Gaudy typically equates with being ostentatious, but when someone pulls off gaudy it’s usually transcendent. Pine Valley is gaudy. La Sagrada Familia is gaudy. Lady Gaga is gaudy.
How do you define the edge that good gaudy and bad gaudy teeters on? My best guess: all of those things are still rooted in the premise that form follows function. They are fundamentally sound, just much more ornate and with much more window dressing
Blake--I appreciate how you're trying to differentiate the meaning here. You're right that gaudy is a term of judgement, delivered by the viewer as opposed to the creator (of an experience, work of art, golf course, etc.). But gaudy results when extravagance and excessiveness
fail to provide aesthetic value. They may try in the process of its creation, but that's the difference between calling something gaudy vs. luxurious, irreverent, exaggerated and brilliant. Venice is ornate and beautiful; the Venetian is an approximation, an empty mirroring, a gaudy representation.
That's the only quibble I want to make, because I think the conversation gets misdirected if Mike Strantz is considered gaudy. He most certainly is not. His methods could have been, just as PV, Gaudi, and Lady Gaga could've been, because they push the envelope of what we as an audience accept as artful, tasteful, and aesthetically progressive. We confirm their work by calling it not gaudy, but groundbreaking.
Desert golf is nearly an oxymoron, so it lends itself well to this example. Let's just say I remember driving around Bighorn in a golf cart and looking up the slope of the San Jacinto's and wishing I was at Stone Eagle instead.