File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1996/96-09-01.085, message 8


Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 12:56:01 GMT
Subject: Re: Two Questions
From: jya-AT-pipeline.com (John Young)


For a masterwork on the cynicism Mark Hemline deftly highlighted , I
suggest Robert Venturi's "Iconography and Electronics Upon A Generic
Architecture: A View From the Drafting Room." MIT Press, 1996.  
 
 
Exemplar par excellence of Robert Hughes's "Culture of Complaint," Venturi
screeches for 375 pages, professorizing, complaining and whining, and
blaming and condemning the unappreciative universe for failing to meet the
unending petty needs of a spoiled, early fame asshole, frustrated by his
waning graduate school talent for emulative sucking up to professorial
authority figures like Vincent Scully (who, as Michael Kaplan posted,
ever-adeptly faint praises his neurotic layabouts to suck in new suckers). 
 
 
Venturi even wastes 40 pages printing his Princeton MFA Thesis, a sure sign
of cowardly creative hopelessness and nostalgic yearning for juvenile
replay of medal-winning. 
 
 
So, here's two more for Today's Design Culture of Anguish questions: 
 
 
I wonder if this haute artlessness of l'enfant keening, always accusing
others for one's own failure, is yet another legacy of the Baby Boom Bust.
It  certainly is commonly observed behavior in the PoMo and PoCo pygmies
and their kiddie-potty-brained boosters and apologists who've got
finger-pointing down to a near-perfect copy-catism. 
 
 
And if that's why the meister romantic cynics like Nietzsche, Heidegger and
the later generations of soft-intellectual continental
off-the-shelf-emulators are such popular Disney-minded ice-creamy
Ben-and-Jerry escapisms. 
 
 


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