Dua Lingo

I’m not proud to admit that the first thing I noticed on the roof garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was tiddies. Sculpted in a messy child’s scrawl and forged in steel, the word tiddies—as in breasts, as in “itty-bitty titty committee”— sits snugly on the inside corner of a parapet in front of a grand view of Midtown. For the museum’s annual alfresco commission, Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj turned doodles he found on elementary school desks in the former Yugoslavia into large-scale sculptures. (The installation is titled Abetare, after the Albanian ABC book from which Halilaj learned the alphabet.) Sweet and sassy squiggles in space, the pieces frame postcard vistas of cotton-ball clouds and the pencil towers of Billionaires’ Row. The day I visited, tourists were posing for selfies beneath a gleefully demented smiley face perched—à la Louise Bourgeois’s Maman (1999), minus the imposing mass and psychological menace—on eight arachnoid legs. The childhood nostalgia feels on trend—think of the faux-naïf cartoons on Graza olive oil’s ubiquitous squeeze bottles; B…