Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...peaceable kingdom is dung covered and bone littered, its graceful life subject to sudden violent extinctions. A high turnover. Life is to be stalked and slain, almost abstractly, and ingested. These days, the death is also to be photographed. The tourist minibuses cluster around a cheetah kill. The late 20th century forlornly suckles on the Pleistocene. The whites popping through the roofs of the vehicles like blossoms from a vase will glare at one another with the hatred of one whose dream has been interrupted...
...20th Century largely has been a confirmation of Nietzsche's most horrible fears. Modern man is increasingly incapable of conceiving of any end higher than mere life, or at least mere life with a second car. The sacrifices of old, committed in the name of love of God, or of nation, or of woman, are no longer understandable...
This suits the curatorial temper of the Met's 20th century department very well. Its stress lies on connoisseurship and comparison, rather than on telling the whole story of 20th century art. The Met's modern collection is not equal to that task anyway. Apart from decorative arts and furniture, it consists of some 6,000 works and is smaller than the Whitney's; it hardly begins to compare in scope and depth with MOMA's 65,000 objects...
They have also plunged deep into the art of the '80s to build a base for the year 2000. Given the shrinking number of 20th century masterpieces filtering onto the market and their relentlessly inflating prices, the Met will never be able to catch up with MOMA. But its gravitational pull as an institution should not be underestimated. The Met is the greatest general museum in America, and its new wing marks what may be the final phase in the competition for modernist icons. Quite a few of the privately owned works that Lieberman was assumed to have lined...
...august Metropolitan Museum becomes a major center of modernism as it opens a huge wing devoted to 20th century works...