When former Representative Todd Akin of Missouri and other Republican politicians betrayed outrageous ignorance of the meaning and consequences of the crime last year, Americans responded with a virtually uniform voice of reproof and disgust at their language.
Back then, their return was as part of a back-to-basics idea, meaning that most basic of "outrageous" judges, Sharon Osbourne, also returned.
And surely if Parisians find his Tree outrageous it is because they all recognise its other meaning.
Other 1980s artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Serra, ran into controversy, but Piss Christ is distinguished by its calculated offence and rhetorical nature – the way it sets out to be unmissably outrageous and adopts that offence as part of its meaning.
The meaning is that neither spouse may make outrageous claims for damages or shameless claims of poverty.
Nothing recalls Clinton's verbal circumlocutions half lecturing, half bullshitting, half pissed, half pleading like Romney's indefatigable, on-command deconstruction of outrageous claims such as Romney did things that have fixed meanings and Romney is one person in particular.
To be effectively outrageous onstage takes bravery; but to be effectively grotesque takes a kind of genius that pushes the antics beyond mayhem to meaning.
To pass off such finger exercises as part of Williams's meaning, to wrangle them into those plays, would be ludicrous and foolhardy, which is the problem with "In Masks Outrageous and Austere" (directed by David Schweizer, at the Culture Project).
