Word: seriousness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...100th anniversary of Stalin's birth last week, Pravda ran a major editorial that mentioned some of Stalin's crimes, including "serious violations of Soviet legality and wholesale reprisals." As a result, the paper said, "many distinguished Communist Party and government leaders, high-ranking military commanders, honest Communists and nonParty people had suffered, though they were innocent." But since Stalin's death, the Party had "resolutely eradicated the consequences of the cult of personality." Still, Pravda called Stalin a "distinguished leader" who had supplied a "need for centralized leadership, iron discipline and extreme vigilance" during most...
...costumes and sets all blend together in Fosse productions to create brilliant flashes of exhilarating razzle-dazzle. Yet the man just does not know when to leave well enough alone. Too often Fosse insists on fusing entertainment with superficially conceived Big Themes. Certainly musicals have a right to be serious, but Fosse's song-and-dance flights into the metaphysical are less illuminating than pretentious. Who cares about, or even remembers, the deeper meanings of such glittery Fosse projects as Cabaret, Pippin and Chicago...
...word "collectibles" has entered the language. To the serious accumulator, a collectible is any object of intrinsic value and aesthetic appeal. Forget the bottle tops. The field by definition includes such esoterica as crystal paperweights and samurai swords, but anything that can loosely be called art draws the richest audience and the fiercest competition for ownership. And the area is continually expanding as fads and fashions change...
...museums become more dependent on corporate funding, this drift away from serious, intelligent exhibition toward spectacle will increase. There will be much more wrapping for mass appeal, in the form of Tut-style blockbusters and Pompeian frolics. Meanwhile, the proper functions of the museum will receive proportionately less support, because they are not "sexy." As corporate public relations firms insert their flackery into the curatorial arena, diminishing the museum's own control of what it shows while encouraging clients to favor exhibitions with guaranteed pull, the situation will not improve. Eventually, we may be reduced to the Ultimate...
...most chroniclers of Me Decade shenanigans do not, that private acts have public consequences; in the great tradition of British novelists, he draws society as a delicate, vast spider web, tuned to vibrate at the lightest footfall or breath of scandal. In addition, Read is a self-described "serious Catholic" and scales this novel to dimensions familiar to readers of Graham Greene: his hero's quest for fulfillment progresses not only as an item of gossip but as a spectacle under the cold eye of eternity...