Word: decorums
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...week's passionate dramma giocoso at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City was positively -- well, operatic. In the fiery lead role was the mercurial lyric soprano Kathleen Battle, renowned for leaving a trail of ill will in her wake wherever she goes. Opposing her were the forces of decorum and rectitude, represented by Met general manager Joseph Volpe. The denouement was catastrophe. Volpe, citing "unprofessional actions . . . profoundly detrimental to the artistic collaboration among all the cast members," summarily fired Battle from this week's production of Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment and withdrew all future offers...
What you see, what confronts and monopolizes your gaze, is a woman on the floor in the foreground. Her bulk is colossal, almost comic. She simply blows away the decorum of the nude -- the ideal body re-formed by thought. She isn't nude but aggressively naked, a biological mountain: swollen thighs and belly, pubic ravine, breasts like boulders, their stretch marks and blotches half- echoing the surface texture of the girl's cloth. The strength of her presence isn't due just to her depicted fatness but to the way the image burgeons from dense paint, a heavy mass...
...imagine people asking themselves with bated breath, "What will Lichtenstein do next?" You know the answer, although the exact image he will do it to is as yet unknown. It will be done very well, probably on a huge canvas, with perfect decorum and an unfaltering sense of design, every black line in its right place, not a slippage in the stripes and Benday dots. Its flat, posterish colors will read with infrangible aplomb. It will parody other art, as in the past Lichtenstein's work has parodied everything from Art Deco to synthetic Cubism, from Franz Marc's horses...
...choked downtown Denver streets with waves of T shirt-clad teenagers (LIFE IS SHORT, PRAY HARD, read one shirt; I GOT A MILE HIGH WITH THE POPE, said another). A Babel of hymns reverberated through the city. Still, for all their energy, the celebrators maintained a remarkable display of decorum and politeness...
...speak, and his audience has the right to hear him. But the expression of dissent at Commencement is neither unprecedented nor undesirable. It's part of the University experience--an experience that, for most of us, has much more to do with opinion and debate than with protocol and decorum...