Word: puree
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Posterity is gearing up for the 200th anniversary celebration of the historic document the Founding Fathers produced. Like last year's extravaganza for the Statue of Liberty, the Constitution's bicentennial will offer a jarring contrast between high purpose and pure kitsch. True, the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, headed by former Chief Justice Warren Burger, has rejected some of the more outrageous proposals. As a result, there will be no bicentennial brownie or constitutional hot dog. The commission has nevertheless designed a circular logo -- enclosing an American flag, an eagle and a scroll with the words...
...away from the hard-core jocks, Wu says, "You just have to concentrate on what you're doing for yourself. Try not to keep it an ego thing." He says he thinks that weightlifting fosters individualism, but admits, "A lot of it has to do with looks--it's pure vanity, that's my motivation. It's a matter of feeling good and looking good...
...static. And satellite connections, which now carry about 60% of transatlantic phone calls, typically produce an echoey sound and an annoying half-second delay because signals must be sent 22,300 miles up to a communications satellite and back down again. Fiber-optic technology, by contrast, delivers a comparatively pure sound. The ultrathin glass fibers in the cable carry information on laser beams of light, which travel with virtually no susceptibility to electronic interference. Long-distance telephone companies have already installed more than 20,000 miles of fiber- optic cables to connect major cities in the U.S., but the undersea...
...have a very distinct and pervasive one -- the last mutation, in fact, of religious experience in the visual arts. The other news is that spiritualism is so arcane and culturally eccentric that it may make the paintings look even less accessible than when they were seen as "pure" form. Yet the timing of this show is brilliant. Like late Imperial Rome, modern America is riddled with superstition, addicted to gurus, Sibyls and purveyors of every kind of therapeutic nostrum. One does not need a planchette to deduce that an exhibition which demonstrates as clearly as this one how great painters...
There are some delightful "pure" works of art in this show, like Alexander Calder's little maquette for a huge motorized sculpture at the New York World's Fair -- a small, sharp orrery with strong cosmological overtones. There are also some rarities by lesser-known artists, notably the huge cubist- derived portrait of the workings of a watch by Gerald Murphy, the American expatriate on whom Scott Fitzgerald was to base his character of Dick Diver. . But compared with the knockout confidence of the work of engineers and designers represented in this show, the machine-esthetic painting...