Word: cataloger
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first few years of the Werkstatte. Hoffmann, Moser and its other founders, repelled by the residual fairy-tale flourishes of aging Jugendstil (literally, Youth Style, the German Art Nouveau), sloughed off applied ornament and embraced elemental geometries -- the right angle, the circle, the sphere. In his thoughtful, gracefully written catalog for MOMA, Adjunct Curator Kirk Varnadoe says that Moser and Hoffmann were out "to recover richness from reduction." The result, briefly, was a deluxe austerity, furniture and objects stripped down and spare but still eager to delight. Only in Vienna: gemutlich modernism...
...architects' and designers' pioneering zeal seemed to give out, the enfants terribles Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka (see following story) had their first shows of paintings in Vienna. Their intense, expressionist works did not flirt, like Klimt's gilded sultanic pictures, with bourgeois prettiness and what the catalog calls "proto-psychedelic sweetness." Schiele, who died young (in 1918, along with Moser, Wagner and Klimt), has been the subject of more passionate popularity than Kokoschka over the years: his images were the more earnestly pained and ugly. As Varnadoe writes, Viennese arts had lost their capacity for compromise between "the giddy...
Reaction to the fashions, shown on French TV, was mixed. Jesuit Theologian Jean Michel welcomed relief from today's "dull and uninspiring" vestments- by-catalog. But a priest at the Paris chancery office saw new evidence of the "crisis in the West." Meanwhile, an old woman entering Notre-Dame cathedral was perturbed: "Why dress up priests as circus performers...
...prime uses: archival scanning that once required exhaustive card- catalog searches and high-speed analysis of myriad numbers until the machine kicks out revelatory patterns. In 1979, for instance, the Miami Herald scanned with a computer all 2 million of Dade County's property-tax assessments to dig out inequities. In 1984 Long Island's (N.Y.) Newsday parsed every state- awarded highway contract in the area and all major county sewer contracts over eleven years to discover that five favored firms collected 86% of the boodle...
Those refined elitists, the Europeans, happen to like our vulgar moronism. One recent week in Britain, five of the top ten singles were by black Americans. Last year two-fifths of French movie box-office receipts went to U.S. films. A catalog detailing such worldwide U.S. hegemony is a source of pride and some embarrassment. Most of the 47 radio stations in Lima, Peru, play mainly American pop music. In Nairobi last week, ten of the 16 movies playing were American, and in a record store at the Sarit Centre shopping mall, a poster of Joe Piscopo, of all people...