Thus, whatever a middlebrow audience in the middle of the 20th century may have enjoyed watching, hearing,or reading, it acknowledged that it should know third-stream jazz or the 12-tone music of Schonberg when it heard it; that it should have an opinion about what, if anything, happened in a film like Last Year at Marienbad; that it should appreciate pointed
eventlessness in the plays of Samuel Beckett (or even the impossibility of drama in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni); that it should understand why New York painters were attempting to achieve absolute flatness; and that it should sample the latest efforts of European writers to produce the New Novel.
When Wolfgang Staehle's exhibition "2001" opened in early September at Postmasters gallery in New York, it offered a panorama of
eventlessness. On three walls, static video images glowed in the darkness, like vast electronic postcards One showed a picturesque hilltop monastery near Stuttgart, its ramparts culminating in fairy-tale pinnacles.