Common motifs in high art? / FRI 12-20-24 / Member of the Golden Horde / Goddess often depicted clothed in green / Rhea's relative / Ancient music halls / Subject of 199 silkscreen paintings by Warhol / Org. with towers / Aptly named descendant of Standard Oil

Constructor: Henry Josephson

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: THE GOLDEN SPIKE (32A: Symbol of America's first transcontinental railroad) —

The Golden Spike (also known as The Last Spike) is the ceremonial 17.6-karat gold final spike driven by Leland Stanford to join the rails of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States connecting the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad from Omaha on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. The term last spike has been used to refer to one driven at the usually ceremonial completion of any new railroad construction projects, particularly those in which construction is undertaken from two disparate origins towards a common meeting point. The spike is now displayed in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. [...] Completing the last link in the transcontinental railroad with a spike of gold was the brainchild of David Hewes, a San Francisco financier and contractor. [...] To drive the final spike, Stanford lifted a silver spike maul and drove the spike into the tie, completing the line. Stanford and Hewes missed the spike, but the single word "done" was nevertheless flashed by telegraph around the country. In the United States, the event has come to be considered one of the first nationwide media events. The locomotives were moved forward until their cowcatchers met, and photographs were taken. Immediately afterwards, the golden spike and the laurel tie were removed, lest they be stolen, and replaced with a regular iron spike and normal tie. At exactly 12:47 pm, the last iron spike was driven, finally completing the line. (wikipedia)

[56A: "Sorry, those secrets are *beyond* classified"]

If this is a debut (as it appears to be, since the constructor's name is not in my database), then it's one of the more impressive debuts I've ever seen. The grid shape itself is arresting. At first glance, it looks too choppy—like, too many black squares, too many short answers, not promising. But then it unfolds and it has this really incredible flow—not all-over flow, but a kind of trickle-down, three-part flow, where one mini puzzle leads down to the next, that part fills up, and then down you go again to the bottom, with big, bright answers splashing across the grid along they way, leaping like KOI across the grid (I know, KOI don't really leap, just play along, for once!). And yes, there are a lot of short answers, but they are mostly clean and *all* in service of gorgeous marquee answers. That is the proper job of short fill—hold the longer, better, more impressive fill in place without being aggressively ugly. And today's marquee fill is indeed impressive. Eight (8) grid-spanners! Well, two are near-spanners, at 14 instead of 15 letters long, but that's another virtue of the grid: you get a couple of rarely-seen 14s (for structural reasons, 14s are often hard to accommodate in a 15x15 grid, generally), and you get a center stack that's leaning, staggered, a little off-kilter, which keeps the grid from being excessively blocky (yes, sometimes I just like (or don't like) the way the squares look in the grid—not as important as how the puzzle plays, but the eye likes what it likes). Yes, the puzzle was too easy, but it was fun while it lasted. Exhilarating to be able to drive ANSWERED TO NO ONE (7D: Had carte blanche) like a spike, right through the heart of the grid, and then have THE GOLDEN SPIKE show up as an answer. My spike didn't *complete* the puzzle, the way THE GOLDEN SPIKE completed the railroad, but man was it fun satisfying to hammer it home: