Word: modeste
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Compared with the crowded, colorful displays of loot in most Broadway theater lobbies, the merchandise counter for Rent looks downright spare: a modest assortment of sweatshirts, mugs, CDs and T shirts in basic-grunge black-and-white. The show, too--on my first return visit since reviewing it 12 years ago--looks a bit paler than it did back in 1996, when it opened off-Broadway to so much acclaim that it made the jump to Broadway just two months later. The aids-centric story lines in this East Village update of La Bohème seem a little dated...
...people have demolished their homes for scrap and moved on. At present, the village looks like it has been carpet-bombed, with piles of rubble rising out of the greasy water. Purwanto points out an especially large mound: the remains of the town's grandest house. His own more modest home is gone except for the broken stubble of the walls. "I was born at this house," Purwanto says, sucking contemplatively on a clove-scented cigarette. From a nearby mosque, still being used despite the rising mud, the call of the muezzin echoes through the abandoned village. "Where my parents...
...couple: she is a rising star in the Catalan Socialist Party, and he commutes half the week to his job as an economics professor at the University of York in England. But on a recent Saturday morning in their sunny Barcelona apartment, they have a more modest ambition: to get some medicine into their 2 year-old son, Maties, who's been running a fever since the previous night. Domenech holds the twisting, crying toddler, as his mom manages to pour the syrup down the hatch...
...light, an invisible motor and a nude woman made of plaster casts of body parts covered in calfskin. (She was modeled on the wife of a Brazilian diplomat in New York, with whom he'd had a long, clandestine love affair.) But for years, Duchamp, who lived in a modest, $40-a-month apartment in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, told his friends he'd given art up for chess and philosophical writing. He said he believed in "masterly inactivity." Indeed, he, Picabia and Ray shared a talent for cerebral sloth. They all thought up endless word games that boil down...
...annoy, of course, but for them subversion was something new. It was about their own personalities, what they felt was right about the burgeoning, professionalized art world that they encountered in the 1910s, and what was uncomfortable about it. Although outrageously ambitious intellectually, they were rather modest in their output. And if they were the forerunners of artistic cool, they didn't have the iron-hard celebrity gloss that we now associate with successful art. The fun of this exhibition is the evidence of a whole culture or philosophy gradually building up, more or less by chance, from scratch. What...