Word: nouveau
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Shiva Naipaul is most weak where his brother is strongest--the ability to empathize with all the people he writes about. He does not try to understand why a nouveau riche black Kenyan has two freezers (which she never uses), whisky at every meal, gold-painted nails, and an expropriated mansion too large for her needs. He simply finds her ludicrous and tasteless...
...abandoned shafts, patrolled by trigger-happy art historians. Trade follows the flag. The original inhabitants, of course, are long gone. A few survivors get a job in the mines. So it has been with the big "rediscoveries" of the art market in the past 20 years, such as art nouveau, art deco, 19th century American art-and now Soviet vanguard art of the period...
...uniting such diverse phenomena as the collapse of a bridge, the crash of the stock market, and the fall of the Roman empire. Yet its subject is not always "catastrophic" in the literal sense: optical scattering, embryonic growth, prison riots, aggressive behavior in dogs, and the rise of the nouveau riche also fall within its domain...
...years the Germans, along with other Europeans, spurned Detroit's chromed giants as only suitable for nouveau riche butchers, high-mark call girls and mobsters. They were just too large, too showy and too expensive compared with the better-quality German models. Now, the weak dollar and the U.S. automakers' new enthusiasm for safety and economy are beginning to make the Ami Strassenkreuzer (literally, Yankee street cruiser) a fast-selling status symbol among the young professional elite...
...architects have not by a long shot said "Goodbye to glass boxes and all that," nor have their European colleagues. The clumsy-concrete school of architecture has simply expanded to include other materials. Any attempt to decorate it with art nouveau or similar elements, no matter how costly, cannot hide the deadly ugliness; even tombstones seem more lively. Thus Philip Johnson, as depicted on the cover of TIME, looks rather like an undertaker displaying just another type of luxury...