Word: america
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hard to imagine a more explosive, splintered era in art making than the past 50 years in America. The roll call is dizzying--happenings, body art, minimalism, earthworks, conceptualism, neo-Expressionism, installations--to name just a few of the schools that have swum vigorously or otherwise through public waters. Then there is the vast sweep of photography, from the voluble street scenes of William Klein to the arch self-reflection of Cindy Sherman. And there is video art, whose evolution has fast-forwarded from monochrome navel gazing to gorgeous spectacle in a scant 30 years...
...there have arguably been just two moments of final consequence to art's mainstream in the past half-century: Abstract Expressionism, with its reinvention of the spiritual; and its brazen opposite, Pop, whose smart, smirking celebrations of Brillo boxes, billboards and Mickey Mouse smiled into the heart of postwar America and found it made of chrome...
...Warhol's iconic images of Jackie after J.F.K.'s murder, and his tabloid pictures of cars crashed and suicides, replaced dignity with glitz, marrying starstruck glamour to grisly death. Nothing since has seemed so electric and shallow, so perfect a mirror of what was happening to the state of America's spirit. The soulfulness of Pollock and the other Abstract Expressionists never stood a chance after Warhol--and no radical art movement has ever been bought up so quickly as Pop was by the public...
Anyone who thinks about the trouble between blacks and whites in America encounters a secondary division, almost as old. This is the line between what might be called the Externalists and the Internalists...
Externalists, who tend toward the political left, say that America's racial problems are to be addressed through outside interventions (affirmative action, busing and other government programs to repair the damage of the past and enforce racial justice). Internalists, who are apt to be conservative, stress solutions that require efforts from the inside: education, hard work, self-motivation, morale, bourgeois values, deferred gratification, the old immigrant virtues (turn off the TV, shut down the gangsta...