Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"... then anonymously authored tale of bondage The Story of O and William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, were freed for examination—in the case of the latter begrudgingly. The court found it “grossly offensive” but concluded that it was not pornographic. By 1967, little seemed offlimits anymore. The Fugs, a radical rock group in the Lower East Side of New York, recorded songs using most outrageous lyrics, such as this line by poet Ted Berrigan: "And I'm getting almost as much pussy as the spades."--Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (2015) by George Cotkin "While it is nice to indulge in nostalgia for the Elysium of the sexual revolution, for many women it was stillborn. ... the ground for sex with alpha-male leaders, which they were told served both the movement and the sexual revolution."--Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (2015) by George Cotkin |
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Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (2015) is a book by George Cotkin.
Blurb:
In 1952, John Cage shocked audiences with 4'33", his compositional ode to the ironic power of silence. From Cage's minimalism to Chris Burden's radical performance art two decades later (in one piece he had himself shot), the post-war American avant-garde shattered the divide between low and high art, between artist and audience. They changed the cultural landscape.
Feast of Excess is an engaging and accessible portrait of "The New Sensibility," as it was named by Susan Sontag in 1965. The New Sensibility sought to push culture in extreme directions: either towards stark minimalism or gaudy maximalism. Through vignette profiles of prominent figures-John Cage, Patricia Highsmith, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Anne Sexton, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Erica Jong, Thomas Pynchon, to name a few-George Cotkin presents their bold, headline-grabbing performances and places them within the historical moment.
This inventive and jaunty narrative captures the excitement of liberation in American culture. The roots of this release, as Cotkin demonstrates, began in the 1950s, boomed in the 1960s, and became the cultural norm by the 1970s.
More than a detailed immersion in the history of cultural extremism, Feast of Excess raises provocative questions for our present-day culture.
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