Ironically, now that photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or irrelevant to label it as such. Serious photographers variously claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing events, exploring themselves -- anything but making works of art. They are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their own work is not involved with art. It shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of Modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art.
Photographers' disclaimers of any interest in making art tell us more about the harried status of the contemporary notion of art than about whether photography is or is not art. For example, those photographers who suppose that, by taking pictures, they are getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified by painting remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from the intellectual austerity of classical Modernist painting by concentrating on the physical act of painting. Much of photography's prestige today derives from the convergence of its aims with those of recent art, particularly with the dismissal of abstract art implicit in the phenomenon of Pop painting during the 1960's. Appreciating photographs is a relief to sensibilities tired of the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical Modernist painting -- that is, abstract art as developed in different ways by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Matisse -- pre- supposes highly developed skills of locking and a familiarity with other paintings and the history of art. Photography, like Pop painting, reassures viewers that art is not hard; photography seems to be more about its subjects than abut art.
Photography, however, has developed all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic Medernist art. Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the promotion of photography as an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far that the public will forget that photography is a distinctive and exalted activity -- in short, an art.
The author is concerned with ______.
A. defining the Modernist attitude toward art
B. explaining how photography emerged as a fine art
C. explaining the attitude of serious contemporary photographers toward photography as art and placing those attitudes in their historical context
D. defining the various approaches that serious contemporary photographers take toward their art and assessing the value of each of those approaches
下列对钢制管道安装工艺的基本规定叙述不正确的是()。
A. 穿墙及过楼板的管道,应加套管,管道焊缝不宜置于套管内。穿墙套管长度不得小于墙厚且穿楼板套管应高出楼面50mm
B. 管道上仪表取源部件的开孔和焊接应在管道安装前进行
C. 管道连接时,应用强力对口、加偏垫或加多层垫等方法来消除接口端面的空隙、偏斜、错口或不同心等缺陷
D. 排水管的支管与主管连接时,宜按介质流向稍有倾斜
变压器安装过程中,装有气体继电器的变压器应有()坡度,高的一侧装在油枕方向,使气体继电器有良好的灵敏度。
A. 0.5%~1%
B. 1%~1.5%
C. 1.5%~2%
D. 2%~2.5%
Opinion polls arc now beginning to show a reluctant consensus that, whoever is to 'blame and whatever happens from now on, high unemployment is probably here to stay. This means we shall have to find ways of sharing the available employment more widely.
But we need to go further. We must ask some fundamental questions about the future of work. Should we continue to treat employment as the norm? Should we not rather encourage many other ways for self-respecting people to work? Should we not create conditions in which many of us can work for ourselves, rather than for an employer? Should we not aim to revive the household arm the neighbourhood, as well as the factory and the office, as centres of production and work?
The industrial age has been the only period of human history in which most people's work has taken the form. of jobs. The industrial age may now be coming to an end, and some of the changes in work patterns which it brought may have to be reversed. This seems a daunting thought. But, in fact, it could offer the prospect of a better future of work. Universal employment, as its history shows, has not meant economic freedom.
Employment became widespread when the enclosures of the 17th and 18th centuries made many people dependent on paid work by depriving them of the use of the land, and thus of the means to provide a living for themselves, then the factory system destroyed the cottage industries and removed work from people's homes. Later, as transport improved, first by rail and then by road, people commuted longer distances to their places of employment until, eventually, many people's work lost all connection with their home lives and the places in which they lived.
Meanwhile, employment put women at a disadvantage. In preindustrial times, men and women had shared the productive work of the household and village community. Now it became customary for the husband to go out to pay employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. Tax and benefit regulations still assume this norm today, and restrict more flexible sharing of work roles between the sexes.
It was not only women whose work status suffered. As employment became the dominant form. of work, young people and old people were excluded -- a problem now, as more teenagers become frustrated at school and more retired people want to live active lives.
All this may now have to change. The time has certainly come to switch some effort and resources away from the utopian goal of creating jobs for all, to the urgent practical task of helping many people to manage without full times jobs.
Recent opinion polls show that ______.
A. available employment should be restricted to a small percentage of the population
B. new jobs must be created in order to rectify high unemployment figures
C. available employment must be more widely distributed among the unemployed
D. the present high unemployment figures are a fact of life