Word: avante
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...John Elderfield of MOMA, far surpasses in lucidity and thoroughness anything else on Schwitters and becomes the authoritative work on the artist. It evokes in brilliant detail the aggressive and sadistic side of Schwitters' lost oeuvre, which was grandiose and trashy but done with constructivist precision. One of his avant-garde friends, on first viewing the Merzbau's bizarre grottoes and columns (which included such elegancies as a "Sex-Crime Cavern" and a bottle of the artist's urine with artificial flowers in it), thought it "a kind of fecal smearing--a sick and sickening relapse." Would it look...
Schwitters was one of the first artists to perceive that a culture writes some chapters of its memoirs in waste. But unlike other German avant-gardists of the '20s and '30s, he was not a political artist with party allegiances; he was utterly absorbed in the ideal of autonomous fine art. "Art is too precious to be misused as a tool," he declared. "I prefer to distance myself from contemporary events . . . But I am more deeply rooted in my time than the politicians." After half a century, Schwitters' constructions, which include every kind of urban detritus--the crumpled sides...
...prosperous family was driven out of Seoul in 1950 by the ravages of the Korean War. His father resettled first in Hong Kong and then Tokyo, where Paik earned a university degree with a major in philosophy. At that point, infatuated with the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Western avant-gardism in general, the young graduate might have pursued his studies in the U.S. The country, however, did not interest him. "Many middle-class Koreans go to live in America in the 1950s," he says. "But I think then there is not much culture in America, Hemingway and all that...
...gospel-like beginning of "Road to Nowhere" are two examples. Even a smidgen of Far Eastern jingles start off "The Lady Don't Mind." The risks they take here, however, are not nearly as daring as their extensive work with African music several years ago. No keys to the avant-garde will be issued here...
...about art investment. It would like live heroes as well. But it wants them to be like heroes on TV, fetishized, plentiful and acquiescent. If Pollock was John Wayne, the likes of Haring 'n' Basquiat resemble those two what's-their-names on Miami Vice: cute cops, a designer avant-garde whose "newness" has all the significance of a goat-cheese pizza...