Eva Sperling Cockcroft

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  print November 1985

  The International Shadow Project

  On the fortieth anniversary of the bomb, as Americans and the media paused to examine, once again, the morality of Hiroshima and the arms race, the International Shadow Project, 1985—perhaps the largest antinuclear art event ever staged—tried to focus this concern by invoking the symbolic landscape of Hiroshima at ground zero. At the epicenter of the atomic blast, peoplewere vaporized leaving only a shadow image etched into the pavement. Inspired by photographs of these Hiroshima victims, landscape artist Alan Gussow developed the idea of stenciling human silhouettes on the streets of New York

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  print Summer 1985

  Kitsch in Cuba

  WHEN I WAS INVITED to visit Cuba to attend the first colloquium of Cuban painting and the annual salon of Cuban art sponsored by the artists and writers union, UNEAC, I did not expect to see artists working with kitsch images. Kitsch has been variously defined as bad taste or false art. Clement Greenberg in his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” defines it as “ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide. . . . Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations.”