Word: contrivedness
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The current mode is "neo-expressionism." It has become the designer jeans of the art industry. Thus one tends to bring mingled curiosity and skepticism to the shows by German painters that have filled half a dozen Manhattan galleries in recent weeks. The neoexpressionists are presented as missionary confreres: burning...
What a waste it would be after 4 billion tortuous years of evolution if the dominant organism contrived its own self-destruction," Carl Sagan, popular guardian of the cosmos and professor of astronomy at Cornell, told a crowd of 2,000 in Ithaca, N.Y. "We are the first species to...
There are no lengthy courtships between Cain's characters, no flowers and chocolate, no meeting her parents and asking for her father's blessing. The passions are sudden and spontaneous and violent. Yet they do not seem phony or contrived. For all these homeless unhappy characters, the prospect of being...
So they can be, but not very often. A peculiar case in point is After Rodin, one of the recent pastel drawings of a nude woman sprawled on her back, rosy, firm and decapitated. To what does this repugnant, though not very gory, piece of sadism owe its title? On...
The text has some virtues, some manically funny apergus, such as the glimpse of reverent Yalies hand-washing the baby's diapers to pay for the pair of Mies Barcelona chairs, those comfortless icons of secular progress. But its flaw, apart from Wolfe's shaky grasp of architectural...