Word: phrase
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have thoroughly enjoyed my tenure as a Crimson editorial columnist. To quote a phrase popularized by Ishmael Reed, "writin' is fightin'," and I've relished the chance to joust with my political and ideological opponents. The negative responses that I sometimes provoked only helped to motivate me. I've received replies ranging from polite criticism to outraged diatribes--even one death threat--but I won't apologize to anyone who I offended because they probably deserved...
...beginning," wrote John Locke in the 17th century, "all the world was America." It was not necessarily a reassuring thought, for America seemed very strange to its first European settlers, particularly the Puritans in New England. To them, its rocky coast and tangled woods were--in the expressive phrase used by one of them--"the Lord's waste," an unowned biblical desert full of strange beasts and savage half-men. However, although America produced no significant landscape painting or religious art during the 17th or 18th century, by the mid-19th century, landscape was the national religious symbol...
...think of it as a reward for success. Those of the late 18th century were more apt to distrust it as a vice. They associated it with frivolity, decadence--colonial rule. Virtue showed itself in plainness, explicitness, pragmatism, "making do," an unfussed directness of craftsmanship. There was, as the phrase went, an "American grain...
Sullivan (1856-1924) was America's first great modern architect. It's a curious twist of fate that, having written hundreds of thousands of words about architecture, he should be known to most people today by one phrase: "Form follows function." It became the motto of all functionalist designers, but it doesn't represent Sullivan's own ideas at all. He wasn't antidecoration. He was, rather, one of the greatest designers of decorative detail, in an age that excelled in it. But he insisted on the primacy of the main masses. Both this and the love of inventive detail...
...just noticed that you used the phrase "cultural objects." Do you support the idea of these survey courses, or even any courses in an art history department, working with the concept of "visual culture?" For example, Harvard's course Literature and Arts B-10 is called "Introduction to Art and Visual Culture...