
American Abstract Sensationalism
The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.
—T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1951.
THERE ARE SENSIBILITIES SO keyed to the routine textures of urban life that they hardly seem to be sensibilities at all. But, if they are invisible, it is only in the sense of sewer mains coursing beneath the Park Avenue of bourgeois critical awareness. I’m thinking of those (largely) self-taught, (mainly) proletarian expressionists—“primitives” who personalized yellow journalism and made abstract sensation into something as complicated as art.
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