Word: banalized
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...almost continuously since he was a teenager, and his buildings are Californian -- brash, unpretentious, ad hoc, construction-worker constructivist. For him, imperfect construction details and urban sprawl are now American givens: the challenge is to make buildings that are compelling in spite of off-the-rack materials and confused, banal surroundings...
...work, these tend to be muted by irony or else lose their focus in conventional panoramas. But his photocollage method seems perfect for them, and the biggest work in this show, Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986, sets them forth at full stretch. It is a scene both banal and grand: an intersection on the highway from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, the yellow highway line plunging out to meet the horizon under a great arch of pale blue sky, dry low brush and gray clay dust on either side, the foreground a clutter of desultory trash, beer cans...
...Brancusi, Miro, Calder, Giacometti and others -- but because they did not want to serve the social consensus in the way that statuary did. Consequently, few public commemorative sculptures made in the past 75 years have any real importance in the modernist canon; and conversely, modern public sculpture is mostly banal in the extreme...
Looked at analytically, Me and My Girl should not be so infectiously exhilarating. The lyrics are banal and devoid of wit; the songs, though hummable and winsome, tend to have the same simple beat; and the narrative -- a reworking of Pygmalion in which a cheerily crooked Cockney finds himself heir to an earldom and a fortune if he can learn to behave like a swell -- is comic but farfetched. Yet the gaudy $4 million production has an unabashed desire to please, touches of sprightly invention (a mounted suit of armor abruptly walks offstage; ancestor portraits come alive and tap-dance...
...tribal rhythms, proved to be a big hit at the recent Amnesty International benefit concert. But old Gabriel fans are going to hear little or none of his former complexity on So. Instead, Gabriel has filled this album with a bunch of love songs that are equally pretty and banal. In short, this will probably be the best Phil Collins album ever made...