Word: aptness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...distinction between cathartic melodrama and historical events needs attention, however, if only because professional historians themselves have so much trouble respecting it. Slavery, so obvious in its lurid immorality, is apt to become especially distorted in the hands of American historians. "What is it about the black experience," asks Author Michael Novak, "that produces in so many good minds, black and white, a positive lust for corruptions of elementary sense?" The answers are probably 1) guilt and 2) ideology...
...world of obsolescence. Our characteristic printed matter is not a deathless literary work but today's newspaper that makes yesterday's newspaper worthless. Old objects simply become secondhand-to be ripe for the next season's recycling. In this world the great library is apt to seem not so much a treasurehouse as a cemetery. A Louis Sullivan building is torn down to make way for a parking garage. Progress seems to have become quick, sudden and wholesale...
...every art historian has been as nobly certain of the natural order as that unruffled Italian phallocrat; yet the fact remains that until quite recently, the work of women artists did not have a history. For several hundred years, women who painted (or, more rarely still, sculpted) were apt to be seen as inconsequential strays, more or less talented, in a man's profession. Men did not make the Bayeux tapestry, or embroider the gold-worked opus Anglicanum chasubles that were among the supreme glories of medieval art. By the late 15th century one artist in every four...
There are G&S aficionados who delight in humming Sullivan's airs and are apt to break into a patter song at a moment's notice, or without it. Then there are those whose exposure to the masters of Victorian operetta has been painfully shoddy. The current G&S production of The Pirates of Penzance is bound to convince both groups that it is, it is after all a glorious thing to be a Gilbert and Sullivan...
...best of the color silk-screen paintings, like Retroactive I, 1964, are such soaring bel canto that one is apt to skip over the odd resonance of their images. Consider the red patch in the lower right corner: a silk-screen enlargement of a stroboscopic photo by Gjon Mili of a walking nude, done in imitation of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which was itself based on an earlier sequential photo by Marey. The image stutters backward through technological time. But then it also looks like the grief-stricken Adam and Eve in Masaccio's Expulsion from Eden...