Word: duds
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Recent group shows, including that landmark dud, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, have been full of this stuff -- by Sue Williams, Raymond Pettibon and others. Its tacky sub-pop imagery, its dazed passive-aggressive stance, its fixation on teenage weltschmerz, all entitle it to be seen as a mini-trend, linking up with the wider American cult of dumb popular therapeutics. In the 1980s, American neo-Expressionist artists shoved their excremental clods of paint at us with the self-evident pleasure that eight-year-olds take in dirty words. Patheticism is the conceptual version of this: no paint, just the words...
...potentially important AIDS treatment announced last winter may be a dud. A "cocktail" of three drugs seemed to prevent the HIV virus from reproducing in test tubes. But both the original scientists and others have discovered a subtle flaw in the research that made the effect seem more significant than it really...
Like many a supposed doomsday weapon, the "debt bomb" has turned out to be a dud. That seems to be true in Latin America, anyway -- and that was where countries had piled up by far the greatest amount of the international debt that sparked despair a decade ago. Experts feared that the ious would crush economies in the Third World, while defaults on the loans would bring down big banks and cause a First World financial crisis...
...Films. Robinson's new company, named after the 1943 Preston Sturges film The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, scored a hit in 1988 with its first effort, Young Guns. The company went on to produce such other moneymakers as Major League and Pacific Heights, as well as a dud, Coupe de Ville, which took in only $5 million at the box office...
...With military supplies and arms dwindling after numerous allied strikes, the Iraqis resorted to "an odd bit of desperation," according to a U.S. War College analyst. They launched a Scud missile at Israel that was topped with a 700-lb. chunk of concrete as its "warhead." The dud Scud buried itself harmlessly in the Negev desert...