[Dixielandjazz] Art Deco parallel with OKOM?

[Steve Barbone]

          For the esthetes on the DJML. Not OKOM, however a discussion
          of Art Deco which was born at the same time, and seems to have
          a parallel history to that of OKOM.


If you are not an interested in Art Deco, Delete now. However if you are 
curious, you will find this an interesting read. Substitute the acronym 
OKOM for Art Deco in the article and it becomes downright eerie.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


          August 20, 2004 - NY Times - By KEN JOHNSON


ART REVIEW | 'ART DECO'


    The Essence of Wit and as Cool as Jazz


BOSTON, Aug. 16  Now it is prized by collectors and loved by 
connoisseurs, but not so long ago Art Deco was so tiresomely ubiquitous 
that nobody wanted it. Applied to everything from ashtrays to 
skyscrapers, it appeared everywhere from Australia and India to London, 
New York City and small Midwestern towns. It defined the look of 
modernity for almost 30 years and then, just before World War II, 
plummeted out of fashion into the dustbin of design history. There it 
languished until the late 1960's, when it was revived by a new 
generation bored by the stringencies of Modernism and delighted by Art 
Deco's witty elegance, polymorphous complexity and kitschy excesses.

As told by a beautiful exhibition that opens on Sunday at the Museum of 
Fine Arts, Boston, the story of Art Deco's rise and fall is as 
fascinating visually as it is intellectually. "Art Deco: 1910-1939," 
organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, presents more 
than 250 objects, including furniture, sculpture, paintings, glassware, 
jewelry, ceramics, fashion, leather-bound books and much more.

If you like, you can simply revel in sheer sumptuousness. Unlike much 
avant-garde modern art, this is not the kind of material designed to 
affront the average viewer's sensibility. As announced at the start of 
the exhibition by Tamara de Lempicka's sexy painting of a beautiful 
young woman in a form-fitting green dress  a kind of lightly 
Cubisticized pin-up  Art Deco wants only to seduce you.

But what is Art Deco? Where did it come from? How did it evolve? Why did 
it die? Why was it resurrected? What does it mean? These are questions 
worth pursuing, and to that end, the exhibition's massive catalog with 
its 40 essays by many different specialists rewards perusal. If you 
don't have time for them all, you will still profit from reading the 
well-written chapters by the book's editors, Charlotte Benton and Tim 
Benton, formerly married.

The challenge to getting a grip on Art Deco is that it has been so many 
different things to so many different people. It emerged shortly before 
World War I as a new style for French luxury goods that initially 
entailed updating traditional forms and motifs. A 1925 dressing table by 
the French designer Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, for example, sleekly 
modernizes 100-year-old French Neo-Classicism. And Paul Manship's 1925 
gold-leafed bronze sculpture of the nude Europa carried away by a bull 
absorbs ancient Greek form and subject matter into an aerodynamic emblem 
of 20th-century speed and dynamism.

But Art Deco quickly proved to be amazingly adaptable and omnivorously 
appropriative. It could swallow up just about any style from any period 
and transform it into something cool, jazzy and contemporary, and it 
could turn just about any commodity  even vacuum cleaners and 
refrigerators  into an object of desire. Art Deco drew on the arts of 
the ancient Egyptians, Aztecs and Mayans, the art and architecture of 
China and Japan, German folk art and African sculpture. It also took 
ideas from contemporary avant-garde styles like Fauvism, Cubism and 
Futurism.

And it made use of all kinds of old and new materials, from stone to 
precious metals to Bakelite.

The question is, how many different things can be called Art Deco before 
the term becomes meaningless? How can things as visually divergent as 
René Lalique's dreamy, exquisitely refined glassware; a severely 
geometric, chrome-plated table lamp with a saw-tooth profile by Donald 
Deskey; a flapper's pink straw cloche with an appliqué of velvet 
flowers; and a streamlined steel meat slicer designed by Egmont Arens 
and Theodore C. Brookhart all be said to belong to the same stylistic 
universe?

Historians do disagree about how broadly to apply the term, which did 
not come into use until the 1960's. Some think that the Streamline 
Moderne style of the 1930's should not be considered Art Deco. Ms. 
Benton and Mr. Benton opt for inclusiveness. Following an idea of the 
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, they suggest that we think of Art Deco 
not as a singular style defined by a particular set of attributes, but 
as an extended family of styles related in many different ways but not 
all sharing the same defining characteristics.

Art Deco does have identifiable formal features  qualities of 
precision, geometrical economy and percussive rhythm  but in a way it 
is more than a style; it is more the name for modern stylishness itself. 
As many of the catalog essays point out, Art Deco belongs to the history 
of capitalism as well as the history of design.

Art Deco didn't create new products as such, but it made familiar things 
look new and provoked a hunger for more new-looking things that it was 
happy to keep feeding. You might already have a Zippo, but how could you 
not want that chrome and white plastic cigarette lighter, which, with 
its curvy, racing car profile, looks at once classically serene and 
ready to leap off the table.

This explains Art Deco's amazing capacity for stylistic ingestion. Freed 
from the restraints of tradition and driven by insatiable demands for 
novelty, Art Deco stopped at no geographical, cultural, historical or 
spiritual boundary in its search for anything it could use to make 
things look new. In its relentlessly expansive aesthetic and commercial 
opportunism, it mirrored globalizing capitalism.

A mood of euphoria runs through Art Deco. A shimmering, Futurist-style 
ode to the Brooklyn Bridge painted by Joseph Stella in 1941 looks like a 
consummate expression of its animating spirit. The possibilities of 
modernity had not yet crashed into the horrors of World War II; you 
could still believe that 20th-century know-how could prevail over 
worldly troubles and that, materially speaking, there would be enough 
for all. Art Deco was not a utopian movement; it was not a movement at 
all. But it could be inspiringly, sublimely optimistic: see the films of 
Fred Astaire or it greatest creation, the Chrysler Building.

At a certain point the movement that made things look new started to 
look old. After World War II, Modernism asserted its influence. It got 
rid of all the frivolous decorative clutter and encouraged more 
rationalistic relations between forms and functions.

It gave us monolithic International Style office towers and lithe 
Scandanavian furniture. And then, with the advent of Pop Art in the 
60's, the wheel turned again and Art Deco's promiscuous, unrepentantly 
commercial ways with style, imagery, history and ornamentation came to 
be appreciated not only formally, but as semiotically rich condensations 
of 20th-century sensibility and experience as well.

Some Art Deco objects look musty today, but many look spanking new: 
Norman Bel Geddes's snazzy Patriot radio with its blue plastic container 
and red bars over the speaker like stripes of the American flag 
resembles something you could buy at Target. Design historians will say 
that Art Deco ended with the 1930's, its last glorious gasp being the 
gleaming white streamlined architectural fantasies temporarily built for 
the 1939 New York World's Fair. But it did not die; it just went into 
hibernation. It woke up in the 60's, and its hedonism, opportunism and 
overweening will to pure stylishness is as alive today in the work of 
countless contemporary designers as it ever was.