Word: lofting
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...salesmen touring the U.S. last week certainly made an aggressive capitalistic pitch: since NASA is out of the business of launching commercial satellites, the Soviet Union would happily fill the void -- for a reasonable price. The delegation from the civilian space agency Glavkosmos visited Washington and Houston, offering to loft U.S. satellites for about half the price of a ride on the European Ariane rocket. To assuage U.S. fears that technological secrets would be compromised, the Soviets even offered to accept the satellites in sealed packages...
...cute; it cultivated nuance and eccentricity at the expense of broader and grander pictorial concerns; it was anecdotal and too much tied to a fascination with human society -- little-island art, not really comparable to the utterances of those Hectors of the prairie and Ajaxes of the long white loft who, in New York City, were busy using up all the air in art history's room...
However, this book is more than just an intro to the coldwater SoHo loft that is Frank Stella's mind. Stella has assigned himself the second task of uncovering the origin of the "crisis of abstraction," the growing consensus even among practitioners that contemporary abstract art bores the hell out of people. Stella attributes this yawning chasm between potential and performance to the flat, two-dimensional quality of the abstraction of the 1970s and '80s, heir to the tradition of highly colored "decorative" paintings exemplified by Delacroix and Malevich...
...place. From the bay of Courbets, dense and dark, impacted with reality, one could look across the nave to their diametric opposite, Thomas Couture's pedantic warning to the Third Empire, The Romans of the Decadence, ancestor of all Cecil B. DeMille orgies. In the distance, on a raised loft that stood where the trains once came in and out, was a grimy white gleam: the spectral plaster of Rodin's Gates of Hell. In a side gallery, a visitor furtively ran his finger over the marble nipple of a luscious demimondaine writhing naked among stone roses, once the sensation...
...startling imagery and elemental, manic drive, David Byrne is not alone. In fact, Byrne is only the most visible member of a movement that has recently vacated its artist-loft digs in lower Manhattan and joyfully taken up residence right next door to the American mainstream. Call it a celebration of specialness: SoHo has come uptown...