Baroque Baroque

Rating:
Summary: all about 20th century's taste for decorative flamboyancy
Review: The book is about the decorative arts and tendencies in fashion, portraiture, phtography, and in cinema. As such, it covers the entire ten decades of the 20th century, with a heavy emphasis on the British stuff -- Cecil Beaton's very "gay" sensibilities for the theatre and later, of course, Peter Greenaway's Caravaggioesque obsessions in film. Some very elegant and justifiably famous photographs are reproduced here, including those shot for Dior and Co. Also valuable are some rare photo-stills taken from cinema. But, on the whole, the book relies on the idea that the "Baroque" is a state of mind, therefore anything flamboyant goes. The book does well showcase the fundamental difference between the works done during the high Baroque period and the 20th century obsession for the bizzare. While the former almost always bore the virility of taking delight in excess, the latter appears to be decidedly Narcissistic, regurgitative and effete. The book shows to what extent the European sensibility has become "Chinese" in modern times with its incessant wistful harking back to a fixed style of pre-conceived form of elegance and behavior.