The true enemy was bourgeois high-mindedness in literature, music, theatre, art, and criticism, and, over the next ten years, he turned much of his critical might to the job of identifying this culture, exposing its calculated banalities, and, often with genuine success, persuading readers of its meretriciousness.
Is Mr. Korine "effectively satirizing" vapid MTV exploitation shows, asked Guy Lodge in a Variety review, "or merely complicit in the glossy meretriciousness of the culture they represent?" Ms. Gomez and Ms. Hudgens have both been cycled through the celebrity tabloids for their romantic relationships.
Proulx presents a society that is struggling and persisting at best - which is not especially likeable, but for which we still feel tremendous sympathy as it strains to comprehend the meretriciousness of modernity.
His sensuous colour was another cause for suspicion and his highly wrought religious compositions, putto piled on putto, smack of meretriciousness – part of a centuries-long ambivalence towards the sensory and theatrical nature of European baroque art.
The optimistic view, if you support Hillary Clinton or are simply depressed by meretriciousness, is that the Times reporters combed the Schweizer book and that this story was the worst they found.
Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family.
Likewise, it's a symptom of their meretriciousness - their tyrannical prettiness, their utter failure to connect with anything that ever made London London - that almost all of the paintings produced between 1747 and 1750 by Giovanni Antonio Canaletto feature radiantly cerulean skies.
True, Warhol caught the meretriciousness of late 20th-century life, and his repetitive paintings of dollar signs, for instance, could be construed as an indictment of our society's prime priority.
Although mindful of a recent firecracker of an essay by David Lipsey on "The Meretriciousness of Meritocracy" – describing equality of opportunity, when combined with serious inequality of outcome, as "the worst possible recipe for a harmonious society", I think not.
