Word: artists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Protean Richness. The tributes are, of course, deserved. Dürer was the greatest artist in German history, and his birth now seems the only internationally memorable event (apart from the war-crimes tribunal of 1945) that took place in Nuremberg. By adapting the new forms of the Italian quattrocento and connecting them to the already robust tradition of the German print, he almost singlehandedly provoked the Northern Renaissance. No single aspect of Dürer's work can do justice to the protean richness of his imagination and temperament. For all-round inquisitiveness, he was surpassed only by his older contemporary...
Coral and Malaria. Of course, Europe had long been crisscrossed by wandering medieval craftsmen like Wiligelmo and Gislebertus. But Dürer seems to have been the first great artist to act on the idea that response to different cultures is part of the creative process itself. His appetite for curios and marvels was enormous, and it filled his baggage with every imaginable sort of junk. Dürer once impetuously swapped a whole portfolio of engravings and woodcuts for "five snail shells, four silver and five copper medals, two dried fishes, a white coral, four reed arrows and a red coral...
...Tureen. Yet artists managed to, at first by subterfuge. A sculptor might rent a loft for $100 or less a month, clean it out and install a folding bed that could disappear against the wall if a building inspector called. He had no security of tenure. The typical habit of SoHo slumlords, which persists today, was to offer no lease, wait for the artist to spend a few thousand dollars renovating the loft, and then arbitrarily double the rent. The pattern of exploitation worked because artists had nowhere else to go. There was no space uptown. Greenwich Village was already...
After much negotiation, the planning commission, prodded by Mayor John Lindsay, came to a compromise agreement last January. It legalized the residential use of about 1,000 lofts in SoHo, provided the lofts were less than 3,600 sq. ft. in area. "Simply legalizing artists' tenancy in the area," the commission felt, "would drive up rents and force industry out, with the consequent loss of jobs." The CPC set up a certification committee to decide who is, and who is not, an artist. The committee has been the butt of much criticism, particularly from artists who are not involved...
Privacy and Meatballs. But the main virtue is simply the extreme, and now imperiled privacy. When the warehouses close at 6 p.m. and the steel doors clang, the streets go dead. There are no decent restaurants between Houston and the trattorie of Grand Street, five blocks south; the only artists' watering place is Fanelli's, reputedly the oldest continuously operating bar in New York. It has been dispensing draft beer and meatballs to the warehouse workers since the 1870s. It shuts on the stroke of 9, leaving Prince Street (on Saturday nights) to the beery wassailing...