Word: drabs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Despite these shortcomings, some of the pieces in the exhibition are worth examining more closely. The sections entitled "Trompe I'Oeil" and "Twentieth Century Still Life" liven up an otherwise drab show. The former category merits a close look because of the amazing technical skill with which they were painted. Most notable is "The Slate" of 1890-94 by John Haberle, in which the entire canvas is painted to look like a chalky slate, complete with a wooden frame, and, as the label points out, uses scientific precision and detail to create a canvas that appears messy and smudged...
...small pigeons rose above the golden domes and the floors below were polished by kisses of the faithful. Under the Soviet regime, with its Stalinist housing bunkers and oppressive military bearing, the city became a grimmer place, but one that was anchored, orderly, predictable, even if, to many outsiders, drab and downcast. By 1976, the British journalist Geoffrey Bocca could describe the scene as a "crushing concatenation of faceless, shabby, shoving, rude and, above all, indifferent, uninterested people...
...trashing its own claims is just part of the campaign for OK soda, a bubbly, mildly fruity drink for teenagers and young adults that Coke hopes will be its next blockbuster beverage and that the company is testing in nine cities from Boston to Seattle. With OK's deliberately drab cans and pseudo-Zen profundities ("What's the point of OK soda? Well, what's the point of anything?"), Coke hopes to capture a generation that is both anxious about its adult-size problems and inoculated against pitches from having grown up with television jingles at breakfast...
Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) and her team take no voyeuristic pleasure from grotesque events they uncover. Nor do they condescend unduly to the queens and pawns in their investigation. The cops are just doing a job -- one that makes their off-duty lives look drab and irrelevant. Scenes of Tennison's wan private life are mere leavening agents in the acrid yet tangy melodrama that is her life on the force -- the only life she has, really...
Some have worried that the lovable Joe Pesci will provoke students into going out and trying to find their very own curmudgeonly-but-cute Homeless Person to bring a little wit and wisdom to drab dorm rooms (and of course to fill all that extra space we have). Only time will tell...