Word: functional
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...Philadelphia Museum of Art, you pass fluttery rococo plaster nymphs in the ornate beauxarts classic entrance hall. The abrupt aesthetic change is like jumping from a sauna into a cool swimming pool. Titled "Design Since 1945," the exhibition (through Jan. 8) presents a world based on the primacy of function, which beautiful form is supposed to follow automatically. It often does. Modern style is the only authentic one of our time, and modernists and their friends therefore peremptorily equate modern with good. It often...
...exhibition presents a world born in illusion and doomed to confusion. Modern design began with the notion that artists and craftsmen, rather than technicians, should shape products made by machines, giving beautiful form to rational function, "liberating" the toiling masses from the "crime" of ornament and clutter. By 1945, Bauhaus idealism was established in the U.S. Textile Designer Jack Lenor Larsen writes that the movement became "a cause, allied with the optimism of a world to be made over in the light of the Four Freedoms. The solution was so simple and clear-and naive...
...After the broadcast, ABC will put on a special 45-min. edition of Viewpoint, anchored by Ted Koppel. The show, intended as both a kind of emotional decompression chamber for viewers and a debating platform between friends and foes of the freeze, has an additional, and certainly not accidental, function. It gives The Day After the weight of a major news event...
...legend ever precedes them, were responsible for the decimation of the caribou herds of the tundra and offer a justification for lupine slaughter. Mowat found, in stead, that man was the predator, that the wolves, besides being agreeable and intelligent in their domestic ways, performed an invaluable Darwinian function in selecting out the unfit deer. All this Ballard shows in images of great but distinctly unsentimental beauty, stressing the contrast between the blundering ways of man and the sometimes harsh, sometimes subtle efficiency with which a natural environment functions when left to its own devices. As the Mowat character, Charles...
...needs to be fairly naive these days to believe that artists can literally function as shamans or magicians. Certainly Motherwell does not think so. But he fervently believes in the efficacy of signs, the ability of quite simple configurations to carry and release powerful associative cargo. The blue triangle of paint above the ocher and earth-red bars of Summertime in Italy, No. 28, 1962, offers all the sense of being in a landscape: light and wind stream from the blue, heat radiates from the brown. Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a lengthy series that lasted some...