A few hundred metres away, sculpted into the soil of Calton Hill, sits the Royal High School of Edinburgh, one of the treasures of the old town and whose sentinel, neo-classical gaze accompanies the visitor all around this part of the city.
Adrian Paci's "Home to Go" (2001), a marble figure with a small terra-cotta roof tied to his back, recalls Michelangelo Pistoletto's "Venus of the Rags" from 1967, in which a curvaceous classical nude gazes into a pile of old clothes.
Somewhere in the space between the notoriously strained Fuck or Fight tour of 1989 and their return with Bossanova in 1990, Francis turned his thematic gaze from classical to cosmic.
This reflects a centuries-long habit of using the classical languages to guide our gaze away from the grubby reality.
To gaze over the classical-music landscape in the final weeks of December is to take in what can seem like an endless, unvarying forest of Handel's 1742 oratorio "Messiah".
The performance of the classical P300 speller, however, declines noticeably in the gaze fixation condition.
Another iconic work from the Eighties shows a photograph of a female classical statue, viewed up-close, and the slogan: "Your gaze hits the side of my face".
At 7 p.m., Roseland Ballroom, 239 West 52nd Street, Manhattan, (800) 745-3000, roselandballroom.com; $31 to $55. (Anderson Rich Aucoinn (Tuesday) This Nova Scotian answer to Dan Deacon wrenches danceable electro shards from unlikely source materials, including classical piano and Death Cab for Cutie-worthy shoe-gazing.
Classical poetry is used to guide Chinese tourists in terms of what to gaze at and how to gaze.
The emotional paintings of Jennifer Packer mean to challenge the male gaze and reject the politics of perception that traditionally define classical representation in figurative painiting.
Stroll along the Huangpu River and gaze at the stretch of Greek temple banks, Neo-Classical-style skyscrapers and Art Deco hotels.
