Word: seriousness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Church is the largest organized body in the Soviet Union, far exceeding the Communist Party in membership. Says one Western expert on the Soviet Union who attended the millennium: "This is a society facing social disintegration. They have a youth that is disaffected, an intolerable abortion rate and a serious alcohol and drug problem." Religious believers, points out this observer, "tend to be constructive members of society. I don't think any Soviet leader now can pit himself against the church." One of the Vatican delegates described Gorbachev's situation a bit more bluntly: "He realizes he needs more than...
...many people, in as many places, as David Hockney. At 50, an age at which J.M.W. Turner was hardly known in France and Henry Moore was only just beginning to enter collections outside Britain, Hockney has the kind of celebrity usually reserved for film stars but rarely visited on serious artists -- Picasso and Warhol being the big exceptions. Merely to see his blond hair and round glasses across a crowded room, let alone hear his Yorkshire voice droning unstoppably on about Picasso, cubism and his own photography, turns the knees of collectors to jelly. When Actor Steve Martin pays...
...think of Hockney is to think of pictorial skill and a total indifference (in the work, at least) to the dark side of human experience. Does the latter make him a less serious painter? Of course not, any more than it trivialized the work of that still underrated artist Raoul Dufy. At root, Hockney is popular because his work offers a window through which one's eye moves without strain or fuss into a wholly consistent world. That world has its cast of recurrent characters -- friends, lovers and family. Hockney's portraits of his parents, in particular, are full...
...Bush and Jackson. As the Vice President again seems to be turning himself into Mr. Maladroit, it is easy to forget how his hyperaggressive debate posture put a crimp in all the wimp talk. Jackson's dominance of the Democratic debates helped him narrow his credibility gap as a serious contender. There were also casualties from these protracted trials by rhetoric: Babbitt, plagued by near palsied facial contortions, and Hart, who returned to the fray looking like the portrait of Dorian Gray...
...current trade negotiations, we will push for removal of tariffs and other barriers that impede commerce. To show we are serious about this goal, we will move immediately to curb the wasteful subsidies that each country pays to its domestic farmers -- subsidies that hamper agricultural trade and lead to overproduction and inefficiency. Specifically, we have all pledged to reduce our agricultural payments by 20% over the next year. If a country does not comply (and the staff of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development will be the arbiter), each of the other nations will subject selected products from...