Word: vapidness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Barbara, the brutal, peasant faces and awkward, potbellied figures of Barbara's tormentors foreshadow the popular style of Bruegel or Bosch-though neither painter had been born when they were painted. By contrast, nothing could be more courtly than the boneless sinuosity of Barbara's figure, the vapid sweetness of her untroubled expression or the richly brocaded gowns and hierarchic formality of the aristocratic spectators...
While this is not a surprising statement, it has serious implications. The most significant is that television programming is not a benignly vapid mess. In fact, the vapidity of television's material is responsible for its deleterious influence, which is primarily the enervating substitution of inoffensiveness for reason. Arlen writes of the most obvious example...
...solely toward the death of music. It is true that the danger of Schoenberg's techniques is their elegant simplicity. In the hands of a master they can be a revelatory means to expression, while in the grip of an ordinary musical merchant they can depreciate into rococo pyrotechnics, vapid and uncommunicative. The calumny heaped upon Schoenberg is disgraceful. He sought not to create "modern" music but to allow music to speak her feelings in the modern war-blasted world. The bitterly ironic result of his lonely work or renewal was that his own works have been ignored while...
Image of the Century. The grotesque, inanely smiling figures in the present show are not much subtler. Woman of Action shows a vapid peroxide blonde, mouth agape and with a skull and crossbones on her belt. "This is the American woman," says Miss Leaf. "She's trying so hard to contribute to American culture and doing such a lousy...
...been rising ever since his epochal Air Power brought home the Caligulan glory of the air force to the musically thirsty, seems to have made little musical progress since that Curtis Lemay extravaganza. His To St. Cecilia was an exciting grotesque written in his consummately banal idiom featuring vapid stentorian outbursts for a brass ensemble and Victory at Sea-type arching melodies for the hapless chorus. This clangorous work, sounding like Hollywood with the rough edges knocked of, brilliantly captured a certain Pliestoceme ambience which would have been beyond the grasp of a lesser composer. The character of the performance...