Word: crux
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Early American modernism is filled with European borrowings, from Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Picabia, Leger, etc., etc. Nothing characteristically American there, you might say. But the crux of the identity issue is not the stylistic sources the artists drew on but the experiences on which they used them. It was there that the American-ness of American art hove into view, and it showed itself in two enormous image fields...
...attempts to revive her. From what little experience I've had with this kind of thing, it appeared that what she needed most was someone to stay up with her while she slept it off. However, it might have been more serious than that, and here we reach the crux of the problem...
...course, do a building that's eco-responsible but aesthetically worthless. The crux of Foster's achievement is to have designed megastructures that are at the forefront of eco-design as well as beautiful in their own right. He is a fine detailer--everything from the junctures of a beam to the cladding to the door handles comes out of the same relentless aesthetic concentration. But on the wider scale, Foster is also one of the great living manipulators of light and transparency. No other government building in the world, for instance, can boast anything as outright exhilarating...
...crux of I Get No is the collapse of time. When an Elvis-impersonator bursts upon the founding fathers, we see the most realistic instance of time-space confuscation. "Elvis" escorts a dorky librarian to the future, where his mission is to prevent a militaristic presidential candidate from winning and fulfilling his alliance with a disco-dancing tele-evangelist by outlawing rock'n roll. They do so by transforming a stuttering barber-woman into the Cinderella candidate destined for victory. What follows is a synchronic allegory of post-revolutionary American history only thinly disguised as an innovative commentary on gender...
...actual budget surplus, an era when prosperity should have rendered these problems moot. Nothing in his speech was new; none of his statistics were shocking. Democrats in the audience surely agreed with most of Cuomo's ideas; Republicans, predictably, would have loved to debate him. But the crux of Cuomo's speech was nonpartisan and unpredictable indeed, because what Cuomo wanted to talk about was not government but redemption...