Word: scornful
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...explicators and publicists for the new. Rothenstein, once a champion of innovation himself, now complains: "Scarcely anything, when it is quite new, however manifestly idiotic, is forthrightly condemned." Small wonder. Past critics were thoroughly cowed and browbeaten, not unjustly, for their classic misjudgments, beginning with the scorn neaped on Manet's Olympia and culminating in the ridicule showered on the impressionists, the Fauves and the cubists. Critics now live in terror of seeming square. The trouble is, as one anticritic remarked, they are now saying more and more about less and less. That includes some museum officials...
...lean prose, Manchester skillfully traces Oswald's mounting frustrations and emphasizes his wife Marina's role in bringing him to the breaking point. "Lee," he writes, "had thought he had found a beautiful, dedicated Communist who would forever be his submissive darling. He had expected her to scorn the world that scorned him and reject the materialism of a capitalist society." Instead, she jeered at all his failures and paid him the ultimate insult of leaving him. Somewhat melodramatically, Manchester pictures Oswald "going mad" while watching a flickering TV set the night before the murder. The author never...
...accelerating change: radical, wrenching, erosive of both traditions and old values. Its inheritors have grown up with rapid change, are better prepared to accommodate it than any in history, indeed embrace change as a virtue in itself. With his skeptical yet humanistic outlook, his disdain for fanaticism and his scorn for the spurious, the Man of the Year suggests that he will infuse the future with a new sense of morality, a transcendent and contemporary ethic that could infinitely enrich the "empty society." If he succeeds (and he is prepared to) the Man of the Year will...
...cause in her new role as deputy leader of the cultural revolution and cultural adviser to the army. Were she anyone but the chairman's wife, Chiang Ching, as Mrs. Mao is known from the Long March days, would long since have felt the sting of Red Guard scorn for sybaritic luxuries; she enjoys the perquisites of three servants and a chauffeur-driven limousine, and likes to screen her old movies for guests in the Mao villa. But there she was on stage, drawing noisy applause as she inveighed against such capitalist poisons as "rock 'n' roll...
Until the 12th century, pictorial references to Jews were generally neutral and even approving. But from roughly A.D. 1100 to 1500, argues Blumenkranz, an Austrian Jew, Judaism was an object of hatred and scorn in Christian art. Mocking the Jews' refusal to eat pork, a sculptured capital from a church in Uppsala, Sweden, depicts Jews drinking at the udders of a sow. Although the Gospels explicitly accuse Roman soldiers of bringing about Jesus' death, some artists went out of their way to show Jews scourging...