Word: likes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...what we have: the first Velazquez exhibition ever held in the U.S., comprising more than a third of his total known output, including such great works of his maturity as the Prado's portraits of the Count-Duke of Olivares on horseback and Queen Mariana and early ones like The Waterseller of Seville, painted when he was around 20, from London's Wellington Museum...
...than empirical vision. Velazquez's influence appears in unexpected places: if, for instance, one wants to know where Philip Guston felt some of the authority for his last paintings lay, where those eloquently clumsy speckled gray-and-pink shapes looked back to, one need only consult passages in Velazquez like the extraordinary plumage of the headdress worn by Queen Mariana for his formal portrait of her in the Prado. Yet not one of his painter-admirers has made Velazquez seem "newer," or in any significant way changed the address of his work. Velazquez himself seems always new, fresh...
...seizes you. Was there ever a painter less interested in thrusting his "personality" at the viewer? He is the absolute antitype of the hot, expressive artist. His cool gaze settles on everything with equal curiosity: he is as interested in the way a formidable old nun grips her crucifix -- like a weapon -- as in the way the left hand of his monarch Philip IV rests, lightly but not quite negligently, on the hilt of his sword. There is nothing he cannot draw, though no drawings by Velazquez survive. That, however, is part of his fascination to eyes conditioned...
...confidence of youth to the melancholy and distance of his afflicted age. The face thickens, the eyes sag, the Bourbon lip takes on a heavy repressed pathos; you can almost see it quiver. Only the mustache, whose upswept prongs will be imitated by Salvador Dali's, seems alert, like antennae. "It is now nine years since any ((portrait)) has been made," Philip IV noted in 1653, in the last decade of his and his painter's lives, "and I am little inclined to subject myself to Velazquez's phlegm, nor thus to find further reason to witness...
...blatant rejection of the poetic notion that each time the bell of doom tolls, it tolls for all mankind. The collective news judgment seems to be that each death diminishes the reader in direct proportion to the shared bonds of nationality, ethnicity, religion, type of government and the like. Pointing out this callous calculus seems to do nothing to mitigate it. As Columbia University professor Herbert Gans noted in his 1980 study Deciding What's News, network journalists in the 1960s tried to prick their bosses' consciences by assembling "a Racial Equivalence Scale, showing the minimum number of people...