Word: dubiously
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...euphoric as a drug high. Its grip reaches far beyond the roseate world of Rembrandts, Sèvres porcelain and Georgian silver. A vast subculture of acquisition is feeding on scarce objects of every conceivable description. Britons are busily unearthing-and auctioneers as busily selling-such objects of dubious virtue as antique typewriters, gramophones and biscuit tins. Americans, with more catholic taste for trivia, have enshrined such unlovely objets trouvés as old flyswatters, orange reamers, apple parers, Kraft cheese jars (a.k.a. "swanky swigs"), Mickey Mousiana, player pianos, Coke bottle tops, beer cans, Barbie dolls, barbed wire and tractor...
...publicist named Peter Meaden assumed informal responsibility for managing them, molding them into front men for the flourishing Mod movement. Representing a sort of secret style, a surly, dubious attitude and a way of life in which the work week was a lingering funeral and the weekend a temporary resurrection, Mod was a kind of berserk street refraction of traditional English clubmanship. Having the right clothes and shoes was important. Riding the right motor scooter was important. Gobbling the right pills in the right quantities and listening to the right music were important. All this has been captured well...
...Giacometti have taught us to expect anything but social ease and confident display from the human head. The social portrait seems exhausted now, a cultural irrelevance. This fall has brought two exhibitions by American artists that underline the demise by recalling portraiture's vanished glories and suggesting its dubious status today. One is a retrospective of John Singer Sargent at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The other is a review of Andy Warhol's portraits, which opened last week at the Whitney Museum in New York City...
Losey adds one character not found in the original, a mysterious young valet in black who hovers wordlessly in virtually every scene of the Don's, often exchanging intimate glances with him. A nemesis? An illegitimate son? A homosexual lover? (A dubious motif also suggested by the epicene revelers at the Don's supper.) The figure, mimed with sullen sensuality by Eric Adjani (Isabelle's brother), remains cryptic and annoyingly gratuitous. He does, however, make a perfect emblem for Losey's whole approach. This Don Giovanni deserves the old line once used by Dorothy Parker...
...This showed that the world's second largest firm (after General Motors) had more than doubled its profits to a walloping $1.1 billion-its first billion-dollar quarter in history. Soon after, other U.S. energy corporations reported spectacular quarterly earnings. Among the majors, Texaco walked away with the dubious first prize of a 211% increase, while Standard Oil of Ohio was second at 191% and Conoco third...