Southwest Airlines is in hot water once again for telling an overweight passenger that she’s too fat to fly. Its policy requires fliers to buy a second seat, but we might have found a better solution…
The airline is in hot water once again for telling an overweight passenger that she’s too fat to fly. Weight loss blogger Kenlie Tiggeman is suing the company for discrimination after flight attendants asked her to buy an extra seat at the gate last November. The airline applies its “Customer of Size” policy sporadically, Tiggeman argues, and should enforce the rules when passengers are purchasing tickets instead of during boarding.
This is familiar territory for the budget carrier. Tiggeman—who, it's worth noting, has lost more than 100 pounds since 2009—dealt with this for the first time a year ago, when a flight attendant told her she was too large for the seats, even though Tiggeman says she fits between the armrests. And in 2010, actor and director Kevin Smith caused a fuss on Twitter when Southwest kicked him off a flight because he didn't fit into his seat.
This whole dustup reminded me of an interesting alternative solution that a friend of mine (who asked not to be named) experienced a few years ago. When boarding an Alaska Airlines flight for a short hop in the northwest, my superpetite friend was stopped by a flight attendant and asked if she would be willing to sit next to an overweight passenger in exchange for frequent flyer miles. _
_My friend decided it was worth losing the elbow room for a couple of hours and notes that her seatmate wasn’t dramatically overweight. “I didn’t feel like the person was so big that they should be required to buy two seats,” she says. “She was big enough to wait until everyone was seated to come down the aisle because she was obviously uncomfortable moving through the plane.”
Her reward: About 1,000 frequent flyer miles and free drinks throughout the flight. Oddly enough, my friend was approached yet another time the following year on the same airline. But this time, a seat opened up at the last minute, and she was bumped up to first class simply for being accommodating.
Even though flight attendants approached my friend twice, Alaska Airlines spokesperson Marianne Lindsey says this isn’t an official company policy. “We don’t even suggest they do this,” Lindsey says. “I'm surprised it happened to her twice! We do give our employees a lot of leeway to make customers happy, to make it work, but we don’t have an official policy about that type of seating.”
It's interesting to wonder whether this should be an official policy for airlines—or at least the unofficial plan A for comfortably seating all passengers. A handful of miles is certainly less costly for the airline than a lawsuit, not to mention that Southwest employees just come off as jerks whenever this happens.
More importantly, this is a discrete way to manage a sensitive issue. In Tiggeman’s case, it upset her not only that Southwest applies its second-seat policy inconsistently but also that the flight attendant carried out the conversation in front of a long line of passengers waiting to board. That’s humiliating and disrespectful—and, I think we can all agree, a poor way to handle the problem.
For centuries, Vienna was the center of Europe’s intellectual life. Now, the city that invented modernity is in the vanguard once again, reinventing itself as a twenty-first-century hub of contemporary design ... and the art set’s newest capital. Tim Murphy scopes out the scene.
In her career as a model, Vienna-born Hanna Putz lived in London, New York, Tokyo, and Paris. But after she picked up a camera and became an artist herself, Putz decided that she wanted to live in a city which not only was artistic and cosmopolitan but would offer her the intimacy and peace of mind she needed to focus on her work. So she went home. “I’m a photographer, an observer,” she said one afternoon, sitting in Die Au Café, inside TBA21, a contemporary art complex in Augarten, one of the city’s many lovely and impeccably manicured parks. “And observation is just what Vienna is about—sitting outside at a coffeehouse, watching passersby, and taking time to enjoy life.” And yet, Putz said, “there’s great energy here. We have a genuine and tight-knit art scene, and we’re aware of the international market. But time passes more slowly in Vienna than in the bigger cities, and I like that.”
Putz is hardly alone in cherishing Vienna’s divine equipoise between orderliness and creativity, established order and new-guard brio. The city is undeniably beautiful: At the center of town is the Golden Quarter, home to a splendid new Park Hyatt hotel and Europe’s second-largest Louis Vuitton store after Paris, and from there the districts, or quartiers, are arranged like Paris’s arrondissements, spiraling out snail-like as they reach the Ringstrasse, the fabled thoroughfare that encircles the central city. A serene landscape of wide streets, wedding-cake apartment buildings, handsome green spaces, and elegant old cafés, Vienna, the seat of the majestic Habsburg empire until 1918 and one of the world’s most prosperous cities, seems to operate with the precision of a Swiss clock—a perfect coordination of subways, trams, and bike-sharing stations. nobody runs, shouts, or honks their horn. Weekdays downtown, the streets are so quiet that all you hear is the ticking of the don’t-walk signs.
Christine Koenig at her eponymous gallery. Behind her are images from Ai Weiwei’s 2014 show, Study of Perspective.
The main hall of MAK, the Museum of Applied Arts. The couches are from 12 Divans, by sculptor Franz West.
Christina Steinbrecher-Pfandt, artistic director of the decade-old ViennaFair, which displays work by Austrian and international artists alike.
Yet all that civility—the placid facade which sometimes earns Vienna a reputation for dullness—masks the growth and dynamism that has taken hold here. Ever since the formation of the European Union in 1993, immigrants from countries both rich (Germany) and not so rich (Latvia, Turkey) have streamed into Vienna, drawn in part by the excellent universities. At the same time, the city has imposed statutes to maintain affordable housing for its middle class, with more than two-thirds of the rental market regulated. So unlike in New York and Paris, where this year’s affordable neighborhood for young creatives becomes next year’s high-end real-estate development, Vienna’s very stability has allowed an entrepreneurial and cultural vigor to flourish. It’s a kind of controlled explosion—an exciting collision of the new in the handsome framework of the old.
All of this has combined to create a singular moment in Vienna. You might even call it a comeback. After all, for much of the past 200-odd years, this city was the center of European intellectual life—the home of Freud and Haydn, Strauss (both senior and junior) and Zweig. Modernity was born here, as were the most radical philosophical and aesthetic movements of the twentieth century. But then came the horrors of World War II, and afterward, Vienna—the early epicenter, in many ways, of those atrocities—fell into a sort of rut, becoming a city of ghosts and museums, treading lightly over its recent past, seemingly determined to offend no one.
But now Vienna is being reborn, exchanging its (fair and not so) reputation as a seat of xenophobia, insularity, and provinciality for the cosmopolitanism that is its birthright. These days, however, instead of being celebrated for its musical or literary innovations, it is one of the world’s great incubators of visual art (as, you are reminded on even a short stroll through the city, it was when the likes of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt scandalized early-twentieth-century Europe with their reinvention of what art could look like and be). It’s done so in part by flying under the radar. Here, you can still be an artist without being consumed with the business of making art. Which, in today’s art-world economy, might be the most radical thing of all.
You feel the city’s new sense of itself everywhere, but most viscerally at its cultural institutions. Both the contemporary art center 21er Haus and the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK)—which shows early-twentieth-century Viennese modernism as well as works by living artists from across Europe—are under fresh, innovative leadership. And Vienna-Fair, the ten-year-old international art event, was recently taken over by a pair of forward-thinking curators—the Lithuanian Vita Zaman, and Christina Steinbrecher-Pfandt, born and raised in Kazakhstan—who have cultivated emerging talent from across Europe: Viennese artists like Putz, Lilli Thiessen, and Alexandra Ruthner, as well as the Bulgarian installation artist Pravdoliub Ivanov and the radical Russian collective Chto Delat. The fair is not yet among the world’s biggest international art souks, but it has become an important bridge between the better-known (and often prohibitively priced) art market of Western Europe and the swiftly rising one of Eastern Europe (it also, conveniently, coincides with the well-regarded Vienna Design Week). “We’re surrounded by classicism here, but most days we ignore it,” Marlies Wirth, a young curator at MAK, told me. “Even if you live in a museum, as we do, you can find your own contemporary structures within it.”
This juxtaposition is nowhere more apparent than in the Museums Quartier, a complex of museums and installation spaces created from old Habsburg stables and opened in 2001. The Leopold Museum, which houses the works of Vienna’s fin-de-siècle golden age, sits alongside both the imposing modern-art fortress Mumok and the Kunsthalle, which shows contemporary works. The Viennese beau monde fill the complex’s cafés and restaurants, while long-haired skateboarders—many of them students at the nearby Academy of Fine Arts, whose graduates include Schiele and Daniel Richter—lounge on the bright-colored Cubist benches that punctuate the center courtyard, smoking and chatting.
It’s that effortless assimilation of culture into everyday life that increasingly draws young artists to the city, says Severin Dünser, a curator at 21er Haus. “Our art community here is not too big and not too small,” he said, after rattling off an impressive list of emerging and mid-career artists who’d made Vienna their home. “It’s a good place for artists to be productive and not get distracted by all the hype.”
On one of my first evenings in the city, I had dinner with Jean-Stephan Kiss, a French interior designer who recently moved here. “Vienna feels very alive to me, unlike Paris,” he told me. “Older folks still like their Baroque and Biedermeier, but young people are into design from the 1950s through the 1970s and even the 1980s.” He continued: “People here can be distant, but they’re very polite. Austrians don’t like to show off, but a lot of them are quite wealthy.” He then gave me one of the best pieces of advice about experiencing the city, which I followed the next day: “Be sure to look up when you walk around.” And he was right. Atop one gorgeous building after the next was a sleek penthouse that had been appended—improbably but successfully—to a nineteenth-century rooftop.
And there it was, that Viennese theme once again—the favorable imposition of the new onto the old. The very arts complex where I’d first met Hanna Putz for tea, TBA21, had once been the home and atelier of Gustinus Ambrosi, a sculptor who was sympathetic to the Nazis during their occupation of Vienna (another theme here: a not-quite-grappled-with past shoving up against a global present). Though it still houses a museum of his works, it’s now the nerve center for the ambitious arts patronage of Francesca von Habsburg, who was born into European royalty, married a man who heads what’s left of Austria’s oncegrand Habsburgs, and has poured her fortune into TBA21, her gallery and one of Europe’s most exciting foundations for new art.
When I visited, the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson was reading poetry outside, taking a break from filming a version of World Light, an epic Icelandic novel staged by a ragged troupe of young Icelandic artists. I met Von Habsburg on the terrace, where she and her curators were sipping white wine. “We’re like an enclosed art biosphere here,” she said, wrapping herself in a violet shawl. Both her black SUV and her Miu Miu bag were parked nearby. “If you nurture one artist over a long period of time, they give you their best work.” (She has also supported such artists as Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson.) “We gave Ragnar $15,000 years ago for a video and . . .”
A call came through on her cell phone. She turned to her chief curator, Daniela Zyman. “Finish that thought for me,” she said, and then excused herself to take the call. Zyman laughed along with Nadim Samman, a young curator who’d recently decamped from London to Vienna to join TBA21. “London’s fast and Berlin parties hard,” Samman said. “But Vienna’s all about the appreciation of slow pleasures.”