Word: 80s
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...decade is half over, but already one begins to feel the peculiar sensation of looking back on the art of the '80s. How, in America, have its frequent miseries balanced out against its episodic splendors? The end of a century -- and even more, the end of a millennium -- brings anxiety with it: the unavoidable doubts and mannerisms of the fin de siecle, when every kind of stylistic bubble rises to the cultural surface, swells and bursts with a soft plop and a whiff, while marsh lights flicker and the cultural promoters croak their Aristophanic chorus. The SoHo Tar Pits: heaven...
Despite a smattering of mature and serious work, this year's biennial was generally agreed to be the worst in living memory. The six curators seemed to have their neural nets patched directly into Manhattan's East Village, that journalists' playpen of urban gentrification, which in the '80s is replacing SoHo as the city's art-based boomtown, its Montmartre of the Neo. There is a small deposit of serious East Village art, but none was represented at the Whitney...
...then (or so one must surmise, through the haze of fin de siecle uncertainties) the whole picture of American art in the '80s will have altered; some popular reputations will seem as obviously ridiculous -- though as sociologically interesting -- as the former cult of such late 19th century artists as Bougereau or Hans Makart. But whether there is any real genius in the offing is a moot point. America has no major younger expressionist artist, like Germany's Anselm Kiefer or England's Frank Auerbach. Though it has some gifted realist painters, notably William Bailey and Neil Welliver, none...
...appropriation as practiced by Americans in the '80s is the exact reverse of this process. It presumes discontinuity. It is not a gesture of homage to an esteemed original. In fact it does not agree that any image has more authority than any other. It is a response to a culture of reproduction. Its posture is a melange of acquiescence and mild pessimism: acquiescence in the thick smog of images now dumped on the eye by "high" and "low" culture alike, pessimism about painting's ability to pierce or dispel it with authentically rooted meanings...
Question: Can a movie about an earnest but occasionally snaky reporter doing a sociological investigation of health clubs (Are they "the singles bars of the '80s"?) support a sober inquiry into journalistic ethics? Short answer: Are you kidding? Long answer: Check out the movie imperfectly titled Perfect, in which John Travolta is, as usual, miscast, this time as the journalist; Jamie Lee Curtis is rendered grim by the unaccustomed effort of thought; and Director James Bridges (who wrote the script with Aaron Latham) proves he has no rhythm. As a concept in search of a plot, the picture will infuriate...