Word: meaninglessness
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...implicit approval of Jehovah himself -- you still have to decide how good they are as art. This is why the dubious orthodoxy of art-historical deconstruction is so popular. It aborts the problem by collapsing everything into ideology and fatuously claiming that the idea of "quality" is either meaningless or oppressive. It appeals to sanctimony and makes the stuff easy to teach. It lets academics feel radical. Above all, by recognizing how full of social messages bad art as well as good can be, it expands the range of available thesis subjects and thus brings relief to the eaten...
While Moscow publicly puts its defense budget for this year at 96.6 billion rubles ($171.9 billion at the official but meaningless exchange rate), about 35% of the national budget, most Western analysts say the figure masks as much as it reveals. For the past 20 years, the CIA has employed laborious computations to estimate the Soviet defense outlay. They have usually calculated it at 15% to 20% of the country's gross national product. Experts in Washington now put the real expenditure at about 30% of GNP. When Richard Nixon visited Moscow recently, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov used figures indicating...
...drawing of a chair. These can be repeated from picture to picture, thus 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...
...dragging her son to an opera to introduce him to "culture." Invariably, the small boy (or sometimes brutish Neanderthal husband) fidgets in an oversized seat of plush velvet as metal-horned, breast-plated Wagnerian heroines screech unbearably in German. For the boy, the opera is long, boring and utterly meaningless...
...Street, Margaret Thatcher cut to the heart of a policy question. A fiery debate over whether the U.S. and its allies should have helped Kurdish and Shi'ite rebels topple Saddam Hussein raged in Europe as well as America. But as far as current policy goes, the wrangling is meaningless because the fighting is effectively over. Right or wrong, the decision was made not to get involved in an Iraqi civil war. Saddam has smashed the revolts; he will stay in power at least temporarily -- and for the moment that pretty much is that...