Word: utopianism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Philip Batty first came to Papunya, he was met with an almost utopian vision. It was 1977, and Batty had come to work as an art teacher at the government settlement in Central Australia; to his joy, artists had taken over the town, some even gathering in his front yard to paint. "There were few places in Papunya that had front lawns and I inherited the policeman's house," recalls Batty, now senior curator for Central Australian Collections at Museum Victoria. "And people like Clifford Possum and Johnny Warangkula used to come around and paint." He was met with...
...plot, lassoing the President into a sexual triangle that leads to his impeachment, needs no footnote from me for its relevance to recent White House history. True, the image of a Vice President with neither power nor notoriety may seem anachronistic, not to say utopian, these days (though at the end, Throttlebottom does say to Wintergreen, in a neat presentiment of Maureen Dowd, "You can be the President and I'll go back to Vice.") But the pertinence of the show's disdain for the motives of the President, the Congress and the press carried a wallop then, and retain...
When it first got under way, early in the 20th century, Modernism was an idealistic undertaking. Clean lines and glass-curtain walls were supposed to bring on a more just, more rational world. After World War II, the style drifted from its utopian foundations and was adopted wholesale for corporate headquarters everywhere. But Foster has kept his connection to Modernism's idealistic strain. His designs are environmentally conscious. His new library at Berlin's Free University is the last word in energy efficiency. And the diagrids of the Hearst Tower use 20% less steel than a conventional frame does...
...also present in the most progressive circles. This isolationist sentiment fails to recognize that—in this age of globalization—countries need to look beyond their borders to solve problems within their borders. With a global economy it is impossible to isolate the U.S. in a utopian bubble of prosperity, and the mass migration we see today is the best proof of that point.But another, more insidious, argument prevalent at Harvard is that global challenges are too big and complex to tackle, and that conflicts closer to home have to be fixed first. We have to focus...
...stake. This is about adaptation or extinction. In 1968, amidst the barricades that inspired Jean Paul Sartre, ideals rotted because of extremism and ideological stagnation. Beautiful dreams turned into anarchism, burning books, and Jacobin violence. Today, Michel Houellebecq, a prominent French writer, points out how even the utopian sexual revolution was perverted into a quasi-capitalist system of inescapable repression and perversion. So much for college dreams. According to another ’68 slogan, beneath the cobblestones, the beach lay. The beach is still there, waiting for the “days of wine and roses...