2. 职称英语
  3. Illegal public art is in the news. The most notorious instance this summer w

Illegal public art is in the news. The most notorious instance this summer w

游客2024-11-22  35
问题     Illegal public art is in the news. The most notorious instance this summer was the switch of flags on the Brooklyn Bridge, by two German artists, from the Stars and Stripes to all-white versions of the same. Others include a Canadian artist’s scrawls, partly in blood, on a wall in the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum and, in Moscow, the painting of a star ornament atop a Stalin-era tower, in Ukrainian national colors. Internationally, the British midnight muralist(壁画家)Banksy continues his waggish depredations(掠夺), rivalled of late by a female upstart called Bambi, who likewise stencils images, only with a sexy-feminist spin. The over-all phenomenon could use a name—I propose Stunt art—and some analysis, starting with distinctions.
    As a category of volunteer art, Stunt art borders the genres of spray-can graffiti and spectacular illegal sport, such as scaling or parachuting from tall buildings. I would set both apart as pursuits undertaken rather strictly for the personal satisfaction or the in-group competition of the performers, although each presents hard cases: glorious graffiti murals like the ones that now, deplorably, are being demolished along with the famed 5 Pointz warehouse building in Long Island City and—return with me to the New York dark age of 1974—Philippe Petit’s breathtaking stroll on a rope between the Twin Towers. Any illicit work or action bids to be Stuntist if its beholders pause in unwilled wonderment.
    Stuntists may have explicit political aims, like those of the pro-Ukrainian Muscovites, or the protesters who recently hung a Palestinian flag from the Manhattan Bridge. But all Stunt art at least impinges on politics by exposing the fragility of certain rules and customs that govern civic order. And all Stuntists are—say it— vandals, in no matter how benign descent from the sackers of Rome, in the year 455.(One account of that occasion tells that Pope Leo the Great, modelling official flexibility in face of unruly expression, persuaded the Vandal chief to forbear destroying the city and, instead, to be content with mere pillage.)Stuntists usurp physical sites that they don’t own, as well as the time of people—police, cleanup workers—whom they don’t employ. Are we mad yet?
    Common reactions range from citizenly umbrage(愤怒)to anarchic empathy, at alternate effects of disruption and charm. We may be of both minds at once, as I’ve been about the Brooklyn Bridge flag team of Matthias Wermke and Mischa Leinkauf, who fled to Berlin after savoring the immediate aftermath of their feat. Our indelible post-9/11 dread, often centered on bridges and tunnels, doesn’t conduce to indulgent humor, and the fillip(刺激)of an infraction(侵害)in full view of N. Y. P. D. headquarters doesn’t purely thrill.(Let them vex their own cops.)But, then, the thing was so neatly done, a balm to the eye and delicately ambiguous in the mind.
    Wermke and Leinkauf told a Guardian reporter, Philip Oltermann, of regretting that they may never again be admitted to the United States. They are consoled by their memories of the dawn hours of July 22nd, a Tuesday. Leinkauf poetically recalls, "Everything was really peaceful. Life in the streets slowly awoke: people walked their dogs, the first tourists popped up, people made their way to work. " They spoke with passers-by. Says Leinkauf, "A burly American with a cowboy hat" remarked, " ’ Did Brooklyn surrender to Manhattan? I mean what else do white flags mean?’ " The artist continues, " ’I don’t know,’ I answered, ’White also means peace. ’ He laughed and said: ’ Oh yes, New York surrendered and America is the most peaceful country in the world. ’
    That’s a little acrid and a lot fun. The prospect of a direct response, rippling through a populace, inspires Stunt art, which pointedly evades the commercial and institutional rat mazes that channel careers in art today. Imagine that you’re an artist driven by the primal will to make a mark on the world. You have the phone numbers and e-addresses of dealers and curators. What they represent depresses you. Rejecting it, might you start to scheme?
    Stuntism is to art as weeds are to horticulture: plants in the wrong place. Authorities, social or botanical, define the wrongness, which becomes more arbitrary the more you think about it. Some weeds are as lovely as tulips. A superb gardener I know welcomes the sceptered majesty of common mullein(distinct from the mannerly hybrid varieties)wherever it opts to sprout. So may it be with Stunt art, in a time given to fanatical constraints on human-natural cussedness. [br] The author illustrates the______of Stunt art in the second paragraph.
选项 A、motive
B、origin
C、influence
D、definition
答案 D
解析 细节题。由题干定位至第二段。本段第一句采用类比的方法说明Stunt art的性质，接着举例说明，最后一句总结界定。可见第二段是在阐释Stunt art的定义，故[D]为答案。
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