Word: lavishness
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...represent itself with a woman at the world's oldest festival of new art was a long-overdue gesture. But alas, the best thing to be said about it is that Holzer is a woman. Considered as art, the installation by this 39-year-old conceptual artist seems lavish but mediocre, especially when divorced from the feverish context of the Biennale's opening...
...days in late May, the whole international art set converges on Venice, jams Harry's Bar and the Corte Sconta, and migrates from one lavish party to the next. Briefly the choruses of "interesting" drown out the arpeggios of the singing gondoliers. This preserves the idea that the Biennale has some kind of following outside the art world itself -- an illusion. For everyone then departs, leaving the festival in a state of utter torpor with three months...
...gauged the potential impact of the great disparity between ostentatious affluence in the West and relative poverty in the East, but that is a grating issue and not likely to disappear soon. Perhaps aware of this, along with the realization that life may have become too lavish, a few West Germans are tuning in to something called Neue Bescheidenheit, or new modesty -- an effort to get back to the essentials of the good life. It has had only modest success. "This is like Jackie Kennedy's basic black and pearls," says one critic. "The pearls are genuine, the basic black...
Onstage vomiting, with visual effects, four times, including a mass upheaval by a dozen actors at once. Excretion, with sound effects, three times. Full frontal nudity, three times, plus two lavish displays of dildoes. Onstage copulation, involving every imaginable combination of genders, countless times in seven separate works. Plus incest, transvestism, self-mutilation, murder...
...suave demeanor, Wuer Kaixi was the obvious choice as poster boy of the overseas democracy movement after he escaped from the mainland nearly a year ago. Since then, however, the young dissident has lost some of his hero's aura, and his rumored peccadilloes -- spending dissident funds on a lavish lobster dinner, faking illness during press conferences to avoid tough questions, and hyperinflating the number of students killed last year -- have been well chronicled in the press. But he is the wiser for it. "It was hard, but that's what press freedom is all about," Wuer, 22, said cheerfully...