The Art of Ideas explores the increased emphasis on conceptual art that began in the late 1960's. Given the intangibilities inherent conceptual art it makes sense that the art of ideas implored "lengthy texts" as Goldberg explains on page 152. These texts reminded me of the Futurist manifestos. I found an interesting connection between performance artists from the late 1960's and the Futurists in that they both, "questioned the accepted premises of art and attempted to re-define its meaning and function" (p 152).
I was reminded of modernism with performers like Josephine Baker and the initiation of jazz and minstrelsy in the Western world in the discussion of Ritual (p 163). As Princess Tam Tam, Baker is unable to control her supposed inner self and unleashes into primitive-like dance. What I found particularly interesting was the linkage to and fascination with things primitive recurring in art and performance beginning in the late 1960's. Goldberg explains the ritual killing of animals in the work of Hermann Nitsch and how, "these ritualized acts were a means of releasing that repressed energy", that energy being the natural rites of primitive man that, "had been removed from modern-day experience" ( p 164). The idea of performing repressed energy seems like a continuation that goes back to the Duncan Sisters and white women performing Topsy as a means of abandoning the responsibility of respectability that is a condition of modern, contemporary Western civilization.
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