Word: setting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Harvard currently maintains several commercial properties that are earmarked for eventual conversion to tax-exempt academic use. While University officials say they would compensate the city for any revenue it might use as a result of such changes, skeptics say they want to see that policy set down in writing...
...Some Israeli hawks may dream of annexing the West Bank, but that has never been official policy. To the contrary, Jerusalem has often promised to permit some form of self-rule for the Palestinians, though it has dragged its heels unconscionably on doing so. Iraq initially proposed to set up a puppet state in Kuwait, but swiftly abandoned even that pretense. Baghdad now proclaims the emirate to be a province of Iraq and is trying, by such means as destruction of records, to obliterate any trace that there ever was a nation named Kuwait...
Varnedoe and the show's co-curator, Adam Gopnik (art critic of the New Yorker), have taken on a sprawling, slippery, tangled theme -- a survey of the transactions between fine art and popular culture over three-quarters of a century, from Cubism to the '80s. They set out to show how some "high" artists raided "low" (popular and mass) culture for their own purposes. Not all of them, needless to say, did. You won't find the visual argot of advertising, news photography, graffiti or comic strips in the work of the great Apollonians of the past hundred years, from...
...narrative Gopnik and Varnedoe present works better in the catalog than on the walls. In fact, it is hard to see how any museum installation -- linear and one-track by + nature -- could convey a real sense of the peculiar eddies of cultural flux and reflux that they have set out to describe. Abstract Expressionism, for instance, tended to set itself above popular culture -- yet one of its true icons, De Kooning's 1950 study for Woman, had a smile cut from an ad for Camel cigarettes. The work does not appear in the show. There are shallow passages...
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...