Word: showing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...once again, the Pokemon swept a nation. "We've never seen anything like it," says Tilden. The products plugged into every kiddie angle: toys appeal to younger kids, who then move on to the cards and graduate to the various levels of video games. The TV show propagandizes each new creature with a tutorial called "Who's that Pokemon?" Most of the Pokemon growl their names repeatedly ("Squirtle, Squirtle, Squirtle"), so the children learn who's who quickly. The craze is also Gen Y Web-friendly: the most popular website for kids 12 years and younger is Pokemon.com...
...this struggle for the soul of American art is mapped in all its fitful chaos in the Whitney Museum's mammoth, frenetic show, "The American Century: Art and Culture 1950-2000," part two of a yearlong survey, on view through Feb. 13. The first installment of the retrospective, covering 1900 to 1950, was all about American artists striving to find their identity in the shadow of European masters--and finally making the leap with the figure-breaking canvases of Pollock. The sequel shows the rampantly imaginative shattering of that identity from Pollock onward, shuttling at high speed between the spiritually...
...view, all of the Whitney's rooms and corridors crammed with pieces dating from AbEx to those practically yanked off the walls of today's downtown galleries. Yet nowhere is the primal battle pitted so bluntly as in the opening salvos on the top two floors of the show. First is Pollock's Number 27 (1950), its swooping marks scraping away the recognizable shapes of the world, implying in the skeins of paint a web of pure energy, limitless and deep. Its yellows and pinks, its muted greens and blacks are autumnal; a pure buzz of nature's prodigious, generative...
...ever after has followed trancelike in the acid-green aura of the Warhol Effect. The art roughly of the '70s, from Kent State through Watergate to the imperial rise of Reaganomics, reflected the seismic social shifts of the times. And what that churned up is seen in the show's kaleidoscope of imagery, ranging from a full-size mannequin of a rather worn-looking camel by Nancy Graves through documentary photos of Chris Burden after a self-inflicted gun wound to a film of Robert Smithson running along the rocky ground of his massive and most famous earthwork, Spiral Jetty...
...telling that none of them are in this show. Lisa Phillips, curator of the exhibition, manages to mimic the raucous energy of a half-century of American art in these overstuffed rooms (and frequently to confusing effect), yet it's clear who she thinks won the struggle for the soul of that art. Despite a token gallery or two thrown in at the end of the show that seem little more than a grab bag of hot names in the '90s, the real finale to the Whitney's survey comes just before these rooms...