Word: surrealness
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...famed one is paradoxically as naked as an exile dispossessed. The celebrity enters into a powerful and potentially dangerous force field, a relationship with masses of people gone slightly insane; sometimes he encounters that side of human nature that forms lynch mobs: the beast. A surreal dynamic goes to work. The famous may find their fortunes held hostage by the moods and attention spans of people they do not know. The unstable affections of fandom have a life of their own and acquire an unpredictable but nearly absolute power over one's personal and professional fate. Fame becomes a form...
...there is something almost surreal in the contrast between the detachment and formal purity of Khmer sculpture and the circumstances under which so much of it precariously survives. To walk into this show is to shift gears; to be immersed in an extremely slow-moving tradition to which the idea of innovation, beloved in the West, means little or nothing. Compared with Indian sculpture, from which it ultimately derives, Cambodian art is quite restricted in its range of subject: there isn't the same bewildering pullulation of different gods. In Cambodia the same cast recurs again and again: the Buddha...
What is left for our poor Mr. Peepers as a symbol of manly pride? The scenes would seem surreal if they weren't already so familiar. An investment banker braves the brutal terrain of Park Avenue in a vehicle built for climbing sand dunes under enemy fire. A claims adjuster clambers aboard a car designed to haul caribou carcasses, so he can pick up his wife's fuchsias at the suburban garden center. Did the old man flip his jeep on Omaha Beach? Then his son will have a Jeep too, to drop off the kids at the multiplex. Vroom...
This scene, from Jean-Luc Godard's poignant, invigorating For Ever Mozart, lasts only a few seconds--yet it serves as a surreal image, a joke and a requiem. After 40 years, Godard can still astonish and amuse in the cinematic shorthand he virtually created. Now two of his films, both about moviemaking, are on view: the 1995 For Ever Mozart and Contempt, his 1963 meditation on sex, lies and celluloid, newly restored after long being out of theatrical circulation. So it's time to praise Godard for what he was and still...
...opening exhibition, curated by O'Keeffe's controversial, longtime assistant Juan Hamilton, comprises 117 pieces and serves as a walk-through of O'Keeffe's career. Among the works on view are early masterpieces from the Evening Star series, which presage whole generations of American abstract art. The surreal animal skulls floating with flowers in their eyes are here, along with the kind of gynecological exposure in the guise of Blue Flower, 1918, that made early audiences cough nervously. And there is the late work From a Day with Juan, 1977, whose white ramp jacked up into heaven presents...