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| The conservative climate of the United States during the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush set the stage for a series of controversies over the place of art in American culture. Many of these battles pitted members of the religious right against artists whose work they considered indecent, subversive, or blasphemous. Others were fought over issues of racism and patriotism, and some involved works of art long viewed as classics by the public at large. Inevitably most of these "culture wars" became political struggles, with proponents of "decency" and "moral values" butting heads with defenders of artistic expression and the right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. |
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| Pastiche is used with a rather different meaning: a work is called pastiche if it was cobbled together in imitation of several original works. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, a pastiche in this sense is "a medley of various ingredients; a hotchpotch, farrago, jumble." This meaning accords with etymology: pastiche is the French version of Italian pasticcio, which designated a kind of pie made of many different ingredients. |
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| Nicolas Bourriaud wishes to approach art in a way that ceases "to take shelter behind Sixties art history" [9], and instead seeks to offer different criteria by which to analyse the often opaque and open-ended works of art of the 1990s. To achieve this, Bourriaud imports the language of the 1990s internet boom, using terminology such as user-friendliness, interactivity and DIY (do-it-yourself) |
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| In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must have. This view is contrasted with non-essentialism which states that for any given kind of entity there are no specific traits which entities of that kind must have.essentialism has been the predominate methodology in philosophy of art, beginning with Plato's definition that "art is imitation." This methodology has been largely popular until the mid-twentieth century with the introduction of anti-essentialism, a movement popularized by Morris Weitz, W.E. Kennick and Paul Ziff |
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| A concern with cultural phenomena on the periphery of European society--particularly sexuality, madness, spiritual punishment, violence, and alterity.Celebration of the "unconscious," often with the implication that non-western cultures are more "in touch" with the unconscious. A concern with dreams and symbols, often assumed to be "universal."Abstraction of the figure, particularly facial and bodily proportions, n. Inspired by "non-Western" arts, especially African, Oceanic, and Native American artworks. Occidental primitivist artists were inspired by the visual abstraction of African artworks, which favor the abstract over naturalistic representation. This is because their artworks tend to represent objects or ideas related to religious meanings or cosmology.Focus on rhythmic and percussive elements, presence of repetition and pattern, especially in music and ritual performance. |
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| Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or avoid what it deems the second wave's "essentialist" definitions of femininity, which often assumed a universal female identity and over-emphasized experiences of upper middle class white women. A post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality is central to third wave ideology. |
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