Word: moralizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...generally gives control over most kinds of property to its owner -- an auto manufacturer, for instance, cannot tell buyers what to do with their cars. Yet every instinct says that art is no ordinary property. The proposals before Congress place it in a separate category by turning to "moral rights," a legal concept dating back to the French Revolution. It permits artists to block the public display of their work in a defaced or modified form. Moral rights are also embodied in the Berne Convention, the international copyright agreement adopted by 76 countries, but the provision is one reason...
...Congress enacts some form of moral-rights legislation, the U.S. could be in for a long period of testing to find the new limits. Can artists dictate how their work must be hung? Can they object to temporary embellishments? Canadian Artist Michael Snow successfully sued a Toronto shopping center that owned his sculpture Flight Stop because they had decked it with red Christmas ribbons. And once a work is in public, may its creator require that it remain there? "Should one generation of artists impose its taste on history?" asks Stephen Weil, deputy director of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington...
...order to enforce that respect. Gravitas is a phenomenon of power, but the forms and styles of power are various. Dictators are forever strutting the tinhorn's impersonation of gravitas. Brute power is only one of the cruder types, and it is sometimes subdued by other forms: a moral gravitas, for example. Martin Luther King Jr. brought his gravitas to bear against men of power who were morally vacant. Gravitas may be aggression, but it may express itself otherwise, as something withheld, as a dignity and forbearance...
...peculiarly powerful form of gravitas may arise out of suffering. It draws its authority not only from the redemptive example of Christ but also from Greek tragedy: the terrible moral power of woe. Mother Teresa has that gravitas of the redemptive. Whole cultures may be judged weighty or weightless by the calibration of suffering. Russian history sometimes seems an entire universe of gravitas: always there is the heavy Slavic woe, the encroaching dark and metaphysical winter...
...bizarre and complex gravitas that destroyed itself in sinister trivialities. Does Ronald Reagan have gravitas? In some ways, Reagan seems a perfect expression of the anti-gravitas America of the late '80s, a place that can seem weightless and evanescent, as forgetful as a television screen. Gravitas, a deep moral seriousness, is not necessarily the virtue for an electronic age. And yet Reagan possesses a gravitas of authenticity. In any case, lame ducks always suffer from diminished gravitas. People don't take them as seriously as before, when the days of power lay ahead...