Word: avante
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...appealed to "sound" taste in his day -- and then got flattened from behind by the avant-garde as it developed after the 1913 Armory Show, which he had helped organize: roadkill, as it were, on art history's Route 66. He didn't quite have the empirical genius of the older Winslow Homer, to whom his early work strongly relates; nor did he quite possess the visionary force of Marsden Hartley, with whom he shared a love of romantic, elemental images -- sea, rock, the buffeting air of Maine...
...sight of modern European painting en masse -- seems to have provoked the change that came over his work after 1914. Actually, Bellows was given to sudden shifts of style, but as the art historian Michael Quick points out in the show's useful catalog, his response to the transatlantic avant-garde was to get interested in theory, a fact that "removes Bellows from the Ashcan School context and places him among the modernist painters of his generation...
Mainstream pop success is a difficult cross to bear for avant-garde hard rockers. Their stock-in-trade is assaulting the status quo and ridiculing pop culture, yet suddenly their songs are mixed into Top 40 radio's diet of fluffy, fast-food hits. Bands such as Metallica and Nirvana have scored their share of chart toppers recently without being perceived as "selling out." Now, two years after their critically acclaimed, breakthrough album The Real Thing, the San Francisco-based quintet Faith No More are the latest heavy- metal hitters to arrive at this crossroads...
...Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, energy specialist Daniel Yergin's best-selling history of oil and how it has misshaped culture in the U.S., from fast food to foreign policy. The Pulitzer Board also voted a special award to Art Spiegelman, editor of the avant-garde graphic magazine Raw, for his unusual Maus tales, an autobiographical chronicle in comic-book form about the Holocaust, its survivors and their children in which Jews are portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats...
...works such as "Mr. Nobody," a sarcastic portrait of a typical American businessman, Warhol makes us look at ourselves in a new, critical way. By taking a posed portrait photograph of an average, middle-class man, silkscreening it onto a canvas, altering the color scheme and presenting it as avant-garde "high art," Warhol raises questions about why we call certain things art, and how the mainstream of popular culture looks at and effects artistic progress. He raises similar questions about popular attitudes toward money (large $-signs on blank canvases), sensationalism (silk screen paintings of car crashes and electric chairs...