Word: promethean
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some American artists and photographers were critical of Promethean technology. The image of the impersonal, overwhelming machine, successor to Blake's "satanic mills," flourished after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Others saw salvation in it. But certainly no culture responded so passionately to it as America's; and in doing so, it produced the complicated and morally fraught self-portrait whose outlines are traced in this exhibition. For once, the Whitney has come up with a show that nobody interested in America and its self-image can afford to miss...
...until decades later, in the age of genetic engineering, would the Promethean power unleashed that day become vivid. But from the beginning, the Watson and Crick story had traces of hubris. As told in Watson's classic memoir, The Double Helix, it was a tale of boundless ambition, impatience with authority and disdain, if not contempt, for received opinion. ("A goodly number of scientists," Watson explained, "are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.") Yet the Watson and Crick story is also one of sublime harmony, an example, as a colleague put it, of "that marvelous resonance...
...perhaps the greatest architect of the century: Frank Lloyd Wright. The decade's supreme collective artifact, in steel and stone, was, of course, Manhattan itself, with its immense towers--Chrysler, Empire State and the rest--rising like blasts of congealed and shining energy from the bedrock, a spectacle of Promethean ambition and daring...
...race had been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race. The rational mind had won the most Promethean of its conquests over nature, and had put into the hands of common man the fire and force of the sun itself...
This Saturday was Homecoming for Dartmouth. The evening before, a Promethean bonfire lit the cold sky amidst shouts of "Harvard sucks" and "No mercy...