Word: vulgarize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Vulgar Parlance. The gag illustrates Allen's reliance on a comic device that is as old as Aristophanes-the principle of inversion or, in more vulgar parlance, the old switcheroo. Woody's divorce joke, in fact, is merely an updated version of a line used by Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. "If I ever get married," drawls Algernon, "I'll certainly try to forget the fact. . . Divorces are made in Heaven." For a time, Allen used so many switches that friends in the trade referred to him as Allen Woody. He carried a sword...
...toughness," says Painter George Cohen, "or maybe we're just losers. But there is a reluctance to do something just because it's 'right.' " Indeed, as the show repeatedly proves, Chicagoans take more pleasure in doing things that are "wrong": scrambled, left-footed, irretrievably vulgar, offensive in subject matter...
...Nutt, this imagery of possession enters a horrific level of sour humor. Nutt is the more playful. His drawing appears to derive equally from Dick Tracy strips (the thin, grotesque, saber-edged line) and back-of-the-comic ads for hemorrhoid cures. The result is a mildly purgative vulgarity, harsh and sexy and comic all at once-a visual equivalent to the kind of sub-Burroughs imagery one gets in some Rolling Stones lyrics. Says Nutt: "I don't know what you mean by 'vulgar.' My women are dream women...
...from the knobby back of a cayuse: they are what they aimed to be, illustrations for magazines like Collier's, nothing more. The earlier artists had, at least, bequeathed a sense of immanence, of epic landscape and idealism to later American art; Remington and Russell left only a vulgar legacy of bronze broncos. With them, the Decline of the West was accomplished-though the nostalgia rides...
...question is: Why? Considered as a formal artist, Escher was virtually negligible. His use of color was dull and his drawing had a serviceably vulgar look: the way Escher described the human figure, for instance, made Norman Rockwell look like Giorgione. Much of his architectural imagery is supermarket Piranesi...