Word: fin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Spring) and practiced, as a matter of principle, a manic cross-fertilization. With Klimt, art became overtly decorative, gold-inlaid portraits masquerading as rich bijoux; with Hoffmann and his Wiener Werkstatte collaborator Koloman Moser, bowls and chairs aspired to art. It was a feverish, unresolved time, and the Viennese fin-de-siecle impulse was to savor the exquisitely confused cultural moment...
...century's opening decade, alas, Hoffmann and some Werkstatte colleagues were retreating into florid ornamental applique and comfortable Sacher-torte treacliness. Sharp geometry had only been a phase. At MOMA, a painted silver box (1910) is hardly recognizable as Hoffmann's work. In Viennese design, the purifying fin-desiecle rebellion had taken place later and then ended earlier than anywhere else in Europe...
...first awareness of the presence of sharks alarms him hardly at all: "Nothing appears more innocuous than a shark fin. It doesn't look like part of an animal, even less part of a savage beast. It's green and rough, like the bark of a tree." Starving, Velasco manages to capture a small gull: "It's easy to say that after five days of hunger you can eat anything." He cannot stomach the sight of the dead, bleeding bird, torn apart by his own hands. He experiences alternating highs and lows, sometimes throbbing with the will to survive, then...
...tell their father of Joseph's demise in the form of a country-western ballad and protest the innocence of Benjamin to a Carribean beat. The absolute show stopper, however, is definitely "Those Canaan Days," performed with outrageous "Fronch" accents in the style of outdoor cafe singers during the fin-de-siecle. If for nothing else, people have to see Joseph for these great ensemble numbers...
...then (or so one must surmise, through the haze of fin de siecle uncertainties) the whole picture of American art in the '80s will have altered; some popular reputations will seem as obviously ridiculous -- though as sociologically interesting -- as the former cult of such late 19th century artists as Bougereau or Hans Makart. But whether there is any real genius in the offing is a moot point. America has no major younger expressionist artist, like Germany's Anselm Kiefer or England's Frank Auerbach. Though it has some gifted realist painters, notably William Bailey and Neil Welliver, none...