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November 12, 2017 - May 7, 2018
The primary purpose of an entertainer is to find an audience and then retain its attention.
“the anxieties of a culture that believes it has no meaning.�
He was a charming vacancy, an elegant decoration on the lapel of a decade overstocked with such fripperies.
“I think [rock] should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself.�
Bowie’s skill was being able to live out the dictum of rock critic Simon Frith: “Rock is entertainment that suggests—by its energy, self-consciousness, cultural references—something more.� He achieved this almost instinctively, whereas Roxy Music, his most cogent rivals as intelligent seventies pop stars, deliberately used their art-school background as a resource. They were a conscious evocation of classic Pop Art principles, deftly using the clichés of fifties and sixties rock to satirize pop’s superficiality, while employing irony and camp as a way of distancing themselves from the purely
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