“1978”
By
the late 1970s, it was evident that both art and design
had reached a crisis point in their ability to generate
new forms possessing enough escape velocity to burst into
the mass consciousness -- which is to say, the decades
varied academic "isms” never touched the lives
of people outside of academia. Instead, the designed objects
of the era most commonly encountered by everyday citizens
were grotesque and labored Detroit beasts; the art they
saw was minimal to the point of being invisible.
In
the 1970s, Roy Lichtensteins Pop explosions retreated
to a world of minimal fields of dots mirrors mirroring
nothing beside stylized blank skies decorative riffs
on earlier Modernist tropes such as Art Deco. Im unsure
if this was a stylistic device created by Lichtenstein to
mollify a minimalism-crazed intelligentsia, or whether it
was merely what he felt the times required. In a similar
vein, I wonder what might have happened had Lichtenstein
lived past 1998, further into the post-ideological stylistic
freefall of the digital era. Regardless, musings of this
sort seem to represent that most interesting cultural kindling
point, the point at which art forecasts a societys
collective life. D.C.
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