Word: modernize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Kansas City [June 18], architects should worry about their falling reputations. But structural engineering is not their real shortcoming; it's aesthetic engineering. When buildings fail to dignify man's spirit, his potential, architecture fails to excite us. It becomes boring. As proof we have the modern suburb...
...course, that the energies of this art sprang full-formed from the head of the Revolution. Moscow, before 1917, was one of the chief condensers of advanced cultural ideas-thanks not only to the artists themselves, but to bourgeois Maecenases like Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov, whose enthusiasm for modern French art (Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, in particular) is still evident in the great public collections of Moscow and Leningrad. There was a steady traffic of ideas, paintings and of the artists themselves between Russia, France and Italy...
...construct. Hence their special relationship to the young Communist state. Today no revolutionary government that had just seized control of a vast, economically foundering country would bother with artists or art schools. The U.S.S.R. did so after the Revolution, thanks to two circumstances that hold true in no modern capitalist state. Print was thinly spread among the masses, radio almost unheard of and there was no television. Moreover, most of the proletariat was not only illiterate, but steeped in the tradition of the icon. So ideological control of static visual images was necessary to the party. One might even...
...which would have topped out at 1,400 ft., dwarfed the Eiffel Tower and given the U.S.S.R. the greatest industrial metaphor in the world, was a euphoric paean to the marriage of "objective" material-girders and glass-with dialectics The idea of a necessary link between the nature of modern art and the aims of socialism was everywhere. "Each part of a futurist picture," Natan Altman argued, "acquires meaning only through the interaction of all the other parts"; its task was not to depict, but to explain dialectical relationships. Illegible in themselves, the fragments of form live "a collective life...
...RECENT edition of the New York Times Book Review, a critic arguing for the persistence of decadence in modern society chose David Bowie as one of his prime examples. That seems both gratuitous and unfair, as though Bowie's sheen of bisexuality and world-weariness alone could spell the decay of an entire civilization. And whatever objections you may have to Bowie's recent music, no one could call it worn-out or impotent...