Word: successful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...everyone is enthusiastic. "It is meaningless to describe anything as avant-garde today," says Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion. "Once you had a success on the order of pop art in the early '60s, it was no longer possible to define anything as avant-garde because there was no longer anything that met with resistance. Once what was formerly regarded as avant- garde was embraced by the mainstream, you simply had novelty." While Kramer admits Wilson's work has an audience, he is nevertheless dismissive. "I think it's a terrible bore. But people of mainstream culture...
...become a national showcase for avant-garde work; its president, Harvey Lichtenstein, is the movement's Sol Hurok. When Lichtenstein courageously produced Wilson's The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud in 1969, few thought Wilson's glacially paced musings would be the stuff of box-office success. But when Glass's opera about the early life of Gandhi, Satyagraha, unexpectedly sold out in the fall of 1981, it was time to think again...
...Most important, the summit was not a failure but, in its way, an astonishing success. It brought the world to the brink of a deal that seemed unimaginable before Reagan and Gorbachev arrived in Iceland: destruction of all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe and a radical reduction of their number in Soviet Asia; a 50% slash in the superpowers' long-range ballistic missiles in five years and their total elimination after five more -- to name only the most striking elements of the bargain that was almost struck. Now that these proposals have been made, the U.S. says they cannot...
Nonetheless, in painting the summit as a success, the Administration got an assist from, of all people, Gorbachev. The Soviet leader launched his own spin-doctoring campaign as soon as the summit broke up, dispatching 15 diplomats to 35 countries from Austria to Zimbabwe. On successive days, Max Kampelman and Victor Karpov, the heads of the American and Soviet arms- negotiating teams in Geneva, turned up in Bonn to conduct briefings for the West German government. Tuesday night Gorbachev, like Reagan a day earlier, went on television to give his version of the summit events to his fellow countrymen...
...early success of its all-out spin-control operation, though, it is by no means certain that the Administration can maintain its momentum. The rise in Reagan's poll standings is the kind of rally-'round-the-President response that appears almost automatically at any time of intense concentration on foreign affairs, but usually disappears in a fortnight or so. Some aspects of the Administration's explanation of "what really happened" at Reykjavik seem inconsistent or even contradictory. Poindexter at first implied that it was Reagan who in effect brought the summit to an end by picking up his papers...