Hobsbawm On The Arts
Hobsbawm writes on Post-war modernist art practice:
- "...consisted largely in a series of increasingly desperate gimmicks by which artists sought to give their work an immediately recognizable individual trademark, a succession of manifestos of despair... or of gestures reducing the sort of art which was primarily bought for investment and its collectors ad absurdum, as by adding an individual's name to piles of brick or soil ('minimal art') or by preventing it from becoming such a commodity through making it too short-lived to be permanent ('performance art').
- "The smell of impending death rose from these avant-gardes. The future was no longer theirs, though nobody knew whose it was. More than ever, they knew themselves to be on the margin."
Read more about this topic: The Age Of Extremes
Famous quotes containing the words hobsbawm and/or arts:
“Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siècle. What holds humanity together today is the denial of what the human race has in common.”
—Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)
“I haven’t seen so much tippy-toeing around since the last time I went to the ballet. When members of the arts community were asked this week about one of their biggest benefactors, Philip Morris, and its requests that they lobby the New York City Council on the company’s behalf, the pas de deux of self- justification was so painstakingly choreographed that it constituted a performance all by itself.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)