artifice

She seemed determined to strip her fame of all artifice while still claiming its pleasures.

That fascination with the artifice — short-term intimacy for a cost — paired with his appreciation for the legitimate work being done spurred Baker to make a series of films that, in different ways, have examined the industry.

In 1966, the Met premiered Samuel Barber's "Antony and Cleopatra," a Shakespeare-inspired spectacle that was panned by the New York Times as an "artifice with a great flourish masquerading as art," producing music that "abounded in declamation and pageantry" but failed to explore the subject — love between a man and woman — and couldn't be saved by Leontyne Price singing at the peak of her powers.

Such simplicity in design, along with a winking sense of artifice, is partly what helped turn Kent’s bogeyman into an unlikely gay icon.

But as is often the case from “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the episode’s sharp-edged satire is laced with deep sentimentality, rendering Casa Bonita almost mythical, a place so ludicrous in its artifice that it becomes a cultural touchstone.