Without identifying itself as "black art," Ms. DeVille's installation brings hard, pertinent existential politics into the museum.
But does anyone ever pause to think how trying it must be always to speak that way, or that such articulateness might be — gulp! — a hard-fought existential commitment?
This is a huge moral reason to work hard to prevent existential threats from becoming reality.
Auerbach's work is about a kind of existential, hard-won truth, while Brown's faithful copies render the older artist's thick oil paint as though it were a trompe-l'oeil reproduction.
And that can be pretty much anything: with Black Flag, it means misanthropy, hard work, masochistic dedication, existential outlook, cynicism but also total release.
The film that the director Danny Boyle and the screenwriter Simon Beaufroy have made from Aron Ralston's memoir, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place," is an existential comedy of the most fleshly and painful sort.
Some would go existential: the hardest shot in golf comes from within, shaped by each golfer's sense of purpose.
"Quitting the Nairobi Trio" is a zany lark of a read, written by someone who seems to have a hard time taking his own existential despair seriously.
Created by Joss Whedon, who also created "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the show featured an oddball genre mix that might have doomed it from the beginning: it was a character-rich sci-fi western comedy-drama with existential underpinnings, a hard sell during a season dominated by "Joe Millionaire".
And yet one would be hard pressed to bring an existential debate to bear in the face of treatable depression, mental illness, impulsive behavior, and a man who tells his five-year-old daughter to jump.
