From far away, ballet can seem decorative, remote, and downright silly.
Picasso's Guernica is harrowing, but the horror of the actual bombing of Guernica in 1937 would have made it seem decorative.
Cheerleaders began to seem decorative and submissive: the idea being that if women were cheerleaders, then cheerleaders must be there to look pretty, and to do what they're told.
But to those, like me, who spend a lot of time squinting up at these towers to the sun, Manhattan has the richer and more varied crop of spires that are not shy about seeming decorative or grand--that, like New York, itself, are not afraid to show off.
The orchestral writing often seems merely decorative -- a velvety setting against which the piano line can shine.
Even after her liberation from slavery, Hildy is winsome, grateful, and defenseless (the gun she flourishes in the finale seems purely decorative).
"And while it may have seemed like a kind of camp," Mr. O'Brien said, recalling "the circus" of Mr. McDermott and Mr. McGough's old-world accouterments, which by the late 1980s included a Model T Ford and a horse-drawn carriage, "it was always rooted in something more sound," if you concede that a style or what seems merely decorative can actually be political.
In "Anger/Nation," at the Kitchen, the scrappy New York experimental theater troupe Radiohole has picked up some shiny new toys, and if it doesn't always seem to know exactly what to do with them — the video seems mostly decorative and underused — that might be for the best.
Here the author succeeds in terms of richness, but there's room for some house-cleaning: "erstwhile" sounds OK but seems more decorative than functional; and the addition of "green, striated" to "Connemara marble" seems to be a case of buying a dog and then barking yourself.
The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative.
