Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What was he into? A game of displacement, often deeper than it seemed. At the time when Lichtenstein and his co-conspirators arrived on the scene, a sort of academy of spontaneity had formed in New York. Painters all over America had deduced from Abstract Expressionism that art, to be sincere, must be thick and splashy, so that the galleries were full of conventional signs for unconvention. A postmodernist before the term got going, Lichtenstein realized that in art, though style may not be everything, everything is style: every kind of image comes to us packaged in terms that inexorably...
...should. For example, the red hat band in "On the Upper Deck," looks as though it is sitting on the surface of the canvas as opposed to on the hat in the image where it belongs. Similarly, the highlights on the buildings in "Montmartre Street Scene" appear more like abstract shapes on the picture plane than reflections on buildings in the distant background. This conflict between the material surface of the painting and the illusion of space in the image is doubly intriguing in its ambiguity, as we are unsure whether to attribute it to budding originality or simply unresolved...
...plot that somehow has to encompass all of these abstract ideas is scattered and somewhat artificial. Although the story is occasionally gripping, Wenders pressures his unbelievable tale to communicate some very weighty ideas, many of which it just can't support...
While "Snappy Crayons Strikes Back" could be categorized as modern dance, that term carries too much of an abstract, artsy connotation to describe the performance. Comical facial expressions and short story lines inject Whiteside's production with a theatrical feel that leaves the audience not only amazed at the physical dexterity of the dancers, but also thoroughly entertained. It is better labeled, then, as the company calls it: dance theater. "Snappy Crayons Strikes Back" plays not to just coffeehouse poets, but to anyone who likes a good laugh and a spectacular show...
...teaches family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, derides the think-tank activists as old-fashioned social reactionaries in disguise. "Divorce is the entering wedge for these people. They found an issue that looked less mean than attacking unwed moms. Everyone is against divorce in the abstract, but in the concrete, they understand why particular people they know had to have a divorce." "These think tanks know how to tap into people's anxieties," says Arlene Skolnick, a research psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "The gap between the way we'd like families...