Word: glassing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...America, that a cultural fascination with machinery that had been growing since the early 19th century reached its apogee. One is used to reading, in prattle like Tom Wolfe's 1981 book Bauhaus to Our House, that the American affair with machine culture during those years -- functionalism, steel-and-glass buildings and so forth -- had been imported, as intellectual fashion, from Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth. The concise and mighty industrial-based forms of American building, conceived by architects from James Bogardus in the 1850s to Louis Sullivan in the 1890s and by the engineers...
...invoked the image of the machine, like the use of bodies as mechanical parts in Busby Berkeley's choreography or the precisely drilled production-line kicks of the Rockettes. Its soaring shafts, tapering setbacks and elaborate stacking (for this was the age of Rockefeller Center, not of the banal glass box) hinted at vastly oversized Mayan temples; the contrast between glittering surface and deep wells and slots of shadow suggested exuberance and secrecy conjoined, the "metropolitan style" of Big Business. Instead of quoting Gothic or Renaissance detail as an indirect sign of quality, the whole tower changed into a business...
...American sculptor who tried to make metaphors of technology, not even Calder, came up with an object as striking as Walter Teague's "Bluebird" radio, 1937-40, whose integration of a spartan constructivist design ethic into an American sense of technology as spectacle -- the big blue glass disk suggesting the ether from which broadcast signals were gathered -- shows how little truth there is in the idea that design is condemned to lag behind "high" art in expressive clarity. We certainly need more shows as thorough and intelligent as this one, to counteract the vulgar mania for "art stars" and remind...
...matter how pneumatic and now these misses are, they are never far removed from the maiden in the tower or the girl in the glass slipper, yearning to be rescued from her room and from her medieval homework. To Sara Wilford, director of the Early Childhood Center at New York's Sarah Lawrence College, "it is not so strange that children would find a Barbie doll to be interesting, something they could idealize and put in a Cinderella framework...
Only a few years ago, wearers of costume jewelry attracted sneers from fashion setters, who considered the plastic or glass baubles to be as chintzy as they were gaudy. But now imitation sapphires, rubies and diamonds have found both new stature and a new name. So-called faux (French for false) jewelry is being sported by the likes of Liz Taylor and Jackie Onassis. "It's the best of both worlds -- very theatrical but also very classy," says Actress Raquel Welch, who has been seen wearing a smoke-and-mauve faux necklace. "And it's not so expensive that...