Word: oracular
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...into mannerism in Europe by the late 1930s, and was revived in America by artists who discarded its utopian fantasies and replaced them with ideas related to epic space, primitive ritual, spontaneous gesture and the sublime. But who today still buys the rhetoric that surrounded Abstract Expressionism--all that oracular guff about existential confrontation, tragedy, timelessness and how we're locking horns with Michelangelo...
...NORMAN MAILER STILL ROCKS BACK and forth on the balls of his feet when he talks. He still leaves the impression of a compact nuclear device as drawn by Herblock--shaking slightly on its launch pad, Yoda-shaped and oracular, although somewhat mellowed by the years. He is capable now of an occasional shrug that says, "Who knows...
Koons has, however, made a contribution to American culture in the form of comedy: the sight of so many critics, dealers and museum folk peering into the demitasse of his talent and declaring it an oracular well whose contents address issues, as the phrase goes, of class, race, money, sex, obscenity, beauty, power and desire. Art is short, bibliography long. Clearly, we are in Madonnaland, where every publicity hound -- oops, semiotician of mass culture -- must have his day in the museum...
After that she became the wittiest journalistic headhunter of the '70s. The list of her victims is long, but the names matter less than the grounds for their execution. Like all good essayists, she was basically a moralist, sketching types of irresponsible privilege (Schiff), proprietary righteousness (Betty Friedan), oracular emptiness (Theodore White), poses of profundity (Gail Sheehy) and head-over-heels self-infatuation (Brendan Gill...
Aghast, we cover our faces, confused and unable to choose between expressions of disgust and nervous laughter. What a surprise . . . who could have imagined . . . such horror. There is a moment of black epiphany at the revelation of a particularly heinous crime -- a moment that is both oracular and inexpressible. Statistics and forensic minutiae will eventually move in to cloud our vision. And the incessant patter of news updates will inevitably numb us, pushing onward the boundaries of our tolerance for atrocity. But in the beginning, as we make out the shape of the crime, as we see it unfolding like...