Word: decorum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...paintings like Dignity and Impudence, circa 1839, he projected Victorian ideas about social hierarchy and decorum onto animals-partly to satirize human behavior (though very lightly), and mainly to suggest that the divisions of the Victorian world were rooted in the natural order. Art may be the ape of nature; but dogs, so to speak, are the apes of morality. Animals want to be men and imitate the better aspects of human behavior-fidelity, tenacity, bravery, gentleness. They cannot make the last evolutionary step, but how consoling to see each doggy eye moist with the desire to do so! Such...
...Decorum and The Scam--Jasper's, 379 Somerville Ave., Somerville...
...have turned out that way. In the intervening decade, there has been a riotous growth of deliberately clumsy, punkish figurative painting in America: paintings that ignore decorum or precision in the interest of a cunningly rude, expressionist-based diction. Quite clearly, Guston is godfather to this manner, and for this reason his work excites more interest among painters under 35 than that of any of his contemporaries. He would never have gained this following had he stayed abstract, and it is sadly ironic that he died last year, at age 66, shortly after the current retrospective opened in San Francisco...
...bully nihilism; the lyrics are surrealist graffiti, spat out indistinctly. Director Spheeris occasionally supplies English subtitles for these messages from a lost world. In interviews she plays the sympathetic den mother to these kids barely out of their teens, and they respond, most of them, with patience and decorum. In assembling these chilling images, Spheeris has followed the music's dictum: start at the climax and run like hell. And in providing a punk primer, she has documented a troubling tendency in movies as well as in music-the triumph of aggression over involvement, movement over purpose, action over...
...truth. World War I was hard to beat as an example of dunderheaded, pointless slaughter. The men who fought it hated it just as much?and even in the same vocabularies?as the men who fought in Viet Nam. They went into it with the same illusions: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, Horace told the boys in the public schools. John Wayne played the part of Horace in America. But finally, after Passchendaele in 1917, Lieut. General Sir Launcelot Kiggell saw the thing honestly. He looked out at the mud-soaked fields, burst into tears and muttered: "Good...