Word: utilitarian
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...NATO summit meeting in Belgium. President Ford expressed hope that Greece would re-enter the alliance. Considering the utilitarian American view of the Mediterranean, it is not hard to understand Caramanlis's conception of a United Europe--without NATO and the U.S.--as an alternative to the current balance of power. The old framework is too rigid to contain the present multiplicity of societies. There is no longer a Communism to pit the Western system against--perhaps, as the late Greek Prime Minister. George Papandreou has written, even the term democracy is simply a euphemism and a way of confusing...
...caressing Adriana's leg or putting his hand under her shirt serve to force his character into a one-dimensional world of male physicality and insensitivity. The periodic eruption of a train into the placid Swiss countryside relentlessly hammers us with its tiresome commentary on Paul's mentality; rational, utilitarian, compartmentalized. Adriana is the classic female--equal shares of mysterious introspection, intuitive insight and the constant assertion of the spiritual over the physical. As she is about to make love with Paul for the first time, she drapes a black cloth on the window (it is day time) because...
When mathematicians speak of the "elegance" of a proof, they do not mean decorative grace notes; they mean the kind of succinct, one-pointed blow that undercuts one's expectations of complexity. In that sense, what Oka calls "these utilitarian wrappings, these crystallizations of everyday wisdom" are elegant indeed. Problem: to pack one dried salt yellowtail in straw so that it can be unwrapped frugally and eaten over a period of time. It must keep up to six months, so some air must get to it but flies must not. The answer in Ishikawa prefecture is to sheathe...
...collector. Daniel Robbins, in the foreword to Max Loehr's completely illustrated, scholarly catalogue of the exhibition, remarks that Winthrop "believed in an artistic faculty essentially independent of time and place; he also felt that the making of beautiful and perfect objects utterly transcended their function in a strictly utilitarian sense as evidence of a way of life." The more than four hundred jades in the collection date from the Neolithic period (to ca. 1550 B.C.) to the Late Eastern Chou dynasty (480-222 B.C.) and they are presented with a minimum of historical or stylistic explanation. In case after...
...works on exhibit at the Busch-Reisinger, whether utilitarian or purely aesthetic in purpose, support Anni Albers's statement that, "The good designer is the anonymous designer ...the one who does not stand in the way of his material." The screenprints, lithographs, textile samples, paintings--even Josef Albers's photographs and his silver holders for ice tea glasses--show an overriding concern with the impersonal qualities of formal design...