Word: forme
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...McLuhan. TV discovered that on the whole, amid all its sitcoms and music and dramas, the most entertaining, the most amusing and sometimes the most gripping thing it can show us is people sitting and talking to one another, and to us. McLuhan argued that speech is the richest form of human communication because it involves several of the senses--sight, sound, touch, etc.--and that speech on TV is the nearest equivalent yet to the face-to-face variety. Hence the ubiquitous talk show. Hence hosts with an uncanny ability to gaze into the camera and connect emotionally with...
...objects. The performing arts were evanescent. A dancer's line, a comedian's schtick, a singer's coloratura vanished as soon as the performer walked into the wings, and could only be remembered, described, perhaps glimpsed in a third- or fourth-hand imitation. Now recordings, film and videotape form a permanent database of old-time show biz. A young actor can summon up Marlon Brando's performance in A Streetcar Named Desire instead of having to read about it as a part of the irretrievable past, remote as David Garrick's 18th century Hamlet...
Will the computer make everybody a creator? Will it undermine the very idea of the individual creator whose work has form, permanence and its own essence? Or will some unforeseen nerd genius figure out how to organize all those electrons in a dazzling new way? For now, things are shifting and blurring too fast to say. True to its theme, our century, which began by changing the old constancies, ends by making change the only constant...
Much of the story of modern sculpture is bound up with welding and assembling images from sheet metal, rather than modeling in clay, casting in bronze or carving in wood; and this tradition of the open constructed form rather than solid mass arose from one small guitar that Picasso snipped and joined out of tin in 1912. If collage--the gluing of previously unrelated things and images on a flat surface--became a basic mode of modern art, that too was due to Picasso's Cubist collaboration with Braque. He was never a member of the Surrealist group...
...independence. After his collaboration with Braque ended with his comment that "Braque is my wife"--words that were as disparaging to women as to Braque--Picasso remained a loner for the rest of his career. But a loner with a court and maitresses en titre. He didn't even form a friendship with Matisse until both artists were old. His close relationships tended to be with poets and writers...