Word: artfulness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Long-hidden cave discovered in 1940, whose walls are covered with Ice Age art...
...found important new techniques in picture-making and story-telling ... It is not afraid to say the same thing twice if twice-telling reveals a fourfold truth ... It is a work of art created by grown people for grown people...
...that tunes would suddenly disappear from music or realistic representation of the world from art or narrative cohesion from fiction. Increasingly, though, these comfortable and reassuring sources of pleasure were segregated in a popular culture that was dismissed by finer sensibilities as aesthetically retrograde. Nor was it that everything interesting in high culture had been accomplished. Brancusi's and Hemingway's pursuit of pure form, stripped of all Victorian encrustations, proceeded. And most of the isms (Dadaism, Surrealism, Absurdism) in some way derive from what we might oxymoronically call classic modernism...
...other hand, we also have to admit that in the last third of the century, modernism ran out of steam intellectually even as it gathered near dictatorial cultural power. Take the art world, for example: allied with the museums, the mass media and the marketplace, it began to wield, as early as the '70s, in Hilton Kramer's words, "a pervasive and often cynical authority over the very public it affects to despise." We live now in an age of empty "Sensation" (to borrow the title of the recent Brooklyn Museum of Art show) and debate not the subtleties...
...yourself back to a time before true mirrors. In Europe the art of painting had been lost to the ruthless destruction of barbarians. No Western man could see a real likeness of humankind upon a wall because no artist knew how to draw one. The pictures that adorned medieval churches--there was no secular painting--eschewed reality for decoration or dogma. Gilt-bedizened Madonnas with flat, staring eyes holding outsize infant Christs bespoke not man but the supernatural mystery of the faith...