Word: kvetching
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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KENTLANDS, MD. "They don't make 'em like they used to" has become an all- purpose kvetch when confronted by the shoddy and the dreary. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a brilliant and relentless husband-and-wife team of architects and planners, are devoting their lives to convincing Americans that when it comes to neighborhoods and towns, they can make 'em like they used to. Kentlands, a new town in the suburban Maryland countryside outside Washington, is the couple's most ambitious project to get under way. Streets are narrow; houses are close to one another...
...giving the impression that such images are obsessive, a la Jasper Johns. This will lend an expectation of profundity to the series. Why profound? Because Salle, as everyone now knows, has discovered important metaphors of the meaningless overload of images in contemporary life. Thus his pictures enable critics to kvetch soulfully about the dissociation of signs and meanings, and to praise what all good little deconstructors would call their "refusal of authoritarian closure," meaning, roughly, that they don't mean anything in particular. It's as though those who bet on him can't bear to face the possibility that...