Word: artful
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...word would fade for years until it was reborn in the early '90s, used again to describe a generation of middle-class youths interested in an alternative art and music scene. But instead of creating a culture of their own, hipsters proved content to borrow from trends long past. Take your grandmother's sweater and Bob Dylan's Wayfarers, add jean shorts, Converse All-Stars and a can of Pabst and bam - hipster...
...Some of this ridicule is a bit unfair. As stores like Urban Outfitters have mass-produced hipster chic, hipsterdom has become a part of mainstream culture, overshadowing its originators' still-strong alternative art and music scene. Those people, of course, no longer identify as hipsters, but they're not the problem. The hipsters who will be the dead end of Western Civilization are the ones who add nothing new or original and simply recycle and reduce old trends into a meaningless meme. It's for that reason that when Williamsburg's hipster playland is in crisis, there aren't many...
...what would that kind of art look like? In that same year, he provided one answer in Tribulations of Saint Anthony, a pandemonium crammed with the kind of scribble-scrawl images the world would not see again until Cy Twombly came along more than six decades later. Around this time, Ensor also started bringing his masks and skeletons out to play on a regular basis. From then on, personal and social relations in his work would be a dark comedy, performed in disguise and in party colors, with the Grim Reaper making regular entrances to rattle his bones in your...
Chronically aggrieved, Ensor was the sort of man who didn't hesitate to draw himself as Christ crucified or, better, as a pickled herring being pulled apart by two art critics represented as skulls. Perhaps because he never expected his work to be accepted, he could pursue it to its furthest conclusions. But then - surprise - the honors started coming his way anyway. Museums began acquiring his art and offering him big shows. In 1929, Belgium's King Albert I even named him a baron, which makes you wonder if Albert had ever seen Ensor's etching of a king defecating...
...criticized for being plush - with its on-campus sand volleyball courts, skateboard park and concert theater - and straying from its central missions of proselytizing and charity, I think it's great that the congregation is branching out. I want there to be more kinds of comedy and music and art. I'm just glad I'm not one of the poor Evangelicals who let themselves see only Christian versions of those things. Because I can't be there every month to save the show...