Does "In the pleasant setting of the urban art gallery" refer to a certain installation by Damien Hirst in the Urban Art Gallery?
Context:
The Void, a glass display case of 8,000 replicas of currently available pills and potions, displays a similar obsession with pharmaceutical collection and classification. Again, the attention both to detail and number is impressive and the precision of the display – each coloured tablet calculatingly equidistant from the next – is satisfying in a way that strikes at some deep desire for order. The Last Supper consists of a series of thirteen panels arranged in light mockery of the Leonardo painting. Each is designed with the elegant colour coding and characteristic typefaces created by the product design teams employed by the major pharmaceutical companies. But instead of commercial brand-names the labels signify commonplace food items: Beans and Chips, Cauliflower Cheese, Omelette and, in the centre, an acid yellow label for a box which contains 200ml of Christ (ferrous Fumarate BP 140mg). Quick as we have become at reading and decoding the puns and puffery of advertising, the work is soon hoist by its own petard and draws little more than a guffaw. This is not to deny its slickness and one might admire in Hirst the advertising copywriter manqué rather than the lapsed Catholic. In the pleasant setting of the urban art gallery, any political or conoclastic motive is lost, perhaps reflecting the fact that we are all only momentarily concerned but shrug off any responsible thinking. There may even be a sense that on our behalf Hirst is wavering into a collusion with the pharmaceutical companies, celebrating the abundant ways of designing pain out of our lives. pharmacologically – and profitably – if you were to read more than cool flippancy into the work.
Top answer
"setting" = The place or type of surroundings where something is positioned or where an event takes place. com/us/definition/american_english/setting )
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So "the pleasant setting of the urban art gallery" must mean "the location of the art gallery in a clamorous area of the city". yeah? But why "pleasant"? Maybe it wants to say "the special location of the art gallery in a calm area of a busy city"?