Word: cool
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...artists, a cool and casual lot, could not have cared less about their critics, or even about the rest of the Biennale, which few of them bothered to attend. John Chamberlain, a sculptor of automobile parts, slept on the Lido beach, declared the marble-patterned Piazza San Marco to be the "world's greatest hopscotch arena" and hopscotched around it like a great shambling bear. Claes Oldenburg, as softly pudgy as his sculptures of melting typewriters made of vinyl plastic, politely ate his way through the festival. Rauschenberg himself was busy at Venice's elegant Teatro La Fenice...
...sight? He could, of course, become an orthopedic surgeon like his old man. But there are easier ways to make a lot of money. Just by signing his name to a contract with the Los Angeles Angels last week, Fred ("Rick") Reichardt of Stevens Point, Wis., picked up a cool $175,000 -which may be the biggest bonus ever paid to a baseball rookie...
...debatable point) psychologically damaging and low in audience participation. Other hot media by McLuhan's rules are photography, movies, competitive spectator sports and radio. Hot media make men think logically and independently, instead of naturally, "mythically" and communally. This is bad. What McLuhan likes are cool media. These are fuzzy, low in information, but richly demanding on the audience to fill in what is missing. The telephone, modern painting, but pre-eminently television are cool and good. Television and other "electric media" are oral-auditory, tactile, visceral, and involve the individual almost without volition. As a result McLuhan believes...
Pseudo Science. As an intellectual game called "cool and hot," the system has great possibilities for a chatty weekend at Big Sur or Martha's Vineyard. Clocks (hot), money (hot), clothes (getting cooler in the U.S.), nudity (very cool), and almost anything else can be interpreted as media by McLuhan's rules. "Backward countries are cool, and we are hot." Autos are hot. The "blurry, shaggy texture of Kennedy" was a natural for cool TV, which is why "sharp, intense" Nixon lost the debates. Private enterprise is hot; public debt is cool, Iago is cool, but Othello...
...McLuhan is not playing games. He is in humorless earnest. And if the book is taken seriously, it must be judged as fuzzy-minded, lacking in perspective, low in definition and data, redundant, and contemptuous of logical sequence-which is to say that McLuhan has perfectly illustrated the cool qualities he most values in communications. McLuhan's solemn pseudo science at work: "What do we know about the social or psychic energies that develop by electric fusion or implosion when literate individuals are suddenly gripped by an electromagnetic field, such as occurs in the new Common Market pressure...