Word: gibberish
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...their generation. By comparison, Marcel Duchamp seemed like a naughty boy who ties enigmatic, impudent, possibly lewd messages to balloons, then lets them fly off into the blue yonder. But now, 42 years after he abandoned art, his messages have come down to earth. Far from being gibberish, the scribblings now seem cryptic formulas for the future...
Although Hartford never quite proves the critics' malicious intent in promoting abstract art, he hits home when he denounces the gibberish with which they promote it. Early in the book he quotes Art News's comments on a De Kooning "Woman:". "she could have been outside a house as well as inside," babbles the magazine, "or in an inside-outside porch space. This state of anonymous simultaneity (not no-specific-place, but several no-specific-places) is seen more clearly in the few objects which appeared, then disappeared around the seated figure." Art News concludes that "Ambiguity, exactingly sought...
Primary Colorfulness. By blending concrete images with paint for its own sake, Johns was trying to mix water and oil, as far as the art of the last 30 years is concerned. He would superimpose 0, 1,2,3 through 9 in a single image, making unnumerical gibberish of the alphabet of mathematics. Or he would paint an anagram of the basic digits so that none would look the same. He tackled these flat, unsensual forms because, to make them the proper subject of art, he had to endow them with more eye appeal and more meaning than their original...
...chair professor of the art of scat singing, wherein a singer abandons comprehensible lyrics in the middle of a song, and she can scoodee-oo-da for 800 bars without running out of fresh gibberish. For added sparks, she tosses in little shards of the classics, such as, say, a bit of the William Tell Overture. Then suddenly she turns to a robust fragment of Did You Ever...
...ROOF (RCA Victor), recorded by the Broadway cast, has warm, old-fashioned songs by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. Zero Mostel, as Sholom Aleichem's earthy innocent, Tevye the Dairyman, brightens whatever he sings-the reverent Sabbath Prayer, the nostalgic Sunrise, Sunset, and the wonderful intoxicated gibberish of If I Were a Rich...