Word: spirits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...name made of baby-talk syllables, its intent to disorient bourgeois expectations of culture by any means possible--was a short-lived but fecund movement born and raised in Europe in the century's teens. It was more like a tiny religion than an art event, with a proselytizing spirit, a code of behavior, a core of the faithful, and a hope of transforming existence. It relied on irrationality, negation, sarcastic humor. Its most durable legacy lay in French Surrealism (the Surrealist fascination with the unconscious was largely inherited from Dada, and several artists, most notably Max Ernst, began...
...movement, such as it was, had only one (relatively) heavyweight American in its membership, the painter, photographer and objectmaker Man Ray. Its spirit was best exemplified by two foreign artists who enriched the New York scene by visiting it--the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp and the French-Cuban Francis Picabia. Their impact goes back to the far-famed Armory Show of modern art, held in 1913, which first gave a mass American audience a chance to see modernism...
...prophesying that the city would soon become the center of modernist effort because its reality had made it the modernist site to beat all others. "Your New York," he told the press, "is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses modern thinking in its architecture, its life, its spirit"--everything but its art, which Dada would supply. This image of the city as social compressor also comes out in Man Ray's neatly epigrammatic New York, 1917--a bunch of slats, stacked to mimic the setbacks of skyscrapers, held together by a C clamp...
Eighty-one pages into The Good Book (Morrow; 383 pages; $25), his entertaining bid to grab serious Bible study back from the religious right, Peter Gomes quotes his guiding spirit: not St. Paul, Paul Tillich or scores of other cited exegetes, but obscure Yale historian and teetotaler Roland Bainton, who in 1958 defended his abstinence "based on biblical principles [although] not based on biblical precepts or biblical practice." Gomes applies this same distinction to biblical texts on slaves, Jews, women and homosexuals, explaining why each group's persecution or exclusion, even if derived literally from Holy Writ, runs counter...
...genteel striptease, and the mean mogul gets his comeuppance. The script, by Cleese and Iain Johnstone, lacks Wanda's mean and giddy inventiveness, and the directors, Robert Young and Fred Schepisi, don't wind their material very tightly. Still, this good-natured movie is very much in the spirit of those ancient comedies from Ealing Film Studios in which nice, silly people defend some enclave of old-fashioned sanity against the forces of brute modernism. And that's a tradition worth reviving...