Word: showing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mask of elitism, downgraded by critics who ought to know better, misused ad nauseam by the art dealers' industry, and rare as the phoenix anyway -- Who wants it? And yet, who doesn't? Sometimes you come across a contemporary exhibition for which there is no other word, and the show of drawings by Richard Diebenkorn at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City...
...present, refracting it through his own experiences without nostalgia or loss. Mastery does not kid itself in distinguishing between a real relation to tradition and one based on expediency. It does not mean facility. (Cezanne had it, in the teeth of exhausting struggles with the motifs that show at every point in his work. Matisse had it, while making things look easier, at least on the surface.) It is not present in raw talent. It rises from deep continuities, not sudden facile ruptures. There are a few living American artists who have it. One thinks of Robert Motherwell's collages...
...makes his pictorial thought possible. It defines the forms, sets up the changes of pace between areas abutting across a surface, provides the evidence of change and reconsideration that the calm look of his finished paintings only partly hides. "If ((drawing)) does not insist on its importance," writes the show's curator, John Elderfield, in his catalog essay -- as acute and satisfying a text as any critic in recent memory has written on drawing -- "it is because its importance is that of mortar between bricks, barely noticeable at times but what holds the structure together and keeps it firm...
Some of the changes seem laughably overdue. One daytime soap producer, observing that network censors no longer monitor his show regularly, says he is more likely to approve language that was once prohibited: "It used to be that you couldn't say, 'My God!' I let it go by now. You could say 'hell,' but you couldn't say, 'You go to hell.' I would allow that...
...films, and there is currently much skittishness about certain subjects, particularly drug use. But the networks' traditional hard-line approach appears to be easing. "We are no longer shackled by general prohibitions," says Matthew Margo, CBS vice president for program practices. "We look at the specific context of a show...