Word: dada
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...terms. The only answer was to drop out of the comic's traditional adversary relationship to power and, instead, parade an anarchic childishness. Their banner might have read HELL, NO, WE WON'T GROW UP. In Britain, Monty Python's Flying Circus tossed music-hall bawdry into a Dada format, and at home National Lampoon updated sick humor with a stinging Wasp edge. They were vicious; they were silly; they couldn't care less. And now someone had to shatter the lulling cadences of stand-up too. Who better than the child of Disneyland and Wittgenstein...
...avant-garde. Given their belief in an imperial France whose seigneurs were Cezanne, Matisse and Gaugin, Fry and Bell preferred any imitation of the Ecole de Paris, however pallid, to anything else, however strong. They both disliked vorticism, the remarkable English movement that combined elements of cubism, futurism and Dada and centered on the belligerent genius of Wyndham Lewis, painter, soldier, novelist, critic and editor of Blast. Bell in 1917 sneered at the "new spirit in the little backwater, called English vorticism, which already gives signs of being as insipid as any other puddle of provincialism," and thereafter the Bloomsberries...
...that really provides the bang for the buck. Zeffirelli and Costume Designer Dada Saligeri offer a regal gold and mother-of-pearl panoply: high atop a throne in the far reaches of the cavernous stage perches the black-clad, thousand-year-old Emperor (Swiss Tenor Hugues Cuenod, making his company debut at 84). For the first time the Met stage, which has swallowed whole such formidable productions as Nathaniel Merrill's 1966 Die Frau ohne Schatten, looks cramped. As is its custom, the Met declines to reveal the spectacle's cost, but best guesses run to about $1.5 million...
...general, Salle's work is just a sourer, more hermetic and manually coarser footnote to a long modernist history of montage and quotation that runs from Dada to Pop art -- random citation from the image haze that envelops us, with some T. and A. for signature. Its "relevance" consists only of the accuracy with which it mirrors the inattentiveness of a culture benumbed by television. Its main debts are to James Rosenquist, for the big, juxtaposed image fragments, and to Francis Picabia, for the unassimilated layering of outline images over solid ones in that painter's late, wretchedly bad paintings...
...with Hearn's money in the '20s and '30s, that ought to be a footnote to the American Wing; dense with fair-to-splendid examples of early American modernists (Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and others) and later abstract expressionists, but far too light on German expressionism, Dada and constructivism. Lieberman and his associate curator, Lowery Sims, have done a brilliant job with what they have, installing the paintings and sculptures so as to evoke unexpected similarities, rhymes, comparisons, rather than the stolid march of historical sequence. Theirs is a reflective hanging, full of aesthetic surprises...