean and looked up to see myself and others reshaped and repositioned, depending on where we were standing in relation to the varying curvatures of the Bean\u2019s surface. <\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s an amazing work of art. The Bean\u2019s western surface offers a compressed, fish-eye distortion of Chicago\u2019s dramatic skyline.\u00a0 On the east,\u00a0 north and south sides, you can snap a self-portrait of a smaller or larger version of who you think you are, in the optically re-proportioned\u00a0 plaza surrounding you. And underneath it, you might see yourself multiplied, or upside down.<\/p>\n

The visual experience is striking. The design itself is reality altering, because despite its 110-ton weight, it appears almost to float over the plaza, like the drop of liquid mercury that inspired Kapoor.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s an intangible effect, too. If one of art\u2019s purposes is to allow us see to our world in new ways, The Bean achieves its goal artfully and subtly\u2014not by clobbering you over the head with a message, but by drawing you in through its beauty and ingeniousness.<\/p>\n

I loved watching people \u2013kids and adults\u2014playing with their reflections, waving to locate themselves on the distorting surface, and discovering the visual trickery of the sculpture\u2019s curves.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if Kapoor\u00a0 intended this to happen, but it seems to me that we all were, mostly inadvertently, doing something very simple, but\u00a0 psychologically powerful and politically important:\u00a0 discovering and acknowledging that there\u2019s more than one way to see ourselves, others and the world around us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I joined hundreds of tourists, camp groups, families and local residents who were visiting The Bean in Chicago\u2019s Millennium Park.\u00a0 [British artist Anish<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10967,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1061,784,16],"tags":[1116,1184,1261],"yoast_head":"\n