Word: catnip
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Nauman doesn't think art has much to do with pleasure. Just about everything that could turn you off is catnip to him: aggro, solipsism, tension, repetition, torpor and bad jokes that may have come out of a misanthrope's fortune cookie. Boredom too. Try watching a fuzzy tape of Nauman overstretching a simple phallic pun by very slowly "manipulating" a long fluorescent tube. You don't so much enjoy this show as endure it; you get through it. Then, in the coffee shop, you peruse the catalog and find such hyperbolic drivel as this, by co-curator Kathy Halbreich...
...Angeles, a company town still cringing from the Heidi Ho' headlines about a Hollywood madam and her yet to be revealed list of star and mogul clients, scandal is a commodity to be both feared and savored. In the rest of the country, the Heidi story was rancid catnip for a slow news summer. But the Michael Jackson story goes deeper -- yes, and deeper than the sad public frolics of Woody Allen a year ago. For as pitiable and lunatic as Jackson's soft eccentricities make him appear in the skeptical public eye, he had surely convinced the world...
...without criticism of the piece, however. "My overall reaction is that the best way to get circulation for any magazine is to refer to the Harvard Business School. It's like catnip for the reader, especially if the news is bad," Alpert said...
...calls Socksmania "a phenomenon." % The hottest items, she says, are pictures of Socks at the White House and MOVE OVER MILLIE T shirts. Bloomingdale's, the upscale New York City department store, is selling a gold-tone-and-enamel Socks pin for $45. And that, kitties, isn't just catnip...
This is all catnip to Terry Gilliam, deviser of the Monty Python animations and co-director of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. On his own he directed one commercial hit (Time Bandits) and one cult smash (Brazil). Critics, this one included, went crazy for Brazil; but not many citizens felt at home amid all the astringent whimsy. And the director's next phantasmagoria, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, was a $50 million flop...