Word: exception
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...find in any gallery these days, also low comedy, puerile cool and enigma. But in a time that has its share of tragedy, where is the art that tries to strike an equivalent note? What we have no language for anymore, at least not in art, is acute pain. Except in room after room at the Tate, in a show that moves later to Madrid and New York City...
...1940s Bacon had been making art for almost two decades, but he had exhibited very little before the Three Studies. Until the postwar years, he was largely unknown except perhaps to the older men who supported him, his multitude of male pick-ups on the side and whatever clients he attracted for a time as an interior designer in London. Decades later, stripped of any associations with fashion or taste, the ghostly outlines of his Bauhaus-flavored interiors and steel-tube furnishings found their way into the stark spaces and barred enclosures of his paintings. You detect them...
They keep telling us that this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But there is at least one difference: in the Great Depression, nobody needed to be told they were in a depression. Today, except for relatively few investment bankers and somewhat more middle-class homeowners, who would guess that things are so dire? Life goes on, reasonably normally. Maybe it's easier to get a cab in New York City--a reliable real-life indication of an economic downturn--but then maybe the effect of the financial crisis is canceled out by the effect of that...
Which is still no mean feat, and One Fifth Avenue (Hyperion; 433 pages) is no mean book, except in the other sense of mean. So far, 2008 is looking like a career year for Bushnell, what with the success of the Sex and the City movie and the success--or, at any rate, the renewal--of her NBC series Lipstick Jungle. She also just announced a deal to write young-adult novels about the teen years of Carrie Bradshaw. One Fifth Avenue should round all that out nicely. It's certainly a page turner of practically Germanic efficiency...
Once my panic subsides, I can focus on the snakes moving across my skin. They're cool, dry and smooth. It's not unpleasant, except when a tiny one stops to nibble on my eyelashes. Their presence stirs something deep and peaceful in me. I come away relaxed and curiously light-headed, though I don't feel the urge to buy myself a python to continue this therapy at home...