Word: satirists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kaufman rightly objected to being called a comedian. But he was, perhaps, a mordant self-satirist, perpetually in touch with, loving and loathing, his inner child, the lonely little Long Island boy, consoled by his obsessive interest in the trashiest manifestations of pop culture. It was his luck to come on the scene in the '70s, just as a generation that had been shaped--blighted--by the same pop materials was arriving at self-consciousness. The natural impulse of the members of that generation was to nostalgize pop culture and their own innocent response to it. On the other hand...
...collected for the first time is one reason to hail the new boxed set of Freberg's work from Rhino Records. But that's only part of the delight awaiting both fans and nonfans of Freberg, who has as much claim as anyone to the title of Great American Satirist...
...Dragonet, his chart-topping parody of Dragnet, was a big hit in Australia even before the TV show was seen there. Later, when it finally arrived, an Aussie fan came up to Freberg and marveled, "Somebody has gone and built a whole TV show around your record!" For a satirist, that's the Academy Award...
...heart, Ellis is a moral satirist torn by his attraction to what he criticizes. There are scenes which are nothing more than masturbatory lists of famous names--"Brooke Shields; John Stamos, Stephanie Seymour, Jenny Shimuzu [sic]". And so many brand names make an appearance, from Alaia to Prada to Yohji Yamamoto, you'd think he had a product placement contract. It seems to be Ellis' convenient shorthand for character sketches. When Victor undergoes a transformation to a law student, we know he is different because he now wears a Brooks Brothers suit and drinks Diet Coke. London and Paris become...
...German Dada. Joseph Cornell in the 1940s was the first American to base a whole oeuvre on it; Robert Rauschenberg in the '50s picked up on him; and Kienholz in the '60s on Rauschenberg. But whereas Cornell was butterfly gentle and Rauschenberg effusively open, Kienholz was a raging satirist attached to the view from over the top. Show him any kind of Establishment, and he loathed it. Almost from the start his work was about social pain, madness, estrangement. He hated all cant, including the art world's. One of the bigger pieces at the Whitney is The Art Show...