Word: one
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...borrow a famous phrase from Karl Marx, "All that is solid melts into air"--was melting already, as of 1911, and forming large and inconvenient puddles on the floor, quite insusceptible to the morally muscular moppings of outraged critics. Here one directs the reader to the foldout chart elsewhere in these pages. Prepared with much disputatious--not to say rebellious--muttering by this magazine's critics, it lists the century's "best" work in every facet of the arts. Its most interesting aspect is the intensely clustered dates of the works representing the major expressive forms...
...heightens and validates the modernist vision. Picasso, watching the military vehicles rumble through Paris, sees in their camouflage painting a kind of Cubism, therefore a kind of modernist triumph. That same year James Joyce begins Ulysses, overturning our traditional expectations for action, plot, drama and the direct impact of one character on another in the novel. "Like Proust," Edmund Wilson writes, "he is symphonic rather than narrative...musical rather than dramatic...
...what appeared to be--often joyously, often grimly was--chaos. "Things fall apart," Yeats wrote in The Second Coming (in 1921, of course), "the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." It was the century's earliest epitaph, and is still perhaps its most powerful one. And Yeats had yet to conjure with the metaphors of modern science--the theory of relativity; the uncertainty principle; the looming figure of Freud, pseudo-scientific poet of our subjectivity--let alone with Fascism and Stalinism. Or, possibly most addling to a poet, the rise of industrialized mass culture...
...subtleties of high craftsmanship but the appropriateness of public funding--talk about power!--for works that large segments of that public, not all of them ignoramuses, deplore. Strolling the latest Venice Biennale, novelist (and art critic) John Updike observed that it was nearly impossible to find anything that "reminded one of art in the old sense, even in the older modern sense," since "the desire to shock...had become veritably frantic...
...chaos. The illegitimate son of Robert, Duke of Normandy, he was known for most of his life as William the Bastard. Robert eventually recognized him, but only as he departed on a fatal pilgrimage to the Holy Land, leaving his seven-year-old a target for usurping barons. One by one, William's guardians and advisers were cut down. The boy escaped assassination only by a desperate flight to his mother's estate...