“1978”

By the late 1970s, it was evident that both art and design had reached a crisis point in their ability to generate new forms possessing enough escape velocity to burst into the mass consciousness -- which is to say, the decade’s varied academic "isms” never touched the lives of people outside of academia. Instead, the designed objects of the era most commonly encountered by everyday citizens were grotesque and labored Detroit beasts; the art they saw was minimal to the point of being invisible.

In the 1970s, Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop explosions retreated to a world of minimal fields of dots — mirrors mirroring nothing beside stylized blank skies — decorative riffs on earlier Modernist tropes such as Art Deco. I’m unsure if this was a stylistic device created by Lichtenstein to mollify a minimalism-crazed intelligentsia, or whether it was merely what he felt the times required. In a similar vein, I wonder what might have happened had Lichtenstein lived past 1998, further into the post-ideological stylistic freefall of the digital era. Regardless, musings of this sort seem to represent that most interesting cultural kindling point, the point at which art forecasts a society’s collective life. D.C.