Word: banally
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...thicket of verbiage protects, and supports, the most banal propositions. Recently, an artist named Jannis Kounellis showed (among other things) a live macaw, sitting on a perch that projected from a steel plate. "The parrot piece," Kounellis explained, "is a more direct demonstration of the dialectic between the structure and the rest, in other words, the nature of the parrot, do you see? The structure represents a common mentality, and then the sensuous part, the parrot, is a criticism of the structure, right?" Stripped of its jargon, this is a not very surprising revelation that parrots are not perches...
...parodies, fleetingly, the idea that any of them should be singing or dancing at all. Sherman Edwards' songs are usually reserved for important occasions like a speech on the shared immorality of slavery, or the apparently telepathic communications between John Adams and his wife, but they remain bumptiously banal...
Sometimes Eugene O'Neill seems like the Ancient Mariner of drama. He holds us with his glittering eye. He harangues us with his banal tongue and his repetitive nightmare about the cursed albatross that haunts his fevered imagination: his family, the restive dead. His soap-opera prose alone ought to chloroform any ghost. But somehow O'Neill slings the albatross round our necks and makes us grieve and attend to his tale of fearful...
Donald Barthelme hit the fan during the great Pop art inversion with his short-story collection Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964). Like his counterparts in painting, Barthelme was out to turn the boring, the banal and the shiny waste of the world's largest consumer society into art with a small a-the smaller the better. "Fragments are the only forms I trust," he wrote, and his plotless arrangements of culture-junk, blown-up clichés and absurd juxtapositions of daily monotonies showered down like confetti...
...sold it to Dr. Irving F. Burton, a Detroit pediatrician, for approximately $37,000. Five years later Dr. Burton sent it to Sotheby Parke Bernet, where it was auctioned with the rest of his collection last month. It was knocked down for $250,000. Thus far the script looks banal-"Impressionism for Fun and Profit." But the painting was not by an Impressionist, nor even by a European. It was Steelworkers -Noontime, by Thomas Anshutz, and its price established an auction record for any picture by an American artist, living or dead. Eccentric as this one sale was, it reflects...