Word: rococo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Charm Station opened last spring in Udatsu-cho on Shikoku Island. It boasts six toilets with international motifs, including the Rose of Versailles, which features a white porcelain bowl decorated with pink roses and exuding the flower's fragrance, and the Fin de Siecle in Vienna, which offers a rococo bowl and whiffs of lavender. The builders, the Golden Tower Corp., hope to turn a profit on the $4 million project in about four years. So far, up to 2,000 visitors a day have flooded...
Without this battleship of an ego, Courbet would hardly have survived the attacks of the critics of his day. What was realism to his enemies? Atheism, socialism, materialism, crudity: a denial of all decent control. An audience that doted on the rococo peasant had insuperable difficulties with Courbet's frieze of worn faces and homespun black suits in Burial at Ornans, 1850. He painted, someone gibed, the way one waxed boots. He was seen as a dangerous socialist, a besmircher of the ideal, a bucolic thug from the Franche-Comte trampling all over the classical tradition with his wooden clogs...
That show has never taken place and never will. This one is, so to speak, its Platonic shadow. In the Renaissance-to-rococo section installed at the National Gallery, the spread and mutation of the pastoral after 1500 is shown by reflection, in prints, copies, preliminary drawings and the work of school artists. With a few exceptions, not until we get into modern times (at the Phillips) do we see the stream of pastoral imagery embodied in works that give it the fullest aesthetic definition...
...long Angela has lived in a domestic cage with rococo bars and gilded walls. Her husband Frank "the Cucumber" De Marco (Alec Baldwin) boards the morning Long Island commuter train, but he does his work in transit, putting a bullet in the brain of a rival Mafia goon in the seat ahead of him. Angela has a cute son, but the kid runs a three-card monte game in the backyard. Her home must have been decorated by Wheel of Fortune: all the furniture and appliances are studiously ugly, and half of them are still in crates. As she tells...
...would be wrong to attribute to Carver or to the loose group of "Dirty Realists" a militant rejection of the rococo experimentation that was rampant in American fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s, but their spareness could easily be a reaction, militant...