Word: vernacular
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kienholz wasn't a Pop artist; there was nothing benign or accommodating in his view of mass culture. To him the TV set was both America's anus and its oracle. He was a history artist, working in a real-things-in-the-real-world vernacular that was, by turns, scabrous, brazenly rhetorical and morally obsessed. Compared with the thin, overconceptualized gruel that most political art in postmodern America has become--the stuff the Whitney normally favors--Kienholz was red meat all the way. Which doesn't mean that his output was uniformly good. An item like The Ozymandias Parade...
...world where Sonny Bono legislates and Naomi Campbell writes novels, why can't ROSEANNE help guest-edit an issue of the New Yorker? Editor Tina Brown's decision to ask the vernacular star to mix it up with the venerable magazine's staff for an issue on the American woman was a cocktail some writers found hard to swallow. Longtime New Yorker writer Ian Frazier faxed in his resignation. "It's a theological issue," says Frazier, meaning not that Roseanne is God but that writing is spiritual. "The New Yorker is about writing. Is writing sitting in a room pitching...
...poet Alice Goodman, tackled explosive subjects in unconventional ways. Nixon presented a surprisingly intimate, sympathetic portrait of the former President, while Klinghoffer roused the ire of some American Jews with its compassionate presentation of Palestinian suffering. Jordan, the team's new librettist, is a political activist whose lapidary vernacular libretto uses a catastrophic Los Angeles earthquake as a metaphor for the shattering power of love...
Despite the aesthetic pleasure (and sick glee) to be enjoyed from the above short's the best films of the bunch are also the funniest. "The Janitor," an Oscar nominee by Canadian Vanessa Schwartz, uses mellow vernacular and quirky sketches of a naked old man's body to bring a janitor of the universe to life. Lines describing the moon as a "sure" nub dustcatcher" don't hurt either...
...this moment you must take pause to ask your neighbor what delayed the hockey season, or better yet, "What is hockey?", be my guest. Your questions indicate that you are either a bubbly Beau brummel, fluent in the vampy vernacular of the now, or you are an ignorant fool. Either way I want you on my team...