Word: lofts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
TIME Contributor Jay Cocks, who originally proposed a piece on Byrne and then wrote this week's main story, first heard Byrne's music about ten years ago when he was awakened one night by a mysterious tune playing on a stereo, then discovered that the Manhattan loft he was in was burning down. The song: Byrne's Love Goes to a Building on Fire. Reporter-Researcher Elizabeth Bland, who assisted Cocks with the story, interviewed the musician-director several times in New York City. Bland says her initial fears about Byrne's daunting reserve were dissolved by the singer...
...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...