Written in a lively and accessible style, Feast of Excess traces in
brief chapters the history of the New Sensibility in America. The
book opens with John Cage in 1952, experimenting with an excess of
minimalism in his musical piece of silence, 4' 33" and in his
chaotic, maximalist work Theater Piece, No. 1. Feast concludes in
1974 with performance artist Chris Burden who, among other things,
had himself shot in the arm, crucified to a VW bug, and spent days
scrunched up in a locker. Each chapter, devoted to a single year,
allows for the moment of creation to be fixed in the biography of
the artist(s), the historical moment, and the emerging tradition of
the New Sensibility. This New Sensibility was predicated upon
excess, pushing things, going too far, whether in the direction of
minimalism or maximalism. This excess was, in general, directed at
shared concerns, including violence, madness, sexuality,
confession, the performative, breaking down barriers between artist
and audience, and between high and low culture. It was about
liberation. The New Sensibility emerged across varied artistic
endeavors in the early 1950s before being named as a specific
phenomenon in the mid-1960s by both Susan Sontag and Tom Wolfe. By
the middle 1970s, this excess in American culture had become
established as the norm. It remains the essence of our culture
today, for good and ill. The excess at the center of the New
Sensibility can disgust, at times, but when it is leavened with a
sense of limits, it can result in cultural products of the highest
quality, as well as resist easy consumption and commodification.
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