Word: ornamentation
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...street. Moulton, on the other hand, establishes himself on the corner right away. Thunder/Purple Rain is a variant on the familiar sex-and-salvation theme. Elizabeth Parkinson plays a sort of fairy who transforms bystanders into lovers with a wand crowned, rather like a car's hood ornament, by a heart. Unfortunately, Moulton makes the song Purple Rain into a dismal solo that looks arduous to dance and provides little enlightenment, emotional or otherwise...
...National Art Gallery in Beijing. Its catalog bore a fulsome essay comparing the two "living sculptures" to Confucius himself and lamenting the utter decadence of so much Western art, which "seems to have lost any moral significance on account of its fruitless search for formal purity. Meaning and ornament . . . have been marginalized . . . The black square painting is a goal that can appeal only to very few aesthetes. Not only the black square but equally the crushed automobile, the Coca-Cola can, and other examples of Western cultural detritus, all threaten to take over the world...
Maki, 64, may be the most talented modernist practicing anywhere today, and his achievement probably could not be duplicated in any other country. "Modern architecture," Maki notes, "having rejected ornament, leaves an unbearable void if shorn of details and a sense of material, no matter how expressive its forms." Thus the proliferation of unbearable voids in downtowns all over the world, where builders have used modernism to justify cheap, uninteresting materials and shoddy construction detailing. Maki's buildings are extraordinary not just because they are intriguingly conceived but also because they are so meticulously made...
...Raphaelite princess, but adrift in the jazz age and bored by the clammy attentions men pay her. The others, Lottie (Josie Lawrence) and Rose (Miranda Richardson), are trussed in marriages that seem more like mergers. Lottie's husband, an attorney, wants her to be a housemaid and party ornament. Rose's husband, a writer, wants her to stay at home, out of his lightly lecherous way, and tend the emptiness she feels after a miscarriage...
Like the ubiquitous religious art of medieval days, Disney iconography reinforces Disney ideology: it announces that this is a complete, hermetic world, an American world that Disney reflects and helped create. And like a pop Chartres, Euro Disney offers an overwhelming wealth of instructive ornament, commandeering the eye and the mind to ensure that visitors breathe, eat, buy and damn well dream Disney. But the riot of detail is also part of the show, maybe the best part. At other parks -- Great Adventure, Magic Mountain, Universal Studios Florida -- the rides are the attraction; with Disney, the park is the ride...