Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/996854
The alliance among the long-ago Mannerists, contemporary painter John Currin, and our photo shoot is synchronistic, for we are all living through Mannerist times. Like that parallel epoch five centuries earlier, our era lacks the confident rationality, beautiful reason, and stately gravitas of the Renaissance. In recent history, the tech boom of the 1990s and early 2000s can be seen as analogous to the Renaissance; the burgeoning Internet and dot.com phenomenon seemed an endless pathway to prosperity via commerce, scientific and cultural pursuits, and an expanded mind. Those times are now over. Nor are we yet in the florid age of the Baroque that succeeded Mannerism, with is grand but self-assured excesses, strangely similar to an earlier age in recent memory — the go-go 1980s. 36