Word: marilyn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...groups, as for individuals, taking a new name is a quintessential American act, a supreme gesture of self-creation in the land where Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn Monroe, homosexuals became gays, and Esso became Exxon. But for many blacks, the choice of a word by which others will know them has a special significance. During their centuries of bondage, slaves had names that were often chosen by their masters. Booker T. Washington wrote in his autobiography Up from Slavery that there was one point on which former slaves were generally agreed: "that they must change their names." This process...
...shows featuring comedians and female impersonators. But be warned--if you go to one of the funny drag shows, don't sit up front unless you can take a little ribbing. The entertainers like to interact with the audience, so don't be surprised if a man dressed as Marilyn Monroe leaves red smooch-marks all over your face and neck...
...cranking out his flashy and unfelt variations on Tischbein's portrait of Goethe. No ideological motives lurk behind the benign collective visage of his innumerable Mao Zedongs; but a billion Chinese could no more be wrong about such a celebrity than 200 million Americans could be about Jackie or Marilyn...
...hard to see how they could: those coarsely nuanced rows of ready-mades, in taking Duchamp a small step further, remain the most eloquent comments on the standardization of mass taste in American art. On desire, Warhol could be dreadfully accurate. His idea of silk-screening Marilyn Monroe's disembodied smile 168 times over derived, no doubt, from Man Ray's painting of Kiki de Montparnasse's lips floating in the Paris sky, but the feeling is quite different. It is about the administration of fantasy by media, not the enjoyment of fantasy by lovers...
...emotional narrative that contradicted its cold, fixed, iconic surface. He unskeined a story in which a horror of the world, verging sometimes on acute dread, mingled with an artificial calm and a desire for transcendence. Try as one may, one cannot imagine Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, being painted by anyone but a Roman Catholic homosexual; it is both completely camp in its pseudo-Byzantine extravagance and, in its identification of the star with the Madonna, yearningly devotional. Here, Warhol is Genet in paint. So too with the "disasters" and the electric chairs of the early and mid-'60s, which...