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“... The turn of one century calls up others, and 2000 was no exception. Museum shows devoted to Style 1900 or Art Nouveau were on view in London, Paris, New York and other cities. It all looked long ago and far away, this pan-European movement pledged to a Gesamtkunstwerk of arts and crafts, in which everything from architecture to ashtrays was subject to florid design, in which the designer struggled to impress his subjectivity on all sorts of object through an idiom of vitalism – as if to inhabit the thing in this crafted way was to resist the advance of industrial reification ...”

“... What does a Princeton graduate whose old dream it was to write for the New Yorker do when that dream comes true, only to discover that his cherished magazine is no longer the middlebrow arbiter of high culture of his imagining, but just another media outlet frantic for its market share of mass culture? On one level Nobrow is the story of this rude awakening, the Bildungsroman of a smart ex-preppie caught between the old ‘Townhouse’ of good taste, as vetted by the New Yorker of lore, and the new ‘Megastore’ where culture and marketing are one, as exemplified by the Star Wars industry ...”

“... Biographies​ of artists often read like legends of heroes. Vasari preferred his Renaissance masters to be precocious in talent, humble in origin and, if possible, anointed by a predecessor – so he gives us Cimabue discovering the shepherd boy Giotto sketching a pastoral scene with perfect skill. Born in 1922, Richard Hamilton was a working-class kid whose gift for drawing was recognised early on: at 12, he talked his way into adult classes, and at 16, not long before the Second World War, into the Royal Academy of Art ...”

“... How​ long can you be absent before you are declared dead? Do you have any civil rights during this interval – which some societies set at the biblical seven years – or are you merely the target of legal action? What happens if you return and your spouse has remarried or the kids have sold the farm? Do you have any recourse apart from revenge? In Absentees, a book about the many ways, across time and place, that people have gone missing, been stripped of status, or become somehow undead, Daniel Heller-Roazen offers a typology of the ‘nonperson’, about whom it can be said neither that ‘he is a person’ nor that ‘he isn’t a person ...”

“... In the early 1960s a spectre was haunting New York, the spectre of banality. Hannah Arendt was publishing her articles on ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ in the New Yorker, and the mostly Jewish intellectual community associated with Partisan Review, Dissent and Commentary was appalled by her notion of the ‘banality of evil’ . The very phrase (many readers got no further) seemed to trivialise the Holocaust, to make its fundamental crimes literally superficial ...”

“... Manhattan is Modern Again!’ the advertisements exclaim, as if this status depended on the new Museum of Modern Art alone. ‘A transcendent aesthetic experience,’ the New York Times gushed. You might not recognise the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace ...”

“... Reyner Banham was as smart and sassy as any critic in the postwar period. What made him distinctive was his passion for the edgiest expressions of his technological age, not only in avant-garde architecture but in anything designed – Cadillacs and transistor radios, custom hot-rods and painted surfboards, gadgets and gizmos; all of which he discussed with great verve in 12 books and over 700 articles ...”

“... Inspired provocateurs during May 1968 in Paris, the Situationists are now the stuff of legend: one of those rare avant-gardes whose art and politics were not only radical but also forged together in radical fashion. Yet, as these early letters of the young Guy Debord, the leader of the group, make clear, they were the stuff of legend from the start ...”

“... The​ Museum of Modern Art in New York is Modernism Central, so when it makes a major move, such as the recent expansion (the doors reopened on 21 October), the entire field shifts with it. Funded mostly by Rockefeller money, a fledgling MoMA appeared in 1929 in rented rooms on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. In 1939 it received its own building, an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on 53rd Street ...”

“... The​ avant-garde of the early 20th century had more than its fair share of clever rogues, and no one played the role with more self-conscious élan than Walter Serner, who compiled an aphoristic guide to succeeding as a con artist in a Europe roiled by social upheaval, economic chaos and political intrigue after the First World War. Born in 1889 to an affluent Jewish family in the Bohemian town of Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), Serner moved in 1909 to Vienna to study law, but the illicit was his true métier ...”

“... Origin​ stories of artists are ubiquitous, but those of art historians are not. Yve-Alain Bois, the pre-eminent French art historian of his generation, narrates his own beginning in this book about his key encounters with artists, theorists and curators. Born in 1952, Bois travels with his mother and little brother from a small town near Bordeaux to Paris (he thinks he was nine, she puts him at five ...”

“... In his account of late capitalism Fredric Jameson describes its cultural logic as if it were a schizophrenic – broken in language, amnesiac about history, in thrall to glossy images, subject to mood-swings from speedy euphoria to catatonic withdrawal. No wonder that his exemplar is Andy Warhol. ‘Warhol distrusted language,’ Wayne Koestenbaum writes on the first page of his smart biography; ‘he didn’t understand how grammar unfolded episodically in linear time, rather than in one violent atemporal explosion ...”

“... For many people, Frank Gehry is not only our master architect but our master artist as well. In the current retrospective which is about to transfer from the Guggenheim in New York to the one in Bilbao, he is often called a genius without a blush of embarrassment (Thomas Krens, Guggenheim director and Gehry ‘collaborator’, can’t get enough of the word ...”

“... Although​ André Breton wasn’t the first to use the term ‘surrealism’, he made it his own with his first Manifesto in 1924. There he defined the fledgling movement as a ‘quest’ to discover ‘the marvellous’ in the mundane and to work towards the ‘future resolution’ of dreaming and waking. While this lofty goal was new enough, the means applied to it, such as playful operations of chance and sudden collisions of disparate words or images, were prepared by Dada ...”

“... the pigment of Cézanne (or, more proximately, Willem de Kooning) mixed in the wax of Duchamp. Foster GalleryFor some critics, turning serial things into singular paintings was a conservative operation, a win for high culture over low. And in 1960, when Johns first made exquisite replicas in painted bronze of trashy things like two Ballantine ale cans or a ...”