Word: weightlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...critic Clement Greenberg sent Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland round to see Mountains and Sea in Frankenthaler's studio, they were astonished. "It was as if Morris had been waiting all his life for this information," Noland would say later. What they saw was a way to convey the weightless bloom of color without any apparent thickness of paint: light without texture. (Maybe they could have seen it earlier by looking at Turner's watercolors, but never mind: American taste ran to watercolors the size of Guernica.) Though practically no one now buys the '60s' doctrinaire readings of color-field...
Rhetoric comparing 1988 with 1960 has a wistful, if cynical, political purpose. It attempts to make a live political connection through the increasingly important American sacrament of memory. It wishes to mobilize nostalgia in order to give glamour and energy to a dismal, weightless campaign. It is politics as seance...
This year represents something close to a dismantling of the American presidential campaign. The candidates perform simulations of encounters with the real world, but the exercise is principally a series of television visuals, of staged events created for TV cameras. The issues have become as weightless as clouds of electrons, and the candidates mere actors in commercials...
...while briskly patrolling the outer edges of modernity in the early 1960s that Sontag became suddenly, improbably famous, for her essay "Notes on 'Camp,' " a meticulous exertion of reason applied to an apparently weightless topic: the enthusiasm for silly extravagance, for the likes of Busby Berkeley and Mae West. "Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style," she wrote. But more than that, "It incarnates a victory of 'style' over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over 'morality,' of irony over tragedy...
...dumb brilliantly, even gets run over by a steamroller and lives to yell about it -- at least until he is blown off the wing of an ascending airplane. Somehow, the admirable Crichton, a veteran director of postwar Ealing comedies (The Lavender Hill Mob), contrives to keep the cruelty as weightless as an animator's cel. Wanda defies gravity, in both senses of the word, and redefines a great comic tradition...