Word: criticize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Kramer opted out. "It has been a very distasteful experience," says the playwright. Meanwhile in St. Paul, Minn., artist LEROY NEIMAN withdrew an offer to donate $4.5 million worth of his works to a proposed museum in his honor--he was born and raised there--after a local art critic said his work "stank." He says he might reconsider, and Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson will visit him this week to soften him up. Finally, poet Adrienne Rich has declined the 1997 National Medal for the Arts, because "the very meaning of art," she said, "is incompatible with the cynical politics...
...Snow's famous 1959 essay, "The Two Cultures," the British novelist and social critic described the huge gap in mutual understanding and shared knowledge between two groups. "Literary intellectuals at one pole--at the other scientists... The degree of incomprehension on both sides is the kind of joke which has gone sour...
...Other Beltway's language does have the edge in one respect: informality. I felt no qualm about E-mailing "Hi Joel" to someone I had never met. ("Hi Jon," I E-mailed to Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley when he announced that he'd gone online, adding helpfully, "This is the proper form of salutation in cyberspace." Yardley answered, jokingly, "Dear Mr. Kinsley: This is the proper form of salutation in Washington.") The same informality applies to dress, which in this world--where style is set by barely socialized young computer geeks--has moved beyond the studied informality...
Martha was diminutive in stature and notoriously soft-spoken. But as our book critic Paul Gray says, "Her voice in print was firm and unmistakably her own. She never raised her voice when annoyed, but her colleagues would have rather endured tongue-lashings from other editors than face her silent disapproval." She spoke and wrote in a style that was flinty and spare; she was allergic to rhetoric. "Oh dear," she would gently say, lips pursed but eyes slightly smiling, as she crossed out a writer's phrase that was more ornate than enlightening. As a result, her words...
Maybe this is not new. Some years back, a film critic observed that the problem with summer pictures wasn't that they were bad movies; it was that they were the same bad movie. But more than ever this summer, with the moguls at the sausage factories sending out a new slice of action salami each week--The Lost World: Jurassic Park, followed by Con Air, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Batman & Robin, Face/Off and Men in Black--the big films look like instant remakes, retreads or reductios ad absurdum of last Friday's film, which wasn't all that...