Word: moderns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...show of early works on paper by the German artist Sigmar Polke, which runs through June 16 at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, is a bit of an anticlimax. Much has been expected of Polke. He is one of the two painters--the other being Anselm Kiefer--who rose to the top of the enormously promoted pack of "new" German artists in the 1980s and remained there when others dropped away or became, like Georg Baselitz, with his crude upside-down figures, formulaic bores...
...arch-trickster, mocking all art styles, sending up the dreaded Canon. (The fact that no work of art by a famous artist these days can safely be considered really and truly outside the Canon seems not to have dawned on those inside the Museum of Modern Art.) His strategy, according to MOMA, is to subvert "the elitist mythologies of artistic creation and production." And so forth. Such claims are counters in a solemn Laputan game whose object is to ratify the countercultural status of a given artist and thereby justify his (or her) prompt entry into the cultural pantheon...
...anthropologist, I firmly object to the theories presented by paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus [PALEONTOLOGY, May 3], who supports the idea that there was interbreeding between prehistoric Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens. Archaeologists merely uncovered a single skeleton of a child with a mixture of modern and Neanderthal features. To deduce that this indicates a peaceful coexistence or gradual immersion of Neanderthals into the Homo sapiens gene pool is groundless and inconsistent in the face of DNA testing recently conducted. The Neanderthals, like other hominids, are no more. Perhaps mankind's evolution was a more violent affair than we would like...
John Minor Wisdom was one of the earliest and most influential voices against racial segregation. As a federal judge with jurisdiction over six states of the old Confederacy, Wisdom helped lead the South into the modern age by striking down barriers of racial discrimination in voting, jury selection, employment, schools, jails, public parks, playgrounds, hotels, restaurants, bars, sports and adoptions...
...problem with romantic comedy has never been getting the lovers together. The trick is to keep two people, obviously meant for each other, apart until they--and we--are crazed with frustration. But in the modern world, all the traditional barriers--most notably class distinctions--are breached all the time. There is apparently nothing to keep the boy from getting the girl for more than about two reels of a movie...