Word: ethnical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...worked hard (heroically, even, considering the difficulty of funding) to set the work of Hispanic-American artists before the public. And yet there is still a gap, caused by a pervasive institutional nervousness about how to deal with minority culture while maintaining the ideal of purely aesthetic standards. For ethnic art repeats the problems posed for museums by women's art: it is prone to easy stereotyping...
...found in abstract expressionism and then in color-field painting -- both high styles and, in theory at least, sociologically neutral. Thus, writes Curator Beardsley, there appeared an "unwritten presumption that the nearer an artist aspires to the level of high art, the more leached out will become the ethnic content of the work." Hence the peculiarly airless and circular way in which New York City defined itself from about 1965 on as the cultural caput mundi, pulling all talent into its gravitational field of orthodoxy, refusing to accord "seriousness" to provincials and barbarians...
This formalist geography lesson could not last, of course. In the '80s it came apart like wet Kleenex. America has no single culture, but cultures. And so it should, since diversity is better than monotony. In any case, many ethnic Americans are still exiles within the dominant, white matrix. One painter in this show, Martin Ramirez (1885-1960), epitomized the extreme fate of the Hispanic as outsider. A migrant railroad worker from Mexico, Ramirez lost his powers of speech and became a catatonic schizophrenic in Los Angeles in 1915, was committed in 1930 and spent the last three decades...
...aesthetic victory. But who will hear it? Who will play it? Previously, albums by the Panama-born Blades were recorded in Spanish and aimed at a Spanish-speaking audience. By making Nothing But the Truth in English, he has risked losing his core audience while still seeming perhaps too ethnic to a wider, whiter one. The record has not hatched a hit, and up till now has sold a modest 100,000 copies. It has also created a tactical problem: "How do we work it out so I can address both Anglo and Latin audiences...
...words) signals a sharp break with the party's promise- them-anything past. This time there are no bold pledges to match earlier advocacy of guaranteed jobs (1972) and national health insurance (1980). Gone too is the usual laundry list of narrow causes like the 1984 vow to "eliminate ethnic stereotyping." The 1988 platform may be purposely vague, but there are hidden subtexts beneath the soporific rhetoric...