Word: art
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...addition to running different covers, these editions contain an enriched diet of world news, reporting not only on politics but also on business and back-of-the-book subjects from art to video. The international editions even have several sections of their own, including Traveler's Advisory, a breezy guide to special events throughout the world; Readings, a survey of important books published outside the U.S.; and Cultures, a chronicle of the idiosyncratic sensitivities and surprising similarities of societies around the world...
...protest quickly spread across the political spectrum. On May 18, 36 Senators signed a letter asking for changes in the NEA's grant-making procedures so that "shocking, abhorrent and completely undeserving" art would not get money. At the prompting of Texas Congressman Dick Armey, 107 members of the House sent a similar letter to the endowment...
...congressional letters and the Corcoran withdrawal incited the ire of arts partisans who contend that withholding funds or threatening to do so amounts to Government censorship. Political whim, their argument goes, should not be the judge of art. What shocks one generation -- a Madonna set in a shabby tenement, for example -- is treasured by a later one. Moreover, art that flouts convention by dealing with the extremities of the human condition is the work most in need of support...
...other side holds that Mapplethorpe's work is pornography posing as art. His works, this faction contends, should be shown privately, preferably in a red-light district. In fact, some of Mapplethorpe's work is so graphic that if authorities had chosen to do so, they could have prosecuted him for child pornography, which has no First Amendment protection...
...Washington Project for the Arts is shopping around for a museum willing to present the Mapplethorpe exhibit, and a laser artist is making plans to project images of Mapplethorpe's photos on the Corcoran Gallery's facade. By canceling the Mapplethorpe show, the Corcoran's Orr-Cahall hoped to deflate the flap and engender serious reflection about what is art, what is not and what the Government should support. Those, she admits, are questions to which "no one has yet found answers...