Word: objectively
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since he assumed the role of B.U.. president two decades ago, Silber has been the object of widespread controversy. His unconventional tactics, criticized by many as dictatorial, bolstered B.U.'s reputation as an academic institution, but alienated many of the university's students and faculty...
...ever-growing "romantic encounter" slang. In a true melting-pot method, every student has brought a way of referring to the process of seduction from his or her high school. In a true Harvard semiotic (and pathetic) argument, the number of signifiers far outstrips the mystical signified object. (In other words, we have a lot of words for it, but it doesn't happen much...
...century's teens virtually Pleistocene. The curators do their best with this, reprinting front pages of Parisian newspapers that Picasso, Braque and Gris cut their collage materials from, or hanging photographs of the kinds of shopwindow display that, they persuasively argue, reinforced the cult of the Surrealist object in the '20s. But the effort to put long-gone popular culture in a museum is like trying to resurrect an old perfume in a room...
Consequently, the show reads as a set of illustrations to the book, for only in the book can the comparison of demotic source with final object be done with the necessary detail. Varnedoe and Gopnik have gone into their subject with vast scholarly elan, mining arcana from the areas where art and life, under the impulse of a modernism striving to refresh itself, are layered. If you want to know what was the catalog model of Marcel Duchamp's urinal, which nursery book Max Ernst got a particular collage element from, or which frame panels from 1962 war comics drawn...
...essay covers is scarcely represented on the walls. Why should these artists be considered worth writing about but not worth showing? You can see why MOMA might object on grounds of quality, since so much of the work was so poor. And you can't put lost subway graffiti in a museum anyway. But to restrict one's coverage of the '80s to Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer and the admirable Elizabeth Murray is tokenism. If the media-obsessed art of the '80s was worth putting in the catalog it should have been on the walls, if only to illustrate...