Word: postmodernist
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These are quibbles compared with Gehry's achievement in this museum. It's a building that spells the end of the smarty-boots, smirkingly facile historicism on which so much Postmodernist building was based--a quoted capital here, an ironic reference there. It isn't afraid of metaphor, but it insists that the essence of building is structure and placemaking. It confronts the rethinking of structure and the formation of space with an impetuous, eccentric confidence. No "school of Gehry" will come out of it, any more than there could have been a "school" of Barcelona's Antonio Gaudi...
...conspirators arrived on the scene, a sort of academy of spontaneity had formed in New York. Painters all over America had deduced from Abstract Expressionism that art, to be sincere, must be thick and splashy, so that the galleries were full of conventional signs for unconvention. A postmodernist before the term got going, Lichtenstein realized that in art, though style may not be everything, everything is style: every kind of image comes to us packaged in terms that inexorably turn into conventions. He was antinuance, antiheroism, antiexistentialist. With good humor and icy elegance, coupled with a genuine liking...
After World War II, nothing of such magnitude would be tried in America; the triumph of the glass-box International Style meant the death of ornament and a recoil from "fine" material. Nor, in the '70s and '80s, was the cheap pasteboard revivalism of Postmodernist historical quotation going to revive a sense of grandeur. Moreover, with the exception of various memorials, and of such projects as Richard Meier's six-building Getty Center in Los Angeles (to be completed later this year), the level of grand commissions for public benefit flattened...
...enjoyed" her experience on the show, she found the conversations were missing something: "I wondered about the God dimension of the stories." Her panel dwelled on the tales' human characters and on their structure--on everything, in fact, but the Being she understands as their center. "It was a postmodernist conversation," she suggests. "It probably is not very reflective of faith as it is lived out by the majority of adherents...
...this soulless city--Robert De Niro's fastidious criminal or Al Pacino's emotionally erratic cop? In the end it doesn't much matter. Their job is to lend familiar dramatic tonalities to Michael Mann's brilliant, jarring, amoral expansion of and meditation on the violent themes running through postmodernist life...