Meditations in an Emergency,,The following is an excerpt from the introduction by guest curator Klaus Kertess: "The title of this exhibition, Meditations in an Emergency, has been appropriated from a poem written by Frank O'Hara in 1957 ¬ when the post atomic era and the growing power of the mass media had not yet anaesthetized more tender emotions. 'All I want is boundless love,' O'Hara could write, as he wrapped his narcissism in just enough irony and lyric improvisation to make it necessary to many a reader's life. The Emergency that this exhibition's title alludes to bristles with more public turbulence. The globalization so avidly pursued by nations right and left has literally and figuratively enflamed the globe it ostensibly means to ameliorate. The threat of terrorism rides next to each of us in whatever mode of transportation she or he chooses, and our privacy is evermore sucked up by surveillance. In the United States, whether with the torture of prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib or with the flagrant lies that led us into war, our Executive branch has mocked the very democratic principles with which it seeks to evangelize the world.