Word: greatly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wagging little head out of the art. Much of what's on show here really ought to be viewed the way another work about another Mary was--last year's bathroom-humor blockbuster, Something About Mary. It's lewd and long on visual pratfalls, and there is not a great deal else to do but roll your eyes as you pass Sarah Lucas' Au Naturel (1994), a dingy mattress leaning against a wall with an erect cucumber shooting up with two oranges at its base, two ripe melons across the way...you get the idea...
What director Sydney Pollack, one of the movies' great romantics (Tootsie, Out of Africa), saw in this lugubrious tale is even harder to imagine. There's no heat, wit or glamour in his telling of it. The movie is like bad gossip: a scandalous premise that comes to no interesting--or even amusingly ironic--point...
...guard standing by to protect it from any angry viewers, is a perfectly competent rendering of a Christian icon--a central figure on a ground of gold. The drawing of an African Mary (Ofili is of Nigerian descent) is plausible, but there is no real depth, no great feeling in the line. You might pass right by were it not for Ofili's strategy to shove the voltage up by adorning it with a pattern of cutouts from porn mags of women's crotches and then adding to the rhythm of the work with clumps of elephant dung. Interpretations reach...
...Jake and Dinos Chapman, whose fascination with genetic mutation leads them down the very foolish path of constructing girlish mannequins with phalluses for noses and sexual orifices in all the wrong places. Hardly Rodin. But then Rodin's Balzac, created just before the turn of the century, wrapped the great French novelist in a cape beneath which, it was said, he was holding his own member in the potent coupling of climax and creative genius. The work outraged its patrons and wasn't cast in bronze until after Rodin's death. Now it is considered a masterpiece that foretells...
...Brooklyn Museum, right outside the entrance to "Sensation," is a small oil by Thomas Cole, the great 19th century painter who went to America from England as a young man and laid down on canvas the raw grandeur of the landscape as illustration of the new nation's moral power. The picture is easy to miss, a little study of a Christian pilgrim on the verdant knoll of a mountaintop. His arms are outspread, brilliant under a sky ablaze with light and hope...