Word: artes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...long, checkered history," says Gary Griggs, a professor of coastal geology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Still, he admits, the Army Engineers "have done better recently." Says Charles Rooney, the corps's chief of civil projects in New York: "The state of the art in coastal engineering has improved. We understand more than we used to. We build smaller to allow the bypassing of sand. We try to be less disruptive. Done correctly, groin construction and jetty construction can stabilize beaches without causing problems...
...this year, at least three American private collections have gone public, with their own buildings and curatorial staff. One, the Menil Collection in Houston, is a triumph. The others, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington (based on a collection put together by Wilhelmina and Wallace Holladay) and the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago, are rather less than that...
...National Museum of Women in the Arts is a virtuous bore. Until ten years ago, with a few resolute exceptions like Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Cassatt and Louise Nevelson, women artists were shabbily treated by American museums and either omitted from their collections or treated as token presences. The idea that art by women was necessarily second rate lingered discreetly in some quarters through the '70s. Today it is gone, at least in America. Apart from political enlightenment, one of the things that killed it was the growth of the art market. Now that any list of collectors' favorites...
What is true, however, is that most female artists, like most male ones, are not very talented and live ill-known in a catastrophically overcrowded art world. Thus it is easy for Ms. Anybody, M.F.A., to blame the obscurity of her work on sexist machinations against her as a member of a class and plangently call for redress in quotas and affirmative action. Hence the National Museum of Women in the Arts, a grimly sentimental waste of money, an idea whose time is gone...
...derivative kitsch. Who would waste ten minutes on these sub-Sargent portraits, these mincing imitations of Childe Hassam, these genre scenes crawling with dimpled rosy brats, if they had not been painted by American women? And what serious artist wants gender to be the primary classification of her art? Lee Krasner did not want to be in a ghetto with "women artists" -- she wanted to be seriously compared, as she now is, with men like Jackson Pollock and Andre Masson. Most living artists feel the same way, and this fact alone will guarantee the irrelevance of the National Museum...