Word: vision
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...modernism--created works that broke dramatically with the past, tearing apart traditional artistic structures and reassembling them in startling new ways. The convulsion of World War I only reinforced the modernists' conviction that the West's moral and cultural heritage had collapsed. All that remained, in T.S. Eliot's vision, was a Waste Land crying out for creative renewal. To Virginia Woolf, what had happened was more fundamental even than geopolitics or culture. Looking back in 1924, she concluded that "on or about December, 1910, human character changed...
...called it La Ville Radieuse, the Radiant City. Despite the poetic title, his urban vision was authoritarian, inflexible and simplistic. Wherever it was tried--in Chandigarh by Le Corbusier himself or in Brasilia by his followers--it failed. Standardization proved inhuman and disorienting. The open spaces were inhospitable; the bureaucratically imposed plan, socially destructive. In the U.S., the Radiant City took the form of vast urban-renewal schemes and regimented public housing projects that damaged the urban fabric beyond repair. Today these megaprojects are being dismantled, as superblocks give way to rows of houses fronting streets and sidewalks. Downtowns have...
ALLEN GINSBERG (1927-1997) He emerged during the somnolent American 1950s as a bardic reincarnation of Walt Whitman. His incantatory, long-lined verses were styled not for parlor reading or classroom study but for public performances, featuring himself. He provided the music for the Beat Generation and a vision of modern malaise: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...
...Sesame Street and the Henson Co., whose next venture will be a global family-entertainment network called the Kermit Channel. Because the works we encounter as children are so potent, Henson may influence the next century as much as this one, as his viewers grow up carrying his vision within them...
...bogus, how beguiling, that in the midst of the Depression, Hollywood erected Art Deco penthouses for swells with nothing better to do than dance the night away. Did audiences rebel at this fantasy vision? No, they wanted escape--escape into elegance. Nearly everyone opted for that patina. Gangsters and jazzmen went to their gigs in cool dark suits; gas-station attendants wore bow ties. To look natty was to buy into the Hollywood myth. Mr. DeMille might never come to Podunk, but Middle America was always ready for its close...