Word: artfully
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...another excerpt, called Monkey Makes Havoc in Heaven, the stage is filled with men, tumbling, bounding, flailing at one another in a skirmish between the forces of a Peer Gyntish Monkey King and a Jade Emperor whose court has been invaded by the delightfully wicked, white-faced simian. Martial art is transformed into high art as the lightning-fast conflict develops...
...problem is that one of the great driving forces of art, the desire to comment on the quality of contemporary life, on the state of mind of people caught up in the conflicts of a particular time and place, is subverted in a totalitarian state...
There the official line is that no dispute exists and everyone derives happiness from working together harmoniously to create the new order. This means the dis orders, the sorrows (and the private visions and fancies individuals indulge in as compensation) - the raw materials of a vital art - are banned as irrelevancies. Artists, if they are to continue to function publicly, must either embrace the gaseous platitudes of revolution or bury themselves in popular, native tradition. Chinese ballet, for instance, was hobbled when authorities decided to erase any Russian influences. Folk singing and dancing seem to be much safer areas...
Illuminations contained pieces on Kafka, Baudelaire, Proust, Brecht and the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In it Benjamin related the development of 20th century mass movements and the mechanical means of mass art. Consider his observations on the film actor as a manipulated prop: "Let us assume," he wrote, "that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without...
...collage, and the beautiful semblance seems to have been an experience of wholeness that was missing from Benjamin's life. His background was not suited for survival in the '20s and '30s. As a youth he had the advantages that his father, a successful Berlin art dealer, could provide. Yet like so many young upper-middle-class intellectuals, Benjamin rejected the very bourgeois values that had enabled him to loll around reading Marx, collecting rare first editions and traveling. He thought of himself as a private man of letters, a scholar-prince supported by stipends from...