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(b Atlantic City, NJ, Aug 23, 1927; d Encinitas, CA, Apr 5, 2006)

American artist. From 1945 to 1949, Kaprow studied art and philosophy as an undergraduate at New York University, where he also worked as a cartoonist for the college humor magazine. He concurrently studied life drawing and painting with Hans Hofmann at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York (1947–1948). Kaprow earned an MA in art history at Columbia University under Meyer Schapiro. Schapiro’s unique pedagogical style—as a social art historian, a semiotician, and practicing artist—was a significant influence on Kaprow’s subsequent career. After completing his thesis, “Piet Mondrian: A Study in Seeing,” in 1952, Kaprow co-founded the cooperative Hansa Gallery in New York with other former students of Hofmann. From 1953 to 1961, he taught art history at Rutgers University where he collaborated on exhibitions and events with fellow faculty members Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Watts, and Geoffrey Hendricks, and with students such as Lucas Samaras and Robert Whitman (see ...

[Lat. odeum]

Type of concert hall where musical performances and recitations took place in the Greek and Roman world; the word derives from ode (Gr.: ‘song’). The oldest known odeion was built for musical contests by Pericles (mid-5th century bc) at the foot of the Acropolis next to the Theatre of Dionysos. It was almost square (c. 68×62.4 m) and covered with a pyramidal roof, said to have been based upon the roof of the tent of Xerxes, King of Persia. The forest of columns needed to support the roof must have created visual and acoustic problems. There is no archaeological evidence for any other odeion until the 1st century bc, although there are many examples of a related type of building, the Bouleuterion or ekklesiasterion. The ekklesiasterion at Priene (c. 150 bc), for example, has rectilinear seating on three sides, while the bouleuterion at Miletos (c....

Area in a theatre between the stage and the audience’s seating area. In the ancient Greek theatre this was a large circular space used by the chorus and dancers in the ancient Roman theatre it was semicircular and reserved as seating for distinguished spectators in the modern theatre it is a narrow space, usually sunken (the ‘pit’), for musicians....

[Gr.: ‘drinking together’]

Highly ritualized drinking party that developed in Archaic and Classical Greece. Initially restricted to aristocratic circles, participants were exclusively male; women, if they attended at all, attended in subordinate roles as servants, dancers, musicians, prostitutes or more refined courtesans (Gr. hetairai). A symposion took place in specially constructed room, the andron (men's room), fitted to accommodate a series of klinai (dining couches) along the walls and usually recognizable in the archaeological footprint of a house through its off-centre doorway. Food was a secondary element; it was offered first and served on small, low tables standing in front of the couches. After the meal and a sacrifice, the drinking began. Revellers elected one of their number as symposiarch, or master of proceedings, whose task it was to decide the pace of drinking and ratio of wine to water to be imbibed (Greeks always diluted their wine; drinking it undiluted was considered barbaric); he would also determine a topic for conversation. Symposia could range from highly philosophical discourse (as immortalized in Plato's famous dialogue, ...