Word: shocks
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...sideline chatter at this suburban campus outside Sacramento, Calif., was anything but casual. Over the summer Center High School's onetime journalism teacher, baseball coach and enthusiastic gridiron announcer had changed from David Warfield to Dana Rivers--and lost her job as a result. Even the jocks were in shock. "He? She? Whatever!" said Fidel Ramos, a hefty linebacker. "They shouldn't fire her." Sophomore Kevin Owen agreed: "It's not his fault he has a disease." And Gentry Stroud, a 16-year-old basketball star, lamented the departure of "a cool teacher. Just because you change how you look...
...teacher--who now dresses in floral skirts, paints her nails pink and wears her hair shoulder-length--hoped to cushion the shock with her explanations. "My transformation should not be traumatic for students," she says. "But it is a tragic lesson if I am burned at the stake for who I really am." Now teachers are pitted against administrators, and children against parents. Some colleagues pooled to buy Rivers a $50 gift certificate from a dress shop, but others are "tired of the Dana Rivers Show," says art teacher Marc Allaman. Still, Allaman defends Rivers' "First Amendment right to answer...
...Museum of Art's sprawling show of young British artists that has opened up the latest front in the culture wars, is a sheep in wolf's clothing. That was bound to be. Not even an ad man's dream of a drop-dead one-liner can hold its shock past the listener's double take. And "Sensation" is precisely that: a vanity showcase from the collection of British ad mogul Charles Saatchi--loud and "naughty" works juxtaposed with the occasional better one--that has generated more noise than it deserves...
...this whole affair is that "Sensation" has gained more attention than any marketing campaign for it could possibly have achieved. The furious outcry came before practically anyone had actually viewed the art. If Giuliani and Mrs. Clinton had bothered to go, they would have seen an exhibition that trades shock for shallowness with all the easy insouciance of youth. It has long been a vogue of contemporary art to focus on social issues at the expense of classical ideals of beauty, and the art here follows that vogue with a vengeance. That's not to say that the work doesn...
...inside formaldehyde-filled cases. The alarming piece that first brought him fame is here as well: A Thousand Years (1990), with its vitrine full of maggots and flies that swarm over the bloody head of a cow. It's a little pocket of hell: nauseating, unerringly brutal, but its shock looks death terribly in the face. Not silly, not shallow, not shock for shock's sake. Nor is Marc Quinn's Self (1991), in which a cast replica of the artist's head is filled with eight pints of his own blood, kept cool in a refrigerated case...