Word: moderners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sympathetic to consultants and investments bankers--they're no more useless than anybody else. I guess if I wanted to go all out with this particular "-ism," I'd spend all my time trying to comprehend "the void" and despairing at the futility of modern existence. I have a feeling that it wouldn't be long before I said, "Screw this, I want a Porsche. Where's the number for J.P. Morgan...
...Proust. Maybe we'd like to be bathing with mermaids, chilling with the Hephalumps. These rooms serve as relaxation theme parks, like the fantasy worlds we created for ourselves under our blankets in the corners of first grade playgrounds. These elaborate flowing waterfalls and bunk bed caves are just modern forts, little escapes from the coldness of mass-produced furniture and rationally-distributed wall putty...
Rockwell could. He knew how a few brushstrokes can mimic wet hair, effulgent sunlight, gunmetal, crinoline, catsup, cardboard, painted brick and polished linoleum. And he got those effects without losing sight of the muddy pleasure of pigment itself, a fundamental notion of modern painting. In a few inches of sailcloth or the slip worn by his Girl at Mirror, he could put white paint through as many adventures as Robert Ryman does in his snow-flurry abstractions. As for his pieties, they turn out sometimes to be the same ones fundamental to civil society. By nothing less than an actual...
When it comes to Norman Rockwell, we all know what we're supposed to think. Rockwell is to modern art what Robert Mapplethorpe is to family values--a slap in the face to all serious standards. So much the worse that for decades he was the best-loved American artist, at least until he was usurped by an even shrewder judge of the national disposition, Andy Warhol. To the art world Rockwell was an exasperating holdout, the man who didn't care that in the 20th century it was simply uncalled for to paint sweet-tempered vignettes in a representational...
Maybe it's not such a surprise. The standard version of modern art history--the story that moves through the Impressionists and Cezanne to Cubism, and from there through ever greater reaches of stylization, psychic turmoil and abstraction--has been under pressure for years to admit developments that can't be legitimized under that model. The creamy maidens of Victorian genre painting, "outsider art" by the mentally ill, hard-to-categorize painters like Jacob Lawrence and Florine Stettheimer--all of them have been tried out on museum walls. It was only a matter of time before attention turned back...