Word: avant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...liked to do the Full Monica on her male servants. Ades' score is a glib farrago of sour, splintered vocal writing, postmodern pastiche and cartoony sound effects. Is this the music of the future? No, just further proof that the now exhausted classical-music avant-garde is repeating itself--this time as camp...
...CLINTON'S GRAND JURY TESTIMONY An uncut four-hour videotape, taken by a motionless camera trained on one man talking. Disembodied background voices; absurdist dialogue about the word is--nothing so avant-garde has ever been broadcast before. Free of punditry, it was the highlight of Monica...
Benton became a surrogate big daddy to replace Pollock's own woundingly absent father. Thus the future avant-gardist had for a mentor a man who hated abstract art. But when Pollock came under Benton's tutelage, he wasn't aiming at abstraction. Benton's way of composing, with its heftily twisting figures and buckling, scoop-and-bump space, was based on 16th century Mannerism--Midwestern El Greco and Tintoretto; he even adapted the Mannerist device of reducing the figures to geometrical dolls, sometimes modeling them in clay. This vehemence, locked up as a system, appealed to Pollock...
...could argue that popular culture's pandering to the young is a kind of dumbed-down reflection of the higher arts' 20th century fixation on the avant-garde. One could especially argue the point if one were looking for a serviceable transition to a discussion of last week's news that the Museum of Modern Art in New York City had to give up four highly esteemed drawings because they are no longer considered "modern." This is due to a quirk in the will of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a co-founder of the museum and the donor of the drawings...
...cousin to kissing up to the 18-to-34 demographic. This led to a round of thumb sucking in the media's tonier precincts about MOMA's mission in a postmodern world. Is there such a thing as contemporary modernism? How does one resolve the paradox of an institutionalized avant-garde? Couldn't somebody else's will have made them get rid of those silly Dalis? While for me personally the debate didn't cut quite as close to the bone as did the fuss over Riley Weston, it did serve to remind me that I have yet to produce...