Word: simulacra
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...brainy postmodernist whose 50 books had titles like Forget Foucault and Simulacra and Simulation, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard attracted a lot of attention. A fierce critic of consumerism, he touted the notion of "hyperreality"--the unreal experiencing of events not through one's senses but through the media. His theories drew a cultlike fan base, which included the creators of The Matrix films, but he was best known for sparking furors with his provocative, if not entirely serious, commentary--most famously his 1991 remark that the much covered first Gulf War "did not take place...
...damaged identity and cinematic fantasy is the film’s greatest accomplishment. The film-within-the-film prepares us for this trapeze act as it poses as Ignacio’s back-story, but turns out to be itself a fiction film—a kind of aggrandizing simulacra of Ignacio’s identity. After we are shown that Ignacio’s flashbacks are no more than an imaginary cinematic representation, Almodovar is able to effectively coincide his look at Ignacio’s childhood into an “accurate” narrative account...
...squadron of landscape-artists has been unleashed; like Stravinsky, they aspire to create a magnum opus of the season's rituals. With ardor, with bags of dirt, they have already begun to transform the Yard from a relatively pleasant, serene meadow into a confusion of cordons, chemical grass simulacra and bare patches of earth hideous to behold. Harvard subsists on tradition: the Yard is made repellent each spring and this one is no different. Why bother, one is compelled to wonder. Why go to all the time and expense for a lawn destined for a life so nasty, brutish...
...squadron of landscape-artists has been unleashed; like Stravinsky, they aspire to create a magnum opus of the season's rituals. With ardor, with bags of dirt, they have already begun to transform the Yard from a relatively pleasant, serene meadow into a confusion of cordons, chemical grass simulacra and bare patches of earth hideous to behold. Harvard subsists on tradition: the Yard is made repellent each spring and this one is no different. Why bother, one is compelled to wonder. Why go to all the time and expense for a lawn destined for a life so nasty, brutish...
...city of such overripe simulacra, whose most characteristic museum is dedicated to the memory of Liberace, what room is there for the clean, piercing, complex presence of real works of art? Not much, you'd think. Any public work of art is apt to pale to invisibility beside those neon signs and huge, crass, mock-Hellenistic sculptures. Nothing a mere environmental sculptor could make would have much luck in drawing the eye away from, say, the outside of the Mirage, with its foaming waterfalls and its artificial volcano that erupts on a regular schedule after dusk, except when (a sign...