Word: utopias
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Imagine stacks of paper on a basement table; Ashbery's sorting to your left, and Ginsberg's stapling to your right. "Everyone was loose and free and easy," Fagin says of the pseudo-utopia he and his writer friends created. "I know it seems idyllic, but maybe it was." Like the School of Paris in painting, the New York School of Poets-closely linked to emerging abstract expressionist artists-was simply a group of writers defined by their common vocation and narrow geographical living space...
...greatest irony of the concept of Utopia is that people are still searching for it when, at the dawn of the 21st century, most citizens of the world's industrial democracies are already living in one. Does anyone doubt that if we could communicate with any person--even the wealthiest and most privileged--who lived much before 1900, and told them that we live in a time when even ordinary people have clean clothes and houses, nutritious food and potable water with which to bathe and cook, the freedom to quit any job we dislike, the ability to hear symphonic...
...critique of the exhibit at the New York Public Library "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World" [IDEAS, Nov. 6], Robert Hughes said, "This is a show about failure." However, there are thousands of successful utopian communities in operation today. Monasteries and other religious communities exist in all parts of the world from Tibet to America...
Basically, Utopia is for authoritarians and weaklings. But it was also loved by philosophers, when they were in a what-if frame of mind, dreaming up systems. Two of Plato's works, The Republic and The Laws, have recognizably Utopian elements. One of the most charming items in this show is a Renaissance miniature from Florence by Zanobi di Strozzi, circa 1470, showing St. Augustine of Hippo dreaming up the City of God, taking dictation (so to speak) from an image of Florence itself, complete with Brunelleschi's great dome, which floats in the blue air before...
After a while at this show, you may think that to be deprived of a life in Utopia may be a loss, a sad failure of human potential. Until, that is, you consider how unspeakably awful the alternative would...