Word: conceits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...stirring words commemorated the last time that one generation ceded power to the next. The 22-year age chasm between President-elect Bill Clinton and George Bush is the second largest in U.S. electoral history, surpassed only by the 27 years separating Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower. But this generational conceit is unlikely to be updated as a theme for Clinton's Inaugural Address. Imagine a hapless Clinton speechwriter struggling to reduce the baby-boomer life experience to tough-minded Kennedyesque cadences. No way would the incoming President dare tell the unvarnished generational truth: "Again, the torch has been passed...
...suited to the life of youth. Yet there is a cautionary note, to be directed at all aspiring student greats. The glamour to be reaped is but a temporary one, born in a small community of willing star-seekers. It is a cardinal sin to assume an air of conceit in such an environment, for this is not your authentic self you are putting on display, but a mere moment of show beneath which little distinguishes you from the common herd...
...Welles made a wonderful movie -- an eccentric adaptation that is in spirit as true to Shakespeare's text as, say, Verdi's Otello. The director's brilliant conceit was to film this tale of the ebony Moor and his blond bride in images of stark chiaroscuro, the blackest black and the whitest white. No moral or visual gray tones here. Dark cloaked figures rush toward the Grand Canal, and pigeons scatter up into an angry sky. The spider-webbery of shadows casts doom across an innocent face. It is a canvas, of baroque silhouettes and diagonals rampant, that marries text...
...soulful blue-gray Weimaraner that is by now the most famous artist's model since Alfred Stieglitz picked up the scent of Georgia O'Keeffe. In the oversize Polaroids that Wegman started making in the late 1970s, Man Ray can be found patiently enduring whatever new conceit his master would visit on him. Dusted in flour, tricked up as an elephant, wrapped head to toe in Christmas-tree garlands, he had the comic gravity of Buster Keaton and the acrobatic ambiguities of a four-legged pun. The pictures made Wegman, until then a lesser-known Conceptualist, the kind of artist...
From the day Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 until it was evicted nearly seven months later, Bush operated on the conceit that he was the leader not only of the U.S. but of the world. No one had elected him to the latter post, but almost no one except Saddam objected. Quite the contrary, the world was eager for someone to follow, and Bush obliged. For a long, proud moment, he conquered the vision thing. It was the high point of his presidency...