Word: weltschmerz
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...maybe not so hopeless. The trio enters into a sweet-spirited menage a trois, and the Weltschmerz-laden song ascends the charts, but with this odd bullet attached: quite a few people have it on the record player when they commit suicide. The song's climb prefigures Nazism's rise--and the demise of the old, gemutlich Europe symbolized by the restaurant...
...collective weltschmerz in reaction to the massacre at Al-Khalil (Hebron) risks conflating the murderous Dr. Baruch Goldstein with the issue of Palestinian distrust of Israel and the current peace talks...
Recent group shows, including that landmark dud, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, have been full of this stuff -- by Sue Williams, Raymond Pettibon and others. Its tacky sub-pop imagery, its dazed passive-aggressive stance, its fixation on teenage weltschmerz, all entitle it to be seen as a mini-trend, linking up with the wider American cult of dumb popular therapeutics. In the 1980s, American neo-Expressionist artists shoved their excremental clods of paint at us with the self-evident pleasure that eight-year-olds take in dirty words. Patheticism is the conceptual version of this: no paint, just the words...
...Celmins? Where are those formidable senior talents, the two Louises, Bourgeois and Nevelson, without whom no account of the post-Surrealist vein in America can be adequate? And what about -- but enough, enough already. One can see why there's a big self-portrait by Philip Guston, full of weltschmerz and peeking nervously over the top of a wall. He must have been expecting Norman of Beijing, not the other...
...gone before, and the final epiphany-the revelation that there is no revelation-is too dim to illuminate Nobody's Angel. McGuane has not so much made the Old West new as buried many of the romantic myths under a modern veneer of laconic prose and cowboy Weltschmerz. Fitzpatrick, and apparently McGuane, believes that quadrupeds do not disappoint like bipeds. The trouble is, novels with more affection for the equine than the human tend to gallop only for a short stretch. And then, all too frequently, they pull up lame. -By Richard Stengel