Word: cliches
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...difference between a madman and me," Dali is often quoted as saying, "is that I am not mad." Indeed, he is not; and that is why the Pompidou Center is crowded. Dali's public hopes to meet a mind which fulfills its two ruling clichés about artists-the painter as old master (Raphael, Rubens) and the artist as freak (Van Gogh, Rimbaud). Dali gives his public a tacky, vivid caricature of both while fulfilling neither. No modern painter has armored himself more assiduously in mediocrity...
...clichés that can be set aside is Scott Fitzgerald's notion that American lives lack second acts. We have become a nation of second-acters (or should it be actors?). Everyone seems to be scurrying about trying to re-create himself at least once before his final scene...
...gawped at. To most people visiting the Met, Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, bought amid vast publicity in 1961 for $2.3 million, is still "the two-million-dollar Rembrandt." It is removed, none too subtly, from all other Rembrandts. In the meantime, the clichés of art appreciation-"masterpiece," "genius," "deep humanity," "quality," "values" and the rest of that fustian-become, in the face of a spiraling market, a dead language, analogous to advertising copy and producing the same kind of knee-jerk reverence in a brutalized culture of unfulfillable desire...
Contrary to cliché, Hollywood does not manufacture dreams; it preserves them in strips of celluloid that promise eternal life. Hollywood embalms desire. Hollywood is a necropolis lined with deities made to appear more beautiful and menacing than they really are. Hollywood, In short, is a good read, even when encountered in Moviola, an overwrought, eulogistic novel about the film business. The book is a greenhorn-to-mogul saga with cameo performances by great stars of the distant and recent past. There is even a bit part for Thomas Alva Edison, without whose inventive genius...
Such mid-life crises threaten to become as much a cliché in literature as they are in life. Yet Piers Paul Read, 38, puts a lot of his native English on this familiar pitch. He knows, as most chroniclers of Me Decade shenanigans do not, that private acts have public consequences; in the great tradition of British novelists, he draws society as a delicate, vast spider web, tuned to vibrate at the lightest footfall or breath of scandal. In addition, Read is a self-described "serious Catholic" and scales this novel to dimensions familiar to readers of Graham Greene...