Word: cliches
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...inexhaustible stock of socko images still wows the impressionable, and forces everyone else to pay heed as his boring yet insistent voice announces verbal and visual abstractions as profundities. He justifies the gaucheries and incoherence of City of Women by passing it off as a dream work-a cliché from the time movies were as short and silent as this one is long and loud...
First, the good news. Les Amis are unbelieveably hospitable. Compared with them, according to GM, "the Frenchman is the most constipated human being on earth." Forget many of the chauvinistic clichés of the past. (Chauvin, after all, was a Frenchman.) Par exemple, the book points out, "the notion that the Americans could produce anything good to eat or drink used to make us giggle." Faux. Actually, there are several restaurants in New York (run mostly by Frenchmen) that would rank with some of the best in Paris. American restaurants, the book says, "are infinitely more elaborate, elegant...
...shrug and dislocate a shoulder, they sing and recede into Peter Max poster-haste. Their gestures and voices are grossly exaggerated; they all seem to have gone to Actors Studio and learned only to overact. They are Bakshi's image of America: searching for archetypal dreams, living out clich...
...longs, though, to hear more of Callas speaking on her art, for she said a great deal, especially in the 1971-72 master classes at Juilliard. Perhaps the cliché is correct: art is inscrutable. That may be the wisdom in a musing early in her career by Italian Conductor Nicola Rescigno: "It is a deep mystery why a girl born into a musically unsophisticated family, and raised in an atmosphere devoid of operatic tradition, should have been blessed with the ability to sing the perfect recitative...
...idea of the avant-garde had gone. This sudden metamorphosis of one of the popular clichés of art criticism into an unword took a great many people by surprise. For those who still believed that art had some practical revolutionary function, it was as baffling as the evaporation of the American radical left after 1970. But ideas exist for as long as people use them, and by 1976 "avant-garde" was a useless concept: social reality and actual behavior had rendered it obsolete. The ideal-social renewal by cultural challenge-had lasted 100 years, and its vanishing marked...