Word: less
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There, however, useful invention ends. The narrative Murphy develops out of this situation is less a homage to a vanished genre than a knock-off of two more recent successes -- The Sting and Prizzi's Honor -- that were funny, but in antithetical, unblendable ways. The movie veers uneasily from not-funny comedy to not-persuasive melodrama. Murphy forgets that the dialogue in old- fashioned crime pictures was as highly stylized as the settings. In place of sharply polished wisecracks, he gives us the steady mutter of the witless, unfelt obscenities that are the argot of our modern mean streets...
...Venezuela has recently joined the Non-Aligned Movement. There's a view in Washington that the NAM is less relevant and coherent than in the past, that it has split up into regional and parochial groups. So you've joined a club just at the point when that club might be going out of business. How would you respond to that...
Only $40.7 million. And was that less or more than the GNP of a minor African state? On the other hand, wouldn't it buy only the undercart of a B-2, and maybe the crew's potty? Or a dozen parties for Malcolm Forbes? That a night's art sale could make a total of $269.5 million and yet leave its observers feeling slightly flat is perhaps a measure of the odd cultural values of our fin de siecle. "Personally," said Ainslie a week before the sale, "I would like to see more price stability -- at present levels...
...ultimate loss to art's hyperinflation may be wider and less tangible than this. Quite rightly, MOMA's Varnedoe rejects the idea that "there was some mythical period, now lost, when art was seen only as the shining purity of aesthetic experience. As long as there has been art to sell, art has been something to buy." But he, like many others, is worried by "the crazy sense of disproportion in the world that puts an extra glow on the art object...
...value for insurance of about $1 billion. Today it would be $5 billion, and the show could never be done. In the wake of Irises, every Van Gogh owner wants to believe his painting is worth $50 million and will not let it off the wall if insured for less. Even there, the problem is compounded by the auction houses: when consulted on insurance values or by the IRS, they tend to stick the maximum imaginable price on a painting to maintain the image of its market value and tempt the owner to sell...