Word: masses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cannot make or buy art but do want to look at it in peace, the art boom has been a disaster. The confusion of art with bullion may have done more to alter the way people experience works of art than any event since the arrival of mass color reproduction. It may well be that my generation -the people born between 1935 and 1940 -will be the last to remember what a truly disinterested museum visit was like. Quite simply, it is now difficult and, for most people, impossible to walk into a gallery and look at a work...
...primarily esteemed not for its ability to communicate meaning, or its use as historical evidence, or its capacity to generate aesthetic pleasure, but for its convertibility into cash. The exoticism of high price generates curiosity, and this curiosity fills the museum, turning it into a low-rating mass medium. But there it collides with an older American tradition, the 19th century reformist belief that contact with works of art is morally elevating and that museums are, in spirit, secular churches. In the eddies of this confluence, the work of art, battered and sucked this way and that by incompatible necessities...
...museums become more dependent on corporate funding, this drift away from serious, intelligent exhibition toward spectacle will increase. There will be much more wrapping for mass appeal, in the form of Tut-style blockbusters and Pompeian frolics. Meanwhile, the proper functions of the museum will receive proportionately less support, because they are not "sexy." As corporate public relations firms insert their flackery into the curatorial arena, diminishing the museum's own control of what it shows while encouraging clients to favor exhibitions with guaranteed pull, the situation will not improve. Eventually, we may be reduced to the Ultimate...
...Kung is particularly important because he has publicly questioned or denied outright the creed that Christ is eternally "one in substance" with God the Father, the belief that the church is based on an apostolic succession that goes back to St. Peter and the sacrificial nature of the Mass. Küng's doubts are influential, as several of his books have become bestsellers...
Peter J. Gomes, 37, the Memorial Church at Harvard University. A quintessential New England preacher who speaks like a Brahmin, Gomes is a board member of the Pilgrim Society in Plymouth, Mass., his famous home town. He happens to be black. Gomes (rhymes with homes) notes wryly that his parents raised him in "a rather backward environment in which language still had some validity." The Plymouth schools thereafter drilled him in memorizing large chunks of great prose and poetry, a skill he retains...