Word: rococo
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Since 1759, when the Wedgwood firm was founded, many people have found it a superb investment. Its backstraps, first applied in the 1760s, first indicated Wedgwood's value as a collector's item. The popularity of the ornamental pieces evolved with changes in taste: the baroque and rococo styles were began to give way in the 18th-century to more classical designs, as a result of the discoveries in both Greece and Italy. Lord Wedgwood himself only collects contemporary pieces. He explains, "I really don't like living in a museum-type atmosphere. All the pieces I have are very...
...between there are many thresholds of transition, where the changes of size alter the whole relationship, within the image, of photography (the source) to painting (the product). Sometimes, more recently, Close seems to abandon the grid altogether, transforming his standard face of Philip Glass into an almost rococo swirl of repeated fingerprints impressed on the canvas from an ink pad: a literal parody, if ever there was one, of the "sense of touch" in traditional painting. But always he seems to be after a kind of minimalist nirvana where, as he puts it, "every square inch was physically the same...
...many ways it might have recalled the stark menace of a Goya tableau. The Deputies in Spain's 350-seat lower house were halfway through their vote on a new government when the heavy rococo doors of the Cortes, the country's parliament in the center of Madrid, burst open. In rushed a dozen armed attackers, most of them wearing olive drab parkas and blue jeans. In the marble corridors outside the chamber, some 200 uniformed men nervously fingered their weapons as they sealed off the exits. The invaders fired their submachine guns at the ceiling to drown...
Before Bath, there is an innocence to Gainsborough's portraits that occasionally looks almost spectral: the early figures of Heneage Lloyd and His Sister, round-eyed adolescents in a rococo garden, look like large pale dolls haunting an artificial landscape. Confidence came with his absorption of the grand manner. With access to the big houses, the young painter could see the work of Rubens, Van Dyck and Claude. He rapidly learned to deal with the social mask. Those pink, smooth, patrician egg faces, the men a little knobbly of jaw and hooded of eyelid, with their "cold pleasant stares...
What makes this trash so flashy and, in its own nasty way, so irresistible, is its unashamed appeal to the lower emotions and the exuberant ingenuity of its rococo plot. Like one of those electric lint brushes, Dallas' industrious writers have picked up a little fuzz from most of their betters, all of their equals, and one or two of their inferiors. Whir, buzz. Here's a thread from Shakespeare's voluminous mantle: that old blood feud betwen the Montagues and the Capulets, or, in this case, the Ewings and the Barneses. Hum, grind. There...