A brief fragment of a thought about Altars as entry points into the understanding of their worshippers...

When in Kraków, make sure to be in the Basilica of the Virgin Mary here shortly before noon. Sit still inside of the main ship of the church and wait for the muted distant trumpet sounds (the Hejnau Mariacki) from the tower of the very building to announce that it is indeed 12pm. Two nuns will enter, and they will open the Altar, a Wit Stwosz (Veit Stoss) pentaptic, gothic masterpiece. Even now, more than 500 years after its creation, the glow of the altar is a powerful one. The contrast between the two states of the artwork is stunning. I wonder why I had to think about the panels of the Veit Stoss altar, when visiting the control room of one of the giant signs on Times Square the contemporary open air cathedral of commerce... How dare I to compare a carved wooden masterpiece that took 12 years to become reality and cost as much as the entire annual budget of the city of Kraków, to a giant, ever re-animated 13-custom-screen-assemblage of pixels on the outside of a building representing the power of News Media? What made me be silly enough to somehow connect a carved and painted masterpiece portraying the "Assumption of the Virgin" (Once a virgin, always a virgin, Mary?) to one of the largest information displays in the world, busy pumping information animated to look as if it were descending from the skies into the main ship of Times Square? Could both of these altars be possible entry points into the understanding of the perception of reality by those who were contemporaries of Veit Stoss, at the verge of the renaissance... and us, now, here, in this post ...(and I just do not know a good term here) world?... What is it really that we trust most, and celebrate most and believe in most? How important are the old symbols and their meaning compared to the last minute information, the breaking news, the real time data, flowing straight from the bottoms of our screens into our perception of what we call now? How relevant is it to us what happened 1000 years ago, compared to what happened 100 years ago, compared to 10 years ago, compared to 1 year ago, compared to an hour ago, compared to 20, 10 minutes ago, compared to now, compared to the predictions of what will happen this year, the next year, and... How will we be looked at by those who will come after us... ...or wait... will they really care, or even know?... ; ) (Hmm... looks like I am sitting in front of my own little altar right now... and there... look... somebody already bit the little fruit... now what does that all mean?)...