Word: utopianism
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...meaning in the world. It prompted a search for alternatives. These alternatives included a desire to exercise control over one's daily life by an emphasis on personal freedom and an urge toward experimentation. In the 1960s and '70s, this world view was shaped further by the promise of utopian communities. Today it has found expression in the growth of religious activity on campuses and the quest for order, especially among upwardly mobile young professionals...
...Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, and a Dutchman, Piet Mondrian--came, more or less simultaneously, to believe that pure form, in opposing what they saw as the deadly materialism of European culture, could open the way to a world of pure spirit. Abstraction would become a language, the key to utopian states of mental and social harmony that had been only dimly implied in art before. Abstract art would be the music of the spheres for the 20th century, manifesting, wrote Malevich, "the spiritual, therefore the divine, the universal...
Abstract painting lapsed into mannerism in Europe by the late 1930s, and was revived in America by artists who discarded its utopian fantasies and replaced them with ideas related to epic space, primitive ritual, spontaneous gesture and the sublime. But who today still buys the rhetoric that surrounded Abstract Expressionism--all that oracular guff about existential confrontation, tragedy, timelessness and how we're locking horns with Michelangelo...
...adaptation succeeded partly because audiences liked the "adult" themes and partly because a political message emerged from the small rural cemetery in which it was set. All classes, races and religions from Spoon River were buried there together indiscriminately, and the equality implied naturally struck Aidman as utopian...
PERHAPS SOME OBSESSIVE PEOPLE WILL simply eat more potato chips if they are fat-free and will still gain weight. But most people will surely substitute the new olestra chips for the old high-fat kind. In any case, let consumers, not the utopian food police at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, make the decision. Over time olestra will contribute to saving many lives that otherwise might be lost due to heart disease and excess weight. BRUCE CHAPMAN, President Discovery Institute Seattle...