Studies of human genetic disorders have traditionally followed a reductionist paradigm. Traits are defined as Mendelian or complex based on family pedigree and population data, whereas alleles are ...deemed rare, common, benign, or deleterious based on their population frequencies. The availability of exome and genome data, as well as gene and allele discovery for various conditions, is beginning to challenge classic definitions of genetic causality. Here, I discuss recent advances in our understanding of the overlap between rare and complex diseases and the context-dependent effect of both rare and common alleles that underscores the need for revising the traditional categorizations of genetic traits.
In structural analyses of innovation, one substantive question looms large: What makes radical innovation possible if peripheral actors are more likely to originate radical ideas but are poorly ...positioned to promote them? An inductive study of the rise of Cubism, a revolutionary paradigm that overthrew classic principles of representation in art, results in a model where not only the periphery moves toward the core through collective action, as typically asserted, but the core also moves toward the periphery, becoming more receptive to radical ideas. The fragmentation of the art market in early 20th-century Paris served as the trigger. The proliferation of market niches and growing ambiguity over evaluation standards dramatically reduced the costs of experimentation in the periphery and the ability of the core to suppress radical ideas. A multilevel analysis linking individual creativity, peer networks, and the art field reveals how market developments fostered Spanish Cubist Pablo Picasso’s experiments and facilitated their diffusion in the absence of public support, a coherent movement, and even his active involvement. If past research attests to the importance of framing innovations and mobilizing resources in their support, this study brings attention to shifts in the structure of opportunities to do so.
'A working countryside is hardly ever a landscape', Raymond Williams observed fifty years ago in his book The Country and the City; for to perceive it as such is to have both the leisure and the ...distance from it, to aestheticize it. This essay argues that, similarly, art practices have too often been understood 'from the outside in': that in Cubist representations of the Mediterranean, the picturesque quality of the Riviera insinuated itself--indeed that that the influence of the decorative was so far-reaching in the inter-World War years that it co-opted avant-gardism itself, and that the Riviera was one of its vehicles for doing so.
In the fateful year of 1913, events in New York and Paris launched a great public rivalry between the two most consequential artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The ...New York Armory Show art exhibition unveiled Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, a "sensation of sensations" that prompted Americans to declare Duchamp the leader of cubism, the voice of modern art. In Paris, however, the cubist revolution was reaching its peak around Picasso. In retrospect, these events form a crossroads in art history, a moment when two young bohemians adopted entirely opposite views of the artist, giving birth to the two opposing agendas that would shape all of modern art. Today, the museum-going public views Pablo Picasso as the greatest figure in modern art. Over his long lifetime, Picasso pioneered several new styles as the last great painter in the Western tradition. In the rarefied world of artists, critics, and collectors, however, the most influential artist of the last century was not Picasso, but Marcel Duchamp: chess player, prankster, and a forefather of idea-driven dada, surrealism, and pop art. Picasso and the Chess Player is the story of how Picasso and Duchamp came to define the epochal debate between modern and conceptual art-a drama that features a who's who of twentieth-century art and culture, including Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Andy Warhol. In telling the story, Larry Witham weaves two great art biographies into one tumultuous century.
The Success and Failure of Picasso appeared in 1965, three years after John Berger left England for Switzerland. By the time of the move he was established as a combative art critic, but for the next ...few years he concentrated on writing fiction. His biographer Joshua Sperling describes ‘the quiet of exile’ – ‘projects unfurl with greater patience’, ‘a séance with the past becomes easier’, ‘voices a metropolis would drown out can be heard’.1 It cannot have been a period of uninterrupted contemplation, though, since Berger and his partner Anya Bostock, employed in Geneva at the United Nations, had two children in 1962 and 1963. Berger says a lot: about art as a luxury item, the nature of the male gaze (though not till the 1970s did he use that specific term), the moral importance of art (or the possibility, at least, of its being morally important), the intensity of Picasso’s vision (‘He has been able to see and imagine more suffering in a single horse’s head than many artists have found in a whole crucifixion’21), the implications of an artist’s choice of subject matter and Picasso’s lack of good subjects in his later years. He wants criticism to be rooted – in seeing, in experience, in beliefs. He also wants it to make a case. In this instance, the thrust of the case is announced in the book’s title (perhaps in Révai’s eyes its first churlish inversion?), and what follows is argued in a style that is direct and highly personal, as he fixes the reader with the full glare of his intelligence. Most long-form writing about art – as opposed to the critical pasquinades that appear in newspapers – is grounded in the assumption that the work under consideration is, even at its most immature or wayward or geriatric, of high quality (even holy). It’s an assumption that produces a forbiddingly descriptive kind of writing, white-knuckled in its emotional continence and sure to encourage the philistines. Berger breaks with this, violently; elsewhere he accords similar treatment to, for instance, Henry Moore and Francis Bacon. Instead of being content to look closely at the work and write about it in commensurately celibate terms, he must look at it and write about it feelingly.
First a picture with the word, then the picture without: the sequence begins to blur. Is that enough to lead the way out of the labyrinth: the blind alleys and the isolation each one of us lives ...individually, with no hope of community, solidarity, synthesis or vision? ...is this drift to the more-than-one of community enough to repel the divide-and-rule of exploitation? Freedom claims the summer storm-"que s'arrogent"-not the other way around: this not a story of metaphoric storms producing freedom, this is not the utopian freedom to which metaphors confine us, made of an idealism that glorifies conflict rather than addressing it. Freshness unfurls in a snake, or in blond hair, each metaphor entwined in the other, and in the leaves of the palms. fraîcheur d'un serpent blond désormais le palmier épris de ta chevelure the freshness of a blond snake forever the palm tree hooked on your hair Picasso's concentric curves on the next page of "Présence" now also look like hair, with fingers or a comb running through it.
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