Banality

So often, the Oscars prize banality: the best picture is a movie Obama can safely endorse and which generates pleasant water-cooler chatter—a movie designed not to chafe or stir controversy, all the things good art is supposed to do.

They have, in a sense, transcended their own banality.

Several years ago, I began to photographically document vestiges of racism, oppression and segregation in America’s built and natural environments — lingering traces that were hidden in plain sight behind a veil of banality.

The first carries an extraordinary power in its creeping terror of the banality of evil.

Their mockumentary about the banality of living in rural England, which they write and star in as lovable knuckleheads Kerry and Kurtan, has a huge cult following.

What underlies the weasel rhetorical manifesto promises and pledges, an ever flowing gushing literary of platitude, banality and cliché.

The glitter belies the banality.

Tuello handed her a cup of coffee, just one human in a free, caffeine-permitting country to another, and the ordinariness of it—the banality, maybe—felt somehow obscene.

And what she called “the banality of evil” was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.

I don’t think that I’ve ever read any author of poetry or prose who, in his or her characterizations, exemplifies so well what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil” than Varon.

I know there's already two dozen viable Ryder Cup candidates for the Americans, but bearing in mind the annual banality of the uniforms, feel like Duf's hat game is worth at least two points for Team USA this fall.

I think he sabotaged his career by blabbing to Wolff because: A) The banality and vacuity of the Trump kids and others enraged him.

What Arendt called the “banality of evil” was at root an inability to hear another voice.

Worse further every act of inanity is keenly egged on by family and friends with fingers on the key pads of their mobile devices ready to vote for the continuity of banality clearly focused on THE MONEY!

However, he was deeply disappointed by the Bayreuth Festival of 1876, where the banality of the shows and baseness of the public repelled him.

In his view, the market (which implies the hunt for higher advertising revenue) not only imposes uniformity and banality, but also a form of invisible censorship.

These sketches parodied the banality of office life, from guessing the sexuality of the new guy to dealing with an ex-stripper temp named Tanya (McKinney).