Word: oedipus
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...individual's secrets. This populist alternative rejects the relationship between the weak patient and the superior, distant doctor or therapist. "We're talking about a group of people like myself who bottomed out so badly that we didn't have the time to waste on things like penis envy, Oedipus complexes -- however you pronounce it," laughs Beattie. "We were ready for some real basic stuff, and the self-help movement gave us that...
...there are larger reasons for seeing it. It reminds us of how ideologically determined the "revolutionary" view of 20th century art has been. One of the pernicious illusions about modernism lies in treating it as a continuous struggle against the past, as though every real artist were his own Oedipus. In fact, the house of inspiration is much larger than avant-gardist rhetoric has ever allowed. The great transformers of art history, like Picasso or Matisse, were also its great conservators. The idea that one tradition was killed stone-dead in 1907, when Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon...
...like beads on a string -- when one slips off, the rest follow." Is there any possibility of knotting that string? Or is scandal as much a part of the market as the NASDAQ? Can the greedy be saved from themselves? Or does Midas play as big a role as Oedipus in the human psyche...