The art criticism of Harold Rosenberg: Theaters of love and combat.
Item
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Title
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The art criticism of Harold Rosenberg: Theaters of love and combat.
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Identifier
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AAI9732954
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identifier
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9732954
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Creator
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O'Brien, Elaine Owens.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rose-Carol Washton Long
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Biography | Journalism | Mass Communications | Literature, American | History, United States
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Abstract
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This dissertation situates the art criticism of Harold Rosenberg within his entire body of criticism and within the history of his time. It asserts that Rosenberg's art criticism had the same radical purpose as his political, social, and literary criticism: to combat the institutionalization of independent critical culture in the United States.;Part I, "Harold Rosenberg's Symposium," explores the social, literary and philosophical origins of Rosenberg's bohemian modernism, and concentrates on the vital importance of his "theater of love"--his intimate community of artists--the bonhomie, and especially the continuous dialogue. Plato's Socratic dialogue, the Symposium, is proposed as a model for Rosenberg's criticism and life.;Part II, "Making Harold Rosenberg: Self, Community, Conflict" overlays the ideal world of the Symposium presented in Part I with the personal and political realities of Rosenberg's downtown Manhattan bohemia in the nineteen thirties. Beginning with Rosenberg's first publications in little avant-garde magazines in 1930 when he was twenty-four, it displays the transforming dynamic between Rosenberg's bohemian modernism and his marxism by way of his contributions to little avant-garde magazines like transition, Blues, Poetry, Symposium, and his own The New Act, as well as Communist Party magazines like the early Partisan Review and The New Masses. Rosenberg's experiences on the Federal Art Project and as editor of Art Front, the Artists Union magazine, and American Stuff for the Writers' Project are discussed at some length because of their impact on his later art criticism.;Finally, Part III, entitled "Aesthetic Assault," is about Rosenberg's "theater of combat." It documents his commitment to anti-bureaucratic intellectual culture from the thirties to the personal manifesto, "On the Fall of Paris," of 1940, to 1962, his first year as "The Art World" columnist of The New Yorker, to his death in 1978. "Aesthetic Assault" represents and situates Rosenberg's attacks on institutional art critics and curators in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Michael Fried, Henry Geldzahler, Rosalind Krauss, Hilton Kramer, and Robert Rosenblum and William Rubin.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
