Word: iconizing
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...from the frozen island. Whereas Bisset inhabits Liz Hamilton, Bergen performs as Merry; she plays bubbly, then she looks sad, saddled all the while with a ludicrous attempt at a Southern accent. Her obvious Hollywood heritage actually starts to work in her favor, since Merry develops into a media icon; Bergen's artificiality and unbelievability become Merry's. She does slip inside Merry on occasion, when fighting with Bisset, and she pulls of some classy comic bits. But all this makes it more impossible to accept her as any kind of friend to Bisset's character...
...slick arbiter of taste. Either way, it jars. Somehow it smacks of elevating the form without changing the content. Who knows? Maybe Chekhov would have watched the Iowa State Opera's version of "Boris Gudonov" complete with introduction by a genuine Russian. Then again, our ultimate pop icon Elvis Presley probably was closer to popular sentiment when he plugged his Sony with a .38, explaining to his manager, who lay wounded by the richochet, in that wonderful Memphis drawl--"Nobody should have to put up with that shit...
...except at the SoHo level of celebrity-some being, in fact, well-known artists, like the sculptor Richard Serra or the composer Philip Glass. Thus what Close proposes is a kind of portraiture diametrically opposite to Andy Warhol's images of Marilyn or Liz, where the painting, an icon of the Star, adapts itself to the intrusive power of repetition and generalization. With Close, there is no generalization at all. None of his faces has a role. There are no costumes, props or traces of social relationships, no evidence of the sitter's work or status; in short...
Deneuve, more beautiful than ever, displays a knowing humanity, and a sensuality she rarely shows in film, where she has been used more as icon than actress. When she and Depardieu finally acknowledge their passion for each other, there is a sheer eroticism-without so much as a button being unbuttoned-that one finds in few movie love scenes...
...Welsh has assembled many of the best-known paintings, from the burning and writhing Sunflowers through the spiky lateen-rigged boats on the Camargue beach at Stes.-Maries; from the bedroom in the Yellow House at Aries to the tiny, dense icon of The Sower, a stubborn black lump distributing flakes of seed under the vast Apollonian wheel of the setting sun. Yet although these images have joined the noble cliches of art history, they can be seen afresh through their relationship with the work of other artists. The service this show does for Van Gogh is to place...