Word: past
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What we're doing is not a contradiction of our ideology. Price controls were a consequence of the lack of markets, the lack of development and the existence of monopolies and oligopolies. These deficiencies required policies that should have been temporary but became permanent. Now we're correcting past errors. What is dramatic is that we're doing it all at once...
...Venezuela has recently joined the Non-Aligned Movement. There's a view in Washington that the NAM is less relevant and coherent than in the past, that it has split up into regional and parochial groups. So you've joined a club just at the point when that club might be going out of business. How would you respond to that...
...think so. That tremendous social explosion came about because of the dammed-up frustration of the past eight years, the decline in living standards. Now, this year, in Venezuela we're going to have a dramatic drop, almost 10%, in our gross national product as a result of our adjustment measures. If we don't straighten out this situation, if we don't have the resources to confront this violent decline, the social situation will reach intolerable extremes. And it's not just us; all the countries of Latin America are suffering...
...what is done is done. The hard lesson of the past decade is that liquidity, to many people, may be all that art means. The art market has become the faithful cultural reflection of the wider economy in the '80s, inflated by leveraged buyouts, massive junk-bond issues and vast infusions of credit. What is a picture worth? One bid below what someone will pay for it. And what will that person pay for it? Basically, what he or she can borrow. And how much art can dance for how long on this particular pinhead? Nobody has the slightest idea...
...inflated market is also eroding the other main function of museums: the loan exhibition. Without a doubt, the past 15 years in America have been the golden age of the museum retrospective, bringing a series of great and (for this generation of museums and their public) definitive exhibitions, done at the highest pitch of scholarship and curatorial skill: late and early Cezanne, Picasso, Manet, Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Watteau, Velazquez, Poussin, up to MOMA's current show of Picasso's and Braque's Cubist years and, perhaps, Seurat to come...