Word: dollarization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...major factor in U.S. steel's improving fortunes has been the decline of the dollar, which has made imports more expensive. But foreign competitors have trimmed costs and boosted efficiency with almost the same zeal as the U.S. mills. The resurgent Japanese steel industry has cut its work force 18% in the past three years, to 228,000. Europe's steel industry, subsidized to the tune of $57 billion since 1975, is now largely self-sufficient owing to higher productivity. Because of such moves, says Walter Williams, chairman of Bethlehem Steel, "we'll never be able to go back...
Most experts thought it did not work. The dollar fell without creating a recession, but America's trade deficit has barely declined. "Come on," argues Baker, whose tolerance for criticism is not his strongest suit. "Can you imagine where we'd be today on the trade deficit if the Plaza process hadn't begun...
Hollywood's superagents have risen in power partly because takeovers and mergers have undermined the traditional influence of the major studios. Today very few actors and directors sign exclusive contracts with studios. Result: agents, who collect 10% of every dollar their clients earn, have become far more influential as matchmakers. Instead of merely peddling artists, they now help create custom-made projects for their stars...
Instead, in Warhol one had the detached art-supplier with mass-cultural fixations on things everyone knew: canned soup, Liz, dollar bills, death. Fame was the real qualifier. One doubts, somehow, that Warhol plowed through Faust before cranking out his flashy and unfelt variations on Tischbein's portrait of Goethe. No ideological motives lurk behind the benign collective visage of his innumerable Mao Zedongs; but a billion Chinese could no more be wrong about such a celebrity than 200 million Americans could be about Jackie or Marilyn...
...between is the interesting stuff. He was an adroit draftsman but not a distinguished one. He soon overcame the influences of his early advertising days (Jean Cocteau and Ben Shahn), but the drawing is never more than efficient. Partly for this reason his freehand "studies" of soup cans or dollar bills never acquire the pressure of the silk-screened ones, but it is hard to see how they could: those coarsely nuanced rows of ready-mades, in taking Duchamp a small step further, remain the most eloquent comments on the standardization of mass taste in American art. On desire, Warhol...