Word: artes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that, there have arguably been just two moments of final consequence to art's mainstream in the past half-century: Abstract Expressionism, with its reinvention of the spiritual; and its brazen opposite, Pop, whose smart, smirking celebrations of Brillo boxes, billboards and Mickey Mouse smiled into the heart of postwar America and found it made of chrome...
...this struggle for the soul of American art is mapped in all its fitful chaos in the Whitney Museum's mammoth, frenetic show, "The American Century: Art and Culture 1950-2000," part two of a yearlong survey, on view through Feb. 13. The first installment of the retrospective, covering 1900 to 1950, was all about American artists striving to find their identity in the shadow of European masters--and finally making the leap with the figure-breaking canvases of Pollock. The sequel shows the rampantly imaginative shattering of that identity from Pollock onward, shuttling at high speed between the spiritually...
...with glitz, marrying starstruck glamour to grisly death. Nothing since has seemed so electric and shallow, so perfect a mirror of what was happening to the state of America's spirit. The soulfulness of Pollock and the other Abstract Expressionists never stood a chance after Warhol--and no radical art movement has ever been bought up so quickly as Pop was by the public...
...simple to say that art ever after has followed trancelike in the acid-green aura of the Warhol Effect. The art roughly of the '70s, from Kent State through Watergate to the imperial rise of Reaganomics, reflected the seismic social shifts of the times. And what that churned up is seen in the show's kaleidoscope of imagery, ranging from a full-size mannequin of a rather worn-looking camel by Nancy Graves through documentary photos of Chris Burden after a self-inflicted gun wound to a film of Robert Smithson running along the rocky ground of his massive...
There was no lack of experiment and soul searching in these years. While Warhol was spinning out his sops to celebrities in sycophantic portraits and the swooning talkfests that filled his gossip sheet Interview, much of American art seemed largely earnest--as if it were a vast machine spitting out proof after proof of the solution to what art should mean as war, protest, the surge of feminism and the pulse of disco played themselves out on the nation's stage...