Word: masscult
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After the boom, slump. Millet had died in 1875, having greatly influenced Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat, blue-period Picasso and especially Vincent Van Gogh. Later, modernism lost interest in images of rural labor; they were derided as sentimental masscult. Millet sank from view, leaving behind one obdurate cliché: The Angelus, in its tacky frame, on every parlor wall...
Banality and Bliss. The truth of certain maxims once thought demode and elitist now reasserts itself: for instance, that a posture of cool boredom can in itself become boring; that a perfunctory infatuation with the signs and portents of "masscult" means nothing unless it is subjected-as by Oldenburg-to a profound change and rethinking; that banality is not always imaginative bliss. And if one happens to find sense in these propositions, it is hard to take all that seriously the marginal artists whose work Alloway has selected. Their work may have this or that to do with signs...
...about as innocent as Bobby Riggs and somewhat less likable) but the grip of organization-first in his art itself, and then in the area of business and social manipulation-which made Disneyland and Disney World possible. He turned himself from a cartoonist into the Old Master of masscult, and from there became a Utopian environmentalist...
...camp boutiques to Parke-Bernet, and a New York art dealer named Bernard Danenberg has contracted with Walt Disney Productions to exhibit "eels" (the clear plastic sheets on which final animation drawings are made) from a new Disney cartoon, Robin Hood. This migration of Disney's iconography from masscult to the commercial fringes of "high" art (it happened to Norman Rockwell last year) will be prodded along by a 7½-lb. tome entitled The Art of Walt Disney, written by English Art Critic Christopher Finch with the full cooperation of the Disney Archives and published...
...over the past 30 years. It has all been assembled by Sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, 47, an amiable, lowering Scottish-Italian with lobster-claw hands and the build of a robot. The show, a melange of art work and subject matter, represents Paolozzi's two decades of involvement with Masscult...