Word: hackwork
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...failed three times to be accepted by the main art school in Paris, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Until his early 30s, nothing he made was noted, and he simply contributed his anonymous efforts to the studios of other sculptors, patinating, chasing, designing decorative masks-the laborious hackwork of an age of commemorative sculpture. He was in his late 30s before he managed to get a major sculpture on public exhibit in France (The Age of Bronze). If ever a great artist lived out the conventional trajectory from obscurity through unpopularity and thence to notoriety and patriarchal fame...
Isaac is neither alarmed nor excommunicated; he is merely ignored. To survive he does journalistic hackwork; to amuse himself, he records the conversation of characters who, 40 years later, seem to have just stepped from a kosher cafeteria. A divorcee reduces world conflict to a domestic squabble: "I made the same mistake as our allies are making...
Sinatra still knows how to seize the screen simply by being around and being himself. But most of those behind the screen settled for hackwork. Catechists will recall that pride is the first deadly sin. Would that Director Hutton had taken some pride in honest craftsmanship...
...Great Train Robbery is one of the most cynical "pure escapist" movies ever made. Crichton hasn't even bothered to conceal his disgust for his lifeless hackwork. He crams his screenplay with adventure-movie cliches, but he doesn't poke fun at them; he piles them on as if to show how much he can get away with. Movies like this aren't very entertaining if they're not stylish or suspenseful; Crichton's stupid, stilted dialogue precludes style; the Mission: Impossible predictability, sluggish editing, and surprising number of loose ends strangle suspense. Characters inexplicably appear and disappear--dragged...
...work has admittedly had its detractors. Pepys attended three productions and termed it "a silly play" and "one of the weakest plays that ever I saw." And one of Britain's finest reviewers, Max Beerbohm, branded it "hackwork" and found it "perfunctory and formless," "tedious and frigid." For my money, it's the supreme work of its kind. And Shakespeare, having at last approached perfection, never returned to the genre again, but proceeded to deeper and darker matters...