Word: gopnik
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Yorker was different. Watching her try to blend the sacred and profane was one of the great journalistic pastimes of recent years. Her brain was a table-of-contents mosh pit: a place where a literary memoir mixed with a dispatch from Hollywood, followed by another from Paris--Adam Gopnik on French health clubs, for instance; then some Washington pages in which, say, Al Gore was pried open by Joe Klein; plus a hair-raising investigative piece on some wiggly strain of hepatitis; a dry, subtle poem by Louise Gluck; and a very readable short story--ideally one with...
...Adam Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker, is exactly right when he says, in an essay in the catalog, that "the theatricality of Avedon's work" is not a barrier to authenticity but rather the path to a different kind of truth, which it reaches by inventing "a set of heightened poetic conventions." Avedon has never been interested in observing the rules of straight photography, in which the most honest picture is one that has been fooled with the least. He crops and retouches; he coaxes the sitter and takes multiple shots until the subject's self-presentation matches...
Much of the art on view conforms to the recipe for postmodernist political utterance set out, with lapidary accuracy, by the art critic Adam Gopnik a couple of years ago. That is, you take an obvious proposition that few would disagree with -- "Racism is wrong" or "One should not persecute gays" -- and encode it so obliquely that by the time the viewer has figured it out, he or she feels, as the saying goes, included in the discourse...
Consequently, the show reads as a set of illustrations to the book, for only in the book can the comparison of demotic source with final object be done with the necessary detail. Varnedoe and Gopnik have gone into their subject with vast scholarly elan, mining arcana from the areas where art and life, under the impulse of a modernism striving to refresh itself, are layered. If you want to know what was the catalog model of Marcel Duchamp's urinal, which nursery book Max Ernst got a particular collage element from, or which frame panels from 1962 war comics drawn...
...catalog is not a mass of fanzine trivia. It is the indispensable text on its subject, whose every page vibrates with the authors' enthusiasm for the "high," their curiosity about the "low" and their richly inflected sense of the complex traffic between the two. Gopnik and Varnedoe write better than their critics. The next-to-last essay ("Contemporary Reflections," by Gopnik, covering a wide swath from David Salle and Cindy Sherman to the short- lived graffiti movement) is, on its own, the best summary yet written of American...