Word: art
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THERE is a kind of art--playful art let us call it--that is becoming more and more popular as the West declines. This kind of art--it includes Camp, Pop, and a lot of other things I'll talk about later--creates a nervousness in reviewers, an anxiety that the artist is trying to take him in, or put something over on him; he fears he is going to make an ass of himself...
...high-brow way of manifesting fear is for the critic to become moralistic, as if such art were not a personal affront, no, but an affront to the Western Tradition, frivolous, you see, considering the Nature of the Times We Live...
...this genius?...this prank...this outrage! For every time the critic becomes serious the artist giggles, and when our critic laughs along with him the artist suddenly turns spooky, funeral. The critic feels like a bug and strikes back with "if we should dignify it by the name of art at all in poor taste unwashed ill mannered self-indulgent...adolescent...childish....infantile...
...sympathize. I can understand why someone shot Andy Warhol. Seeing picture of, (or by) that smug silvered hair fairy with his dark eye glasses I've felt the same impulse. That's not art, I want to say, you're not artist. Leonardo is an artist, Dostoyevsky, Michelangelo, Rilke...in a phrase, the Western Tradition of High Seriousness...
...Cambridge Art Association on Garden Street, right across from the Commander Hotel on Garden Street, rents and sells prints and paintings of local artists at very low prices and very good quality. There should be a student art gallery similar to it in Cambridge but since there isn't this one should get twice as much patronage. It is fun, not frightening, to pick out pictures according to your own tastes, instead of watered down versions of commonly accepted great masters...