Word: museum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...game -- a rather drab, black-and-white job called Computer Space -- was introduced in 1971, to a notably tepid reception. Since then, arcades have seen a parade of breakthrough hits, technological advances, a boom period and then a falloff in popularity. Enough has happened, in short, for the American Museum of the Moving Image to assemble a collection of nearly 50 classic video games and call it historical scholarship. The exhibit, Hot Circuits: A Video Arcade, complete with earnest musings on the sociology of it all, can be seen through Nov. 26 on a newly opened floor of the museum...
...fashion quickly, and many of the older models, it turned out, were close to extinction. The exhibit's organizers spent months canvassing dealers and manufacturers in an effort to locate surviving machines. "To the people we were dealing with, 1982 was ancient history," says Rochelle Slovin, the museum's director. "So many games were difficult to find. Many just got thrown out or were repainted...
...considered the first successful video game. The search at one point led to a dealer in New York City reputed to have 21 games in his basement; unfortunately, the building had been torn down three months earlier, and all the games were buried under the rubble. The museum finally found a Pong machine in an arcade operator's collection in Great Neck, N.Y., a week and a half before the exhibit was to open. The museum also unearthed one of the last surviving copies of Death Race, the 1976 game that stirred a storm of * protests when parents noticed...
...becomes combustible. A case in point: on June 12 Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art abruptly canceled an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's work, which included sadomasochistic and homoerotic photographs. "We really felt this exhibit was at the wrong place at the wrong time," explained museum director Christina Orr-Cahall. "We had the strong potential to become some persons' political platform...
...urine. Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in March, produced equally provocative work: his oeuvre includes pictures of nude children in erotic poses, a man urinating into another's mouth, and other violent and homosexually explicit poses. When some of the work was exhibited at New York's Whitney Museum last summer, there were averted eyes, even among those who make a career out of being avant-garde and supersophisticated...