Word: artists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...picture is dismal. I attended a number of undergraduate theatricals and they were all terrible. The Lampoon and the Advocate are significantly worse than even most English university papers (and they are pretty bad!). Journalism on the other hand, which requires a mentality antithetical to that of the creative artist, flourishes. The Carpenter Center has made a noble attempt to get the visual arts in by the back door, but it founders because of the usual Harvard problem of trying to do too much in too short a time. If the Carpenter was limited to a solid, rigorous introduction...
These weaknesses in the presentation of European art would not be so serious if it were not for the fact that Harvard partakes of the general, worldwide confusion about art and what to do with it. For the artist his work is an approach to reality that is both different from, and entirely independent of other ways of knowing; science, language and so on. He believes, in the words of Ruskin, "that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people...
Joseph Beuys-sculptor, maker of happenings, guru and political fantasist-is without doubt the most influential artist in Europe. At 58, he is also one of the few genuine art world stars: the gaunt face, the felt hat that never comes off in public and the fishing jacket make up a uniform as immediately recognizable to his fans as Al Capone's fedora or Picasso's monkey mask. He even has a retinue of attendants, attired in cute red jumpsuits. For some years he has been one of the chief culture heroes in Germany, particularly...
Beuys (pronounced boyce) was called up into the Luftwaffe from a small north German town. He did not turn into a professional artist until he was in his 40s. Having survived a series of crippling depressions, he fills the role of the penitent prophet. His wartime experiences, particularly the occasion in 1943 when he crashed in a Ju-87 and was saved by wandering Tartar tribesmen who wrapped his traumatized body in felt and fat (thereby planting the germ of Beuys' later obsessive interest in fat and felt as art materials, emblems of healing and magic), have...
...answer to this is, in effect, a brisk substitution. If art cannot affect politics, we shall designate everything that happens in the world as art, as a form of "social sculpture." Since in the present intellectual climate of Germany nearly every act can be read as political, the artist assumes the stature of a revolutionary prophet. The result is Beuys as political Luftmensch, reeling off harmless Utopian generalizations about social renewal through universal creativity, supporting the Free International University, and engaging in squabbles with the Düsseldorf Academy. This, however, is less social sculpture than social packaging. Beuys...