Word: objectness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Cambridge Police Department has become the object of distrust and anger within several segments of the community following charges lodged by citizens over the summer of police brutality and racial discrimination...
This is actually a good lesson. It makes one remember how completely the city and the museum (closed, protective spaces, controlled environment) have permeated formal American sculpture and directed its "look." The art demands an artificial space, cold or meditative, in which nothing competes with the object. An extreme example is the work of Barnett Newman, the late dean of minimal art. Several of his austere steel pillars are dotted on the rolling, shaven greensward of one of Newport's more lavish mansions, The Elms. Isolated in their white museum cubicle and garnished with the rhetoric of sublimity...
When a person watches a moving object, he uses an eye movement called pursuit, in which the eyeballs move back and forth to maintain a stable image. This is no problem for most people, but Dr. Philip S. Holzman and his colleagues report in the Archives of General Psychiatry that in schizophrenics this eye movement is markedly impaired. It is also impaired, but usually not so conspicuously, in close blood relatives (fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers) of patients-a significant finding, for although schizophrenia is not directly inherited, it tends to run in families. If psychiatrists can identify susceptible...
...Manhattan insurance executive named Muhlbach is scouting a rival's New Mexico operations. His object is corporate merger, but Muhlbach finds his own independence endangered. In a Taos curio shop, he is transfixed by a terra cotta nobleman. His soft, Prufrockian sensibility struggles briefly to understand the figurine's power. "Does he remind me of myself?" Muhlbach wonders incongruously. No matter. He pays $30 for it and takes the piece to an expert in Albuquerque. The verdict is quick: authentic Mayan, a dark survivor from pre-Columbian burial rites. By the time his plane touches down...
With declarative simplicity, The Connoisseur traces Muhlbach's plunge into a world where everyone is "into" some sort of object: wicker baskets, pre-Columbian bowls, Oriental sculptures, early American leg irons. His new acquaintances are sharks, nuzzling through dealers' galleries, circling fiercely at auctions. With cold passion, they study the artifacts of vanquished people; blankly, they watch for signs of ignorance or weakness in competitors, especially newcomers like Muhlbach. Having acquired a little knowledge, he quickly obliges them. He successfully bids on what he takes to be an Olmec jade mask, realizing only as the hammer falls that...