Word: decays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...they never decay into nostalgia. Schwitters was a lyrical genius, a Persian miniaturist of the modern city street, confecting icons of junk under the eye of strict formal abstraction. One would expect the number of small pieces in this show to be, in the end, fatiguing; but it is not, thanks to Schwitters' dedication to reinventing a surface with each collage. His favorite matrix was the grid of cubism, a shallow, divided skin on which the scraps of paper and little objects surface and vanish, overlapping like leaves on a forest floor. He called them all "Merz" constructions: the name...
...American children, nurtured as they were (and still are) on candy bars and other sweets, returned from a dental checkup in triumph. In fact, it was not unusual for a child to have five, six or seven cavities at a time, and just as many the following year. Tooth decay was a perennial national problem that meant a mouthful of silver for patients, and for dentists a pocketful of gold...
...something shockingly worldly about his endless selling. What are we to make of this fatherly Bible banger, this artful entrepreneur in rube's clothing who sups with Presidents and world leaders, and reaches out directly to the simplest of men and women? His earnest warnings about America's moral decay, the breakdown of family values, are instinctively appealing. Is he, as his followers proclaim, the truest and bravest voice in the whole Fundamentalist movement, crying out against the rising tide of sin and sleaze? Or is he, with his swift mind and glib tongue, a modern Elmer Gantry, a power...
...slip where the lighters used to moor (the ferry Ellis Island, scuttled by decay after logging 1 million nautical miles crossing to Manhattan, now lies beneath the water there), two deckhands on a workboat sprawl out sunning themselves. "Everywhere you look there's a study team combing over something. I'm surprised they ain't started strip-searching us yet. Everything's historic! Jeez, I bet I'd get busted if I tried to take a damn Coke bottle off this island...
...rejuvenated in the waters of that miracle swimming pool where the old guys take a furtive daily dip. And lo! these senior citizens are of a sudden healthy, frisky and horny. Cancers dissolve, romance blooms anew; fox-trotting arthritics turn into disco dervishes. Wouldn't it be wonderful if decay and death were so easily washed away...