Word: spartanism
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...classicism of La Pittura Colta is a mere shell, and its vaunted erudition is as thin as a museum postcard. All it retains from the beaux-arts tradition is the desire to get the highlight on the Spartan's backside right-not that it always does so. It has the calm not of classical elevation but of exhausted decadence. The Venetian setting is unfair to it, for anyone can take the water-bus back to the Scuola di San Rocco and see what Tintoretto could do with the human figure. The right place for it is Las Vegas, among...
...visit to several Caribbean schools offers little that would contradict the arguments of critics. Most operate on shoe string budgets and breakneck schedules, cramming a semester's work into four or five weeks. The aptly named Spartan Health Sciences University on St. Lucia has only two full-time professors. The physiology and biochemistry departments occupy one room, separated from the hallway by a beaded rope curtain. The microbiology laboratory consists of a few rough wooden tables. Students are advised to bring their own microscopes...
...Spartan school looks luxurious compared with the St. Lucia School of Medicine, opened with great fanfare last September by Edward Antar, owner of a New York discount electronics chain called Crazy Eddie's. "They had nothing," says Cornelius Lubin, an official in St. Lucia's Ministry of Health. "No labs, no cadavers." The school quietly closed in March. Closed less quietly was the Centre de Investigacion y Formacion Social. CIFAS was one of two Dominican medical schools shut down in May as part of the local government's effort to clear the rep utation of its university...
...surprisingly, the flood of new wealth has begun to produce a Chinese version of the affluent society. At the Xiang Jiang state farm near Mao's birthplace in Hunan province, which was renowned a dozen years ago for its spartan housing and inadequate sanitation, TV antennas now protrude from rooftops and pop music blares from tape recorders. Local Party Secretary Qiu Huaisheng proudly points out that "of the 200 households, 126 have bought TV sets and 112 own cassette recorders." Sometimes, however, the peasants' purchases, as well as their entrepreneurial skills, are both illicit and posilively profligate. A group...
...Memphis quest, claims Sottsass, "implies an optimism that the body is always winning. The puritanical, Catholic approach of 'less is more' is wrong because we know that all Catholics are sinners." Yet Sottsass's domestic décor is far more spartan than hedonistic. His Milan apartment and office are simply furnished, with plain tables and black plastic chairs. Says he: "I have to be free of any outside information to concentrate. I would like to live in a monastery...