Word: appelations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Lewis Hine's 1932 Men At Work photographs, the worker is celebrated as "premier dancer and creator--choreographing, conducting, constructing, bringing the city to life--the Michelangelo of Manhattan." Ever conscious of his pedagogical responsibility to forge connections between these artists, Appel hammers home an academic comparison of Hine and Mondrian. Artist parallels worker, as a nexis, forging form from chaos...
...Appel's critical stance on modernism is that of a fan, a supporter verging on groupie status. He urges that we "properly appreciate an enriching body of work that can be called `celebratory modernism,' and that we do so before the works in question have grown even dimmer or have disappeared entirely behind the newest academic fog banks." And his point is well taken. After all, Bauhaus vests trust in our aesthetic judgement and hopes for the future. It is a positive statement of mankind's ability to engineer his environment and there's something to be said for that...
...Appel also criticizes postmodernism, which he accuses of fostering a particularly nasty brand of cynicism. Something has gone awry, he writes, when our media-induced cynicism spreads to the degree that "we find ourselves blinking with astonishment and perhaps shame at the televised spectacle of dissident Chinese students carrying a twenty-foot-high paper-mache statue of Miss Liberty in Beijing's Tienanmen Square, and dying for it a few days later...
...Appel, a professor of English and American Culture at Northwestern University, makes his points digestible by dividing the 231-page book into 41 minichapters ideally suited for the undergraduate attention span. Although his survey format is somewhat arbitrary, Appel's arguments do cohere...
Occasionally, The Art of Celebration becomes a bit precious, like when Appel asks, "Do the people who collect classic modern plates ever actually use them? Does one's use of the rhetorical question and the impersonal pronoun disguise one's uneasiness with the subject, a fear of sounding effete about dishware? Why doesn't the Design Collection have any beer mugs on display? Is the form art-proof by definition? Is some wine-bound snobbery at work, even in utopia?" But you forgive the prof, `cause, ya know, this education thing is an uphill climb. A spoonful of sugar helps...