Word: youthcult
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...years ago, who witheringly described advertisers? target audience as ?the all-important 18-19 demographic.? To gauge from Super Bowl commercials (I fart in your general direction), Hollywood movies (stuff blowin? up, guys crackin? wise) and most newspaper and magazine coverage of the arts (INSERT HERE name of latest youthcult fad), you?d think American comprised nothing but teenage boys with billions to burn...
...adman's adman. He wasn't a hipster like William Bernbach, who tapped into youthcult with the "Think Small" campaign for Volkswagen. He wasn't an elegant rationalist like David Ogilvy, whose ads famously advised the rich that a Rolls-Royce was the sensible car to buy. He didn't even work on Madison Avenue, but in Chicago's Loop instead. But Leo Burnett, the jowly genius of the heartland subconscious, is the man most responsible for the blizzard of visual imagery that assaults us today...
...there also, he tells himself, "to save my life." But his first-aid program calls for steady transfusions of alcohol, a spicy diet of youthcult flicks and, in desperate moments, mouth-to-mouth sessions with a girl reporter. Craig also broods about his past (he has been an s.o.b. to a lot of little people) and agonizes over his future. His soul-searching is sup ported by a pulpy cast that includes his own Antonioni-bred daughter, his Irish agent, an embittered ex-screenwriter, an aging movie mogul, several leering French waiters and - since this is Cannes - a falling-down...
After years of relative obscurity ("Decent poverty is really an ideal environment for serious people," he said), Goodman became a kind of youthcult hero in 1960 with the publication of Growing Up Absurd, in which he argued that problem children were the fault of a society that offered them only dull jobs and squalid ideals. Two years later in The Community of Scholars, he attacked the colleges as bureaucratic machines that had proved unable to provide youth with genuine learning. "The ultimate rationale of administration," he wrote, "is that a school is a teaching machine, to train the young...
Only a hair separates that Hamlet-like image of self-debate from the vulgarities of Nazi youthcult art; the exaggerated slenderness verges on caricature but nowhere falls into it, and to look at the structural grace of the body, with its bent leg thrusting into the pelvis like a flying buttress, is to realize how well Lehmbruck could surround a figure with active space instead of merely displacing air with bronze. Perhaps if Lehmbruck had lived to reconcile the contradictions in his art, he would have been - against his expectations - a better abstract sculptor than he was a figurative...