Word: vernacular
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Yeah, but not in Sam's case--unless you thought of him as a sort of Charles Ives, drawing on the vernacular only to subvert it with a big, blatting off-key note. Like the brave soldier who spreads his battlefield picnic on a fallen foe's body; the beautiful blond whose wig falls off in a fight to reveal a perfectly bald pate; the western hero who coolly plugs his lover when the bad guy tries to use her as a shield in a gun fight. Sam didn't strain for these bold, indelible moments. They just came naturally...
...surreal life fades into waking dream (brilliantly translated into the latest vernacular by Jay Rubin), Murakami delivers a synoptic reading of all the ills of modern Japan, from crooked real estate deals to two-dimensional media men to a wonderfully true, Sprite-drinking 16-year-old girl who works in a rural wig factory. And as Okada floats through his planless days, he experiences every postmodern malady, from unwanted phone-sex calls to--the ultimate heartbreak--an E-mail "conversation" with his lost wife. These contemporary scenes of listlessness and drift are thrown into the strongest relief by gripping, graphic...
...match the effusive, unconstrained energy of Rauschenberg's generous imagination. Compared with the more pursed, hermetic and self-reflexive Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg is and always has been a gusher. He loves the sound, smell, grunge and look of the street. He doesn't look at his sources in American vernacular--photos, movies, and junk of all kinds--with anything resembling irony or distance. He is in it up to the neck and wants...
...style underwater or a mile away, and it had none of the morbid undercurrent of Warhol's. It was its own logo. It fairly crackled with assertion and impersonality, both at once. Those Benday dots, that studied neutrality of surface, that not-so-simple love of a vernacular (romance and action comics of the '50s) that was already receding into nostalgia when Lichtenstein took it up in the '60s--whom else could it have belonged...
...style may not be everything, everything is style: every kind of image comes to us packaged in terms that inexorably turn into conventions. He was antinuance, antiheroism, antiexistentialist. With good humor and icy elegance, coupled with a genuine liking for his low-art or no-art sources in American vernacular, Lichtenstein was able to construct an art that approached real monumentality on the foundation of images that bien pensant taste regarded as trash...