Hey, that’s me 
Hal Foster
The turn of one century calls up others, and 2000 was no exception. Museum shows devoted to Style 1900 or Art Nouveau were on view in London, Paris, New York and other cities. It all looked long ago and far away, this pan-European movement pledged to a Gesamtkunstwerk of arts and crafts, in which everything from architecture to ashtrays was subject to florid design, in which the designer struggled to impress his subjectivity on all sorts of object through an idiom of vitalism – as if to inhabit the thing in this crafted way was to resist the advance of industrial reification. As the aesthetics of the machine became dominant in the 1920s, Art Nouveau was no longer nouveau; in the next decades it slowly passed from an outmoded style to a campy one, and has lingered in this limbo ever since. Yet what struck me about this recent parade of Art Nouveau exhibitions was its strong echo in the present: an intuition that we live in another era of blurred disciplines, of objects treated as mini-subjects, of total design, of a ‘Style 2000’.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Hal Foster, a co-editor of October, chairs the department of art and archaeology at Princeton.
Other articles by this contributor:
Bigness · Rem Koolhaas
Global Style · Renzo Piano
It’s Modern but is it contemporary? · The Trouble with MoMA
At the Grand Palais · Richard Serra
In Venice · Hal Foster at the Biennale
At the Guggenheim · Pop Surrealism
At the Whitney · Ed Ruscha’s Hollywood Sublime
The Great US Election Disaster · Hal Foster writes about the 2000 US Presidential Election
print layout
tell a friend