Word: faustian
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...Metaphor. Ever since the Futurists declared a racing car to be more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, artists have thought about connecting their work to the Faustian energies of 20th century technology. Never has the dream become more urgent than in today's electronically conditioned society. It is a fundamental issue because the very idea of "experiment," endlessly declared to be the founding principle of modern art, is really a metaphor drawn from science and industry. The problem is that industrial experiment radically changes the world, whereas artistic experiment does so only marginally and for a minority...
...even rearranging enough molecules to create life itself, man will invoke comparison to the legendary Faust. He attained the power to create life?the tiny test-tube man, or homunculus?but only after he had bartered away his soul to the devil. If the new knowledge is used recklessly, Faustian man of the future may wonder if he, too, has not made a pact with dark forces...
...Schwitters was also possessed by that Faustian drive that today can be seen in Claes Oldenburg: the ambition to turn the whole world, bit by bit, into an immense objet trouvé. Thus his radical invention of environmental art. Schwitters' Merzbau (or Merz-house) in Hannover was the first great work of its kind, integrating assemblage, painting and architecture. Its convolutions reached through two floors and four rooms of Schwitters' home, with a separate offshoot in the attic. It was as if he had deposited the cells and memories of his own brain, wrought out in a coral...
...trend, someone is predicting how and when it will end and what will take its place. Why so much compulsive eagerness to read history before it happens? Perhaps it is an escape from an unsatisfactory present. Perhaps, also. Americans-and 20th century men generally-are deluded by the Faustian illusion that by predicting the future, they can control it. If all this seems occasionally oppressive, if the arrogance of the prophets begins to irritate the layman, there is one consolation: the forecasters are usually wrong, since predicting is a loser's game...
...book Of a Fire on the Moon, ostensibly about the Apollo 11 moon shot, Norman Mailer was really writing about Wasps (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). Or so he indicated during an interview with Leticia Kent, published in the current Vogue. Hymenopterist Mailer, who has called Wasps "the most Faustian, barbaric, draconian, progress-oriented and root-destroying people on earth," has moved on to "some mysterious and half-spooky conclusions," notably that "the real mission of the Wasp in history was not, say, to create capitalism, or to disseminate Christianity into backward countries...