THE REAL IN PHOTOREALISM
by Donald Kuspit


I suppose when the Bauhaus first appeared it looked like a breath of fresh artistic air, but in retrospect it looks like something more perverse: a purveyor of urban anonymity and more insidiously, a milestone on the way to the mechanization -- denaturalization -- of life, bringing with it the robotization of human beings, and with that their dehumanization, that is, the loss of the feeling of being human, bringing in its wake depression and barbarism. Paradoxically the pursuit of hyper-efficiency in all areas of life -- domestic as well as public (Bauhaus furniture and teapots as well as buildings) -- results in defective human beings and a defective society -- peculiarly unfit human beings and a peculiarly unfit-for-organically-alive-human-beings environment.

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