Old city of Zurich, thoughts about cultural differences and art

We stopped in Zurich on our way to Israel from Japan. Zurich is a small and beautiful town built around the outlet of the Limmat river falling to the Zurich lake. The lake is around 350m above sea level and surrounded by alpine mountains, what explains the snowy cold weather we experience. The old city is beautiful with narrow streets, European style buildings and several very interesting protestants churches. One of them is the St. Peter Church which has Europe’s largest outside church clock:

The Grossmunster church has large thick heavy metal doors and two beautiful high towers, for five Swiss Franks (about $8NZ) you can climb the towers and overlook the city (this is from where I took the overlooking photos)

The view from the top of the tower is spectacular

We continued to the old 9th century Fraumunster church which its highlights are several Marc Chagall glass windows. Chagall made those 5 windows in the 1970’s when he was 90 years old. 4 of the windows exhibits scenes from the okd testament and one of Jesus, for me it was a bit strange to observe a Christian picture made by a Jewish artist especially that I didn’t find his work so magnificently talented like how he is considered to be…. it looked to me more like a job that a talented artist could do but does not justify such a fuss:

It made us discuss art and what makes some artists so famous and rich, while the majority of the artists remain anonymous and pour. I actually think that what makes an artist successful is not talent but rather marketing and connections. I doubt if Mark Chagall would be famous if he stayed in Russia, where he was born, and wouldn’t had moved to Paris and the US and met the people which made him famous.