Word: bel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...American illusion that art is socially therapeutic brought to its apex. Medicean longings inflate the breast of the lowliest junk-bond zillionaire. Whole busloads of fledgling collectors shuttle on regular tours, shepherded by docents, art-investment consultants and "educators" of every stamp, among the private collections of Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Malibu. What other commodity offers such a blend of transcendence and fiscal display? Buying is a spectator sport, and the art gallery the Nautilus center of the soul. But in Movieland, the heat of egotism creates a desire for equal screen credit. Where else would a museum herald...
...alas, the classic 1934 model with the "waterfall" radiator, but still modernity on wheels, squinty windshield, fairings and all. Between them are such icons as the 1936 Sears-Roebuck Waterwitch outboard, offering its owner some whiff of the thrill associated with Henry Dreyfuss's bullet-nosed locomotives or Norman Bel Geddes' flying wings. Your trousers shorten as you look...
...supplied one of the core images of American art deco: the conquest of the air, by buildings and machines -- the taming of vertical space. The aircraft, with its fairings and streamlines, became the formal metaphor for a host of products from milkshake machines to staplers. Fantasy piled on fantasy: Bel Geddes, one of the master industrial designers of the period, looked at airfoils and fish and came up with the finned, monocoque body of his Motor Car Number 9, 1933, which was never built but which launched a thousand period spaceships into the popular epic of the future...
...from bird watchers to parents who do not want to miss Junior's first step as they try to focus the camera. Whatever the attraction, many dealers have had to struggle to meet the demand. "We can't keep enough Maxxums in stock," says Michael Schreiber, a salesman for Bel Air Camera in Los Angeles...
...were marked by the 1939 and 1964 New York world's fairs. The '39 fair was the work of the country's first and last great generation of designer-promoters. The son et lumiere theatrics were unabashed. Raymond Loewy designed an exhibit called "Rocketport of the Future," and Norman Bel Geddes' "Futurama," the most popular exhibit, was a scale model of a perfect, antiseptic cityscape. "Strange? Fantastic? Unbelievable?" asked the Futurama narrator. "Remember--this is the world...