Word: decorums
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...members of most professions-be they baseball players, politicians or journalists-treat their calling with gravity and decorum, at least in public. Privately, they may kid their colleagues mercilessly. Artists, on the other hand, like actors, regard their fellows as prime targets for public parody. Lately, works of art poking gentle, and occasionally savage fun at other works of art seem to be multiplying like guppies. Though these works sometimes look like literal copies, they are usually sly, even malicious comments about the nature of art and its relation to reality. John Clem Clarke's stylized version of Frans...
...without religion, a peremptory must without a tempering why (inverse of the European formula, religion without morals). Agnew maintains the cult of success as a form of righteousness. America's history revolves around the interconnected superstitions that one must deserve success; that one can (rather easily, by mere decorum) deserve it; and that if one deserves it, it will come. America was built on the symbiosis of Dale Carnegie and Billy Graham. These national superstitions have been prolonged in Agnew beyond their natural life by his blighting prosperity, his deals and millionaire pals, his anachronistic Main Street of steel...
...that Director Carol Reed (The Third Man) has strayed from the far less successful Broadway version, which was stunted by stage boundaries and hampered by overplayers. Instead he has gone to a richer predecessor: David Lean's virtuous 1948 adaptation, memorable for its palpable atmosphere of terror and decorum. After a season of watching inane twitching in the name of dance, the viewer is most happily greeted by Onna White's choreography, an exuberant step-by-step exploration of Victorian zeal...
...last, in bright decorum going by With the bloom on them, and the heads held high, In all their delicate, fastidious, proud Grace and perfection stepping past the crowd...
...sole concession to flamboyance is a reconstruction of Dali's ivy-twined Rainy Taxi, from the 1938 exposition, faithfully copied right down to the snails that crawl on the faces of the sopping, green-lit mannequins inside. Otherwise, dulcet decorum is preserved because, as former Sarah Lawrence Professor Rubin puts it: "While the Dadaists use the term antiart to deny modern art, in retrospect their work takes its place in that tradition, enriching more than denying...