Hippie Modernism in Berkeley

The Greatest Artists You’ve Never Heard of 

- Carlo McCormick

CHRONOLOGY IS A BITCH. THE FOOL’S FRAME by which we mangle and molest the irascible erratic energies of culture into some semblance of order, the compartmentalization of time into a cluster of events, is the pedantry of history misinforming our necessary understanding of the messy ways in which ideas and sensibilities flow freely and unpredictably across generations. Quite arguably a necessary evil, its scope and limitations are at once useful and problematic, as much for the museum as for all those other cultural industries by which nostalgia is fobbed off as history. Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, organized by the Walker Art Center and arriving February 7, 2017 at the Berkeley Art Museum, is at once a scholarly argument for the insights afforded by following a single strain of thinking over a set time period, and a cautionary example of the distortions and displacements endemic to describing the unruly and mutable form of any zeitgeist as if by thesis.