Sublime

But in their time, the forties and fifties, Davis’s images of mass culture were on their own. They ran counter to the romantic mainstream, and did not belong to the conventions that Surrealism had engendered. No other major American artists were ready to go so far into the badlands of other media, or to do it with that uniquely balanced mixture of

When the Fair came to a close on October 17, 1965, Robert Moses was revealed to the public in all his egotism, arrogance and ruthlessness. He was, in fact, portrayed, in the press’s emphasis on the $100,000 a year in salary and expenses and the escrow account, as something worse than he was—greedy for money. He was in public disrepute so great that

Almost a century later, it gave Jacob Epstein the idea for his Vorticist sculpture, The Rock Drill, 1913–14 (plate 27): a sort of bronze arthropod, mounted on the legs and bit (or penis) of a pneumatic drill. “This,” Epstein later wrote, “is the sinister armoured figure of today and tomorrow. Nothing human, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster

Mark Fisher was possibly the last of a disappearing breed: the music critic as prophet.

so that the art experience is replaced by the excitement of peering at inaccessible capital.

Marcel Duchamp The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass) 1915–23 Oil and lead wire on glass 109¼ × 69 ins Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier