The 1980s: The Arts: Overview

American Decades | Date: 2001

THE 1980s: THE ARTS: OVERVIEW

The Culture of Success

Much of American art in the 1980s was shaped by and responded to the consumerism and feel-good conservatism of the Reagan era. In a decade preoccupied with success and image, art got bigger: bigger in scope and ambition (elaborate sets, large casts, and complex narratives for commercial musicals), bigger in theme (epic visions in the works of Neo-Expressionist painters), bigger in budget (record advances for new novels), and bigger in promotion (hyping of pop albums and art auctions). Art also became far bigger as a cultural presence. From twenty-four-hour-a-day media coverage to in-your-face images of pop art, video, and graffiti, art was more immediate, available, and accessible than ever before. The new scale and influence of art suited Americans in the 1980s. With more disposable income than in the 1970s and weary of the pervasive pessimism of that decade, they wanted to enjoy themselves again. They began to spend more money on arts and entertainment, aided by the healthiest national economy since the 1960s. Prices in the art market reached new heights as the wealthy discovered that acquiring fine art was a way to parade their success. With increasing corporate, foreign, and private investment in Hollywood and the rapid growth of computer technology, American cinema became increasingly the province of big-budget adventure spectacles designed like thrill rides and packaged as pure escapist fun. Broadway was right behind, hawking high-end productions crammed with star names and special effects. There were other toys too: MTV served up one fantasy after another, while small, portable audiocassette players, videocassette recorders, and compact discs gave young urban professionals—"yuppies"—the freedom to enjoy books and music on the go and movies in their homes. As a result art packaged as entertainment became one of the most profitable (and exportable) American industries. The primary sources of art and entertainment—from galleries to movie studios to publishing houses to record labels—came more than ever to look on art as a business and to view the financial bottom line as the ultimate purpose of an art form.

Wealth and Status

Inevitably Americans' obsession with material success was reflected in the art of the 1980s. Appropriation artist Jeff Koons used status symbols such as bar accessories and sports equipment to celebrate and lampoon materialism. In 1985 Madonna's "Material Girl" video showed the budding starlet swathed in mink and fluttering greenbacks, trilling that "the boy with the cold hard cash is always Mr. Right." Rap singers such as L. L. Cool J boasted not only about sexual conquests but also about their fine clothing and sports cars. Popular movies—including Risky Business (1983), Trading Places (1983), Baby Boom (1987), and Working Girl (1988)—glorified "having it all": career, wealth, and family. Wall Street (1987), despite a finger-wagging preachiness, made a cultural hero of corporate raider Gordon Gekko, who declares that "greed…is good." Tom Wolfe's best-selling novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) centered on a yuppie financier who imagines himself "Master of the Universe." Even John Updike's working-class protagonist Harry Angstrom reappeared to taste the good life in Rabbit Is Rich (1981). Bret Easton Ellis studied the decadent swimming-pool culture of rich California teens in Less Than Zero (1985), while "glitz" novelists such as Sidney Sheldon (Master of the Game, 1982), Shirley Conran (Lace, 1982), Jackie Collins (Hollywood Wives, 1983), and Judith Krantz (I'll Take Manhattan, 1986) set their potboilers in the international playgrounds of the nouveau riche. Far more cynical than these writers was playwright David Mamet, who skewered the American success ethic in Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) and Speed-the-Plow (1988), his explorations of greed and opportunism in the world of con artists, hustlers, and deal makers. Artist Jenny Holzer displayed a similar disaffection in her controversial "Inflammatory Essays," billboards, and posters: "Money creates taste" and "Private property created crime" were two of her best-known aphorisms.

The Art of Publicity

The media flourished in the 1980s, fed by a celebrity-starved public. It seemed as though virtually everyone, as Andy Warhol once predicted, was famous for fifteen minutes. Trend-spotting magazines such as US and People and "behind the scenes" television programs, including Entertainment Tonight and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, bombarded Americans with more information than ever before about actors, artists, writers, singers, and video performers. Some, such as novelist Salman Rushdie and painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, found themselves thrust into the spotlight overnight. Other celebrities were discovered in unlikely spots: Vanna White turned letters on a game show; Courteney Cox danced onstage in a rock video; La Toya Jackson bared all for centerfolds. A national taste for scandal boosted several careers; Vanessa Williams lost her Miss America crown after nude photographs of her were published in Penthouse, but she rebounded with a strong recording career. Meanwhile, the infidelities of Bruce Springsteen, Sylvester Stallone, and other celebrities were photographed by enquiring photographers from the supermarket tabloids. Riding trends with the savvy of advertising executives, many of the most successful artists and performers of the decade learned to use the media to package and market their public images and to create a demand for their projects and products. The expert in self-marketing and image mongering was Madonna, but she had plenty of competition from many others—including novelist Tom Wolfe, film actors Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Broadway hit maker Andrew Lloyd Webber, artists Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo, movie moguls Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, and horror writer Stephen King.

Brats

Disillusioned in designer wear, under-appreciated in urban lofts, misunderstood at the mall, and affecting boredom through a haze of designer drugs and alcohol—the" brats" were the 1980s version of the Lost Generation. The term began with a group of young actors known as the "Brat Pack," made notorious in movies such as Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and St. Elmo's Fire (1985). Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, Charlie Sheen, Sean Penn, and a host of other petulant young actors flooded the multiplexes of America with hipness and "brattitude." Many of them starred in film versions of novels by another group of "brats," overnight literary sensations Tama Janowitz, Jay Mclnerney, and twenty-one-year-old Bret Easton Ellis. After hailing these three novelists as modern chroniclers of youthful alienation, the media later dismissed them as mere barometers of pop culture. Tom Cruise, one of the hottest movie stars of the 1980s, went deftly from one "brat" role to another. Music video produced several "brats" in the late 1980s, including Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, and New Kids on the Block, all of whom were still teenagers when they began selling millions of CDs in suburbia. Many of the most popular performers on the rap scenes were brats: D. J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Kid 'N Play, L. L. Cool J, and Tone Loc. Eddie Murphy of the popular television show Saturday Night Live became a movie star at twenty-one. Meanwhile, in the world of jazz, audiences were amazed at the talents of boy wonders Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr., both of whom had recording contracts by the time they were twenty. "Brat" painters Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo competed for the attentions of the media and art community by bad-mouthing one another, boasting about their artistic prowess, and dressing in black. By the time they were thirty their incomes were in six figures.

Bigshots

The most treasured American art form in the 1980s may have been the art of the deal. Increasingly, creative people learned to think like businesspeople, and those artists and performers who stayed on top learned to see their work as a commodity and an investment. It was not surprising, then, that some actors and movie directors shifted gears and became producers. In the 1980s, as in the studio era of the 1930s and 1940s, only Hollywood producers and a few superstars had the clout to get their projects on the screen. The A-list of movers and shakers included Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sherry Lansing, Joel Silver, David Geffen, and Jon Peters. At the top were Steven Spielberg and George Lucas; between them they were responsible for producing and/or directing six of the top ten moneymakers of the decade. On Broadway it was much the same story; with audiences demanding ever-bigger shows, important producers (such as Cameron Mackintosh), directors (such as Trevor Nunn), and investors assembled new plays and musicals with the military strategy of generals. Andrew Lloyd Webber became the Midas of Broadway after composing the megahits Evita (1978), Cats (1982), and The Phantom of the Opera (1986). After the success of his first full-length novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe took potshots at established novelists in a manifesto on how to write fiction. Any work by Stephen King, the wealthiest and most-published novelist of the decade, was virtually guaranteed to make the best-seller lists (and be sold to Hollywood). Manhattan art dealers Tony Shafrazi and Mary Boone made their reputations, and vast amounts of money, by shrewdly investing in brash young artists with superstar potential, working the media machine to create demand, and jacking up prices accordingly. Film actors such as Eddie Murphy and Bruce Willis raised their fees exponentially after a single hit. Madonna was perhaps the most skillful entrepreneur of the decade, becoming a one-woman conglomerate as she marketed her movies, videos, recordings, and image and made millions.

Marketing

In the 1980s economic success required aggressive advertising and clever packaging. Spielberg and Lucas presold their blockbuster movies, often a year or more in advance, with teasers, trailers, and merchandising tie-ins that ranged from action figures to soft drink cups. Pop artist Keith Haring took marketing a step further, creating a line of products bearing his most popular graphic images and then opening a store to sell them. His contemporaries took note; Jenny Holzer and Mark Kostabi were among other artists of the 1980s with their own product lines. The marketers of Batman (1989) went still further, planning their media blitz around a single, simple graphic—a bat logo—and selling the movie as a shared public "event." By then, the makers of motion pictures such as The Big Chill (1983), Flashdance (1983), Footloose (1984), Top Gun (1986), and Dirty Dancing (1987) had revolutionized the film, video, and recording industries by using soundtrack albums and accompanying hit singles and videos as advertisements for movies. In 1984 Michael Jackson altered video production, packaging, and store sales with his $1 million high-tech "Thriller" clip and an accompanying cassette, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller. Within a few years, rock and pop performers were typically releasing "video albums" to be sold alongside new recordings. Madonna, Tama Janowitz, and Kenny Scharf were so skillful at marketing their work that the product itself became secondary; they became advertisements for themselves. Advance promotion, including advertisements on MTV, helped horror writers Stephen King and Peter Straub set a record for pre-publication sales of their collaborative novel The Talisman (1984). After the huge success of Cats, preselling also became the new standard on Broadway. Before the show opened in October 1982 the producer, Cameron Mackintosh, mounted massive advertising campaigns and used the media to attract large audiences long in advance, Similar techniques did the same for the big-budget, expensive-ticket musicals Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon.

Style over Substance

"Where's the beef?" asked a much-quoted television commercial in the mid 1980s. The question might well be applied to the art of the decade, much of which was characterized by bloated budgets, endless hype, an obsession with technology, and the recycling of old ideas and images, usually from the media. In recording studios better and cheaper technology—from synthesizers to samplers—created an artificial, heavily "produced" sound on many pop, rock, jazz, country, and even classical releases. With the spectacular success of music videos, the "look" of a band or a singer became as important as the quality or content of a song. Record companies began to sign a barrage of new recording artists who were highly photogenic but had more to offer visually than musically. The pop duo Milli Vanilli were forced to return their 1989 Grammy Award for Best New Artist when it was discovered that someone else had done the singing on their hit records. Media-inspired artists such as Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring were often clever and fresh in their appropriation of popular culture, but their trendiness and insistence on fun as a theme undermined the possibility of enduring artistic reputations. Neo-Expressionist painters Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe were also criticized as slick and superficial. The bottomline, blockbuster mentality of Hollywood was a boon to the special-effects industry, but often the movies themselves seemed only excuses to show off computerized technology or, in the cases of Return of the Jedi (1983) and Batman, to merchandise toys. Action movies and big-star comedies—including Stripes (1981), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Lethal Weapon (1987), and Die Hard (1988)—became exercises in crowd-pleasing irreverence and glib one-liners. Even "arty" cult movies such as Blue Velvet (1986), Brazil (1985), and Blade Runner (1982) attracted more attention for their style and hip attitude than for content or character. Broadway hits suffered from the same high gloss; reviewers complained that most shows offered nothing special but effects. Andrew Lloyd Webber struck many critics as formulaic in his approach to musicals, while similar charges were leveled against Stephen King. The new wave of "brat" novelists were accused of peppering their fiction with hip cynicism, ironic wit, and pop-culture references while forgetting to supply the "beef" of plot and characters.

Pop Culture Crossover

Starting with hip-hop—an urban subculture that thrived in the Hispanic and African American communities during the early 1980s—American pop culture forms began to merge and overlap to a degree never seen before. Hip-hop unified the audiences for three different but interdependent arts: break dancing, graffiti art, and rap music. The hip-hop sensibility spread to the artistic community of New York City, which embraced its energy and forms. Suddenly multimedia was everywhere. New York "art clubs" such as Area and The Palladium drew huge and varied crowds by merging art, video, dance, music, and fashion. Pop artists became successful by appropriating images and ideas from other arts and from the mass culture. Music video was ignited from the sparks of dance, film, and pop music. The success of the movie Flashdance was the key to a new crossover marketing phenomenon that used soundtracks and videos to boost box office and used blockbuster movies to sell soundtracks and videos. This new merging of film, video, music, and other mass media also helped to create an ever-growing preoccupation with fashion, image, hipness, trendiness, and "attitude," especially among the young. Thanks to video and hip-hop, dance and choreography reached mainstream America as never before. Video stars such as Sting, Madonna, and Tina Turner and directors such as Adrian Lyne launched movie careers; respected motion picture directors, including Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, tried their hands at video. Painters Eric Fischi and Robert Longo; novelists Tama Janowitz and Jay Mclnerney; and playwrights Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Beth Henley dabbled in film, video, and music projects.

Revisiting the 1960s

During the 1980s the media seemed obsessed with the baby-boom generation, the "thirtysomethings" who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. A rash of Vietnam War movies—Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), In Country (1989), and Casualties of War (1989)—indicated that the 1960s generation was anxious to reexamine, or even make peace with, their troubling experiences in that decade. Other movies of the 1980s dealt with the changes the baby boom generation underwent between the 1960s and the 1980s. The Big Chill depicts a group of seven college friends who come together for the funeral of a compatriot. Once idealists and rebels, they have been calmed into complacency by material success in their thirties. Baby boomer nostalgia, thanks to the Motown soundtrack, was a key to the success of the movie. Such nostalgia was also expressed in pop songs by aging baby boomers such as Bruce Springsteen ("My Hometown," 1985; "Glory Days," 1985), John Cougar Mellencamp ("Check It Out," 1988; "Cherry Bomb," 1988), and Bryan Adams ("Summer of '69," 1985), each of whom looked back from adult responsibility to the simpler, more vital days of their youth in the 1960s. In 1986 Mellencamp also contributed "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.," a tribute to rock and soul music of the early 1960s. Other wistful backward glances were provided by Starship ("We Built This City," 1985), George Harrison ("All Those Years Ago," 1981), and the Grateful Dead ("Touch of Grey," 1987). Even the post-baby-boom generation could not resist nostalgia; in their work pop artists Ronnie Cutrone and Kenny Scharf resurrected the television cartoons they had watched during their childhoods in the 1960s. Valley Girl(1983) was the first movie to portray a new, inverted generation gap: conservative, materialistic teenagers of the 1980s attempting to tolerate the druggy excesses of their liberal former-hippie parents. In Running on Empty (1988) a teenager is forced to live on the run from the FBI because of his parents' radical political activism in the past. The message of such movies, like that of Tom Cruise movies and David Mamet plays, seemed to be that milking the system was far more enjoyable and profitable than rebelling against it.

Selling the Counterculture

One of the ironies of the conservative Reagan era was the way in which mainstream America embraced and canonized previously underground, countercultural, even subversive artists and images. An appetite for glamour and decadence brought the drug subculture, once the province of fringe dwellers and bohemians, into the living rooms of the wealthy, as chronicled by novelists Bret Easton Ellis, Tom Wolfe, and Jay Mclnerney. Largely for the same reason, Robert Mapplethorpe's glossy homoerotic photographs turned a tidy profit. Wolfe, the best-known chronicler of the hippie counterculture during the 1960s, became a dandyish literary star in the 1980s. Jack Nicholson repackaged his 1970s counterculture image for the 1980s in a series of crowd-pleasing "everyman" roles that allowed him to personify and celebrate lechery and madness. Jane Fonda reversed her legendary 1970s radicalism and became an exercise queen, selling millions of aerobics videos. Former burnout Glenn Frey of The Eagles reemerged in the mid 1980s with new hits and a new pumped-up body, which he showed off in a series of health club advertisements. Others who cleaned up their acts, mended their youthful ways, and polished their images for the 1980s marketplace included John Lennon, Steve Miller, and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Even the Grateful Dead went mainstream, scoring their first Top 40 hit. Meanwhile, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and other stars of the countercultural 1970s comedy program Saturday Night Live were showered with lucrative movie deals. The public cheered as their cutting-edge irreverence and political satire were transformed by Hollywood into harmless and lovable fraternity-boy antics. The Manhattan underground of the late 1970s was repackaged and swallowed up as 1980s commerce. Bands once considered punk, including Talking Heads and Blondie, received full-scale promotion and posted Top 40 hits, while previously "alternative" and "fringe" artists Robert Longo, Laurie Anderson, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, and Kenny Scharf began selling their work for small fortunes. Weird, arty personas and images, only recently considered hopelessly uncommercial by the recording industry, were used to peddle new pop stars such as Cyndi Lauper, Boy George, Annie Lennox, and Prince to the video generation. Some of the most "alternative" musical acts—including R.E.M., Metallica, and Run-D.M.C.—were catapulted into stardom and filled stadiums for their concerts.

Comebacks

In the 1980s "retro" was in, and faded pop-culture heroes returned to the limelight in droves as aging baby boomers became nostalgic. Andy Warhol returned to the limelight amid a new frenzy for pop art. Painter David Hockney, who had raised eyebrows in the late 1960s with his homoerotic poolside images, became one of the wealthiest and most collected artists of the 1980s. Dennis Hopper, best known as the hippie director of Easy Rider (1969), became a mainstream Hollywood hero after appearing in the cult hits Blue Velvet and River's Edge (1987). Cher was reborn as a movie actress, winning an Oscar for Moonstruck (1987). She also resurrected her recording career. Tina Turner emerged triumphantly from Ike Turner's shadow, strutting her stuff on stage, in videos, and in movies. Aretha Franklin returned to the top of the charts, and 1960s heartthrob Tom Jones broke into video with his version of Prince's "Kiss" (1989). The aging and ever-changing singing group Jefferson Airplane reemerged as Starship. The Beach Boys, John Lennon, and George Harrison all returned to the top of the charts. Pop music of the late 1980s began to resemble that of the 1970s, with Heart, Queen, Cheap Trick, the Bee Gees, Boston, and Aerosmith all scoring major hits. Meanwhile, Reagan-inspired nostalgia and a renewed taste for style and elegance made old-time crooners such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennett popular again. Golden Age movie actors—including Henry Fonda, Don Ameche, Katharine Hepburn, and Jessica Tandy—came out of retirement to capture press attention and Oscars. After a slump in the 1970s Disney became the most profitable Hollywood studio, resurrecting the careers of stars such as Bette Midler, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robin Williams.

Causes and Issues

The 1980s were not a decade of greed, style, and self-promotion for everyone. Some artists and entertainers involved themselves in 1960s-style social causes. Others used their work to make political statements. Bob Geldof organized the Band Aid project in 1984 and the Live Aid twin concerts in London and Philadelphia in 1985 to aid victims of famine in Africa, inspiring the USA for Africa collaboration that produced the all-star pop anthem "We Are the World" (1985). The Farm Aid concert held in 1985 sought to raise money to pay off the debts of American farmers, but its chief accomplishment was publicizing the farmers' plight in the 1980s. John Cougar Mellencamp's album Scarecrow and a trio of "save the farm" movies in 1984—Places in the Hearty Country, and The River —had a similar effect, focusing media attention on foreclosures and the disappearance of private ownership. Jessica Lange of Country and Sissy Spacek of The River joined Jane Fonda on Capitol Hill to testify on behalf of American farmers. The AIDS epidemic, disregarded by the government during much of the decade, also prompted arts benefits, including auctions and performances, as well as fund-raising efforts by celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor. Larry Kramer used his play The Normal Heart (1985) to protest government apathy and raise public awareness of the AIDS crisis. Filmmaker Oliver Stone was openly critical of U.S. foreign policy in his movies; in Salvador (1986) he criticized the Reagan administration's military support of the anticommunist regime in Nicaragua. Hardcore punk bands such as the Dead Kennedys and Minor Threat also attacked the administration's policies, staging a Rock Against Reagan tour in 1983. Projects such as the movie Cry Freedom (1987) and Paul Simon's Graceland (1987) album helped to open American eyes to South African apartheid. The rock recording "Sun City" (1985) promoted a boycott of South African entertainment venues.

The Macho Decade

Despite the strong presence of women in the job market and in the culture at large, the arts in the 1980s remained largely a boys' club. In the art world the media focused much attention on the brash, all-male fraternity of Neo-Expressionists and on male pop artists. In Hollywood and on Broadway the decade was characterized by powerful producers and deal makers (almost exclusively men); macho action stars such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger dominated movie screens. At the top of the pop-music scene were all-American-boy rockers such as Bruce Springsteen and all-male heavy metal acts. The burgeoning hip-hop culture was built on male assertiveness and competition, as was the underground punk-rock scene. The model for stage and screen dialogue was created by playwright/screenwriter David Mamet, a master of realistic and hypermasculine speech patterns. Men—especially white men—dominated mass culture so effortlessly that it was often easy to forget minority artists, who had struggled publicly, vocally, and often successfully to win respect and attention in the 1960s and 1970s. Racial and feminist issues, vital to the arts throughout the previous decade, seemed almost invisible for much of the 1980s.

Minorities

Yet American women did continue to make their mark in the arts. Meryl Streep, nominated for six Academy Awards during the 1980s, emerged as a model of strong, independent movie women. Other successful actresses of the 1980s included Glenn Close, Jessica Lange, Debra Winger, Sissy Spacek, and Kathleen Turner. Women began to get a foothold in Hollywood as directors and producers as well. Playwrights Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Wendy Wasserstein were all Pulitzer Prize winners, and novelists Anne Tyler and Anne Rice both won critical acclaim. Video stars such as Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, and Pat Benatar proved that women could be strong, powerful, sexual, and fun. Artists Jenny Holzer and Laurie Anderson influenced the national culture with their provocative wordplay. Even country music, long the home of old-fashioned, docile women, boasted independent new stars such as Reba McIntire and Emmylou Harris. African American artists also achieved mainstream success. Eddie Murphy was a huge crossover star, as were Michael Jackson, Prince, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie, and dozens of others. Wynton Marsalis became a jazz superstar, while playwright August Wilson was the new toast of Broadway. Bill T. Jones emerged as an influential dancer and choreographer; painter Jean-Michel Basquiat became a media sensation. Novelists Toni Morrison and Alice Walker both won Pulitzer Prizes. Hip-hop culture spread from urban ghettos to suburbia thanks to exposure in movies, videos, and galleries. Rap artists such as Run-D.M.C. attracted large interracial audiences.

Gay Visibility

Gay sensibilities and themes, long present in American art, moved closer to mainstream acceptance in the 1980s. Throughout the decade movies as varied as Making Love (1982), Victor/Victoria (1982), Personal Best (1982), Deathtrap (1982), Lianna (1983), Streamers (1983), My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Desert Hearts (1985), Maurice (1987), and Prick Up Your Ears (1987) featured gay characters, story lines, and romances, usually in a sensitive and straightforward way. Novelist David Leavitt and playwrights Larry Kramer and Terence McNally received serious critical attention, while other popular novels and plays—including Ellis's Less Than Zero, Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), and Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles (1988)—treated homosexuality and bisexuality as commonplace. Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and David Hockney were among the best-selling artists of the decade. Popular music and video brought gay performers—especially those in British bands such as Culture Club, Erasure, Dead or Alive, Pet Shop Boys, and Bronski Beat—into American living rooms, while Madonna tweaked listeners and viewers with a defiant sexual ambiguity. Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim flourished on Broadway with his innovative musicals, while Harvey Fierstein won awards for his plays. Mark Morris and collaborators Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane won acclaim for their dance performances and choreography. Film actor Rock Hudson's death from AIDS in 1985, followed by the AIDS-related deaths of Liberace, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and director-choreographer Michael Bennett increased awareness of gay issues throughout America. By the end of the decade emerging gay artists—including singer K. D. Lang, pianist Michael Feinstein, and Gus Van Sant, director of the movie Drugstore Cowboy (1989)—were finding new popularity with mainstream audiences.

Backlash

Despite the apparent assimilation of minorities into mainstream American culture, the arts in the 1980s mirrored continued societal friction over minority issues. The divisiveness of race became more pronounced as Ronald Reagan's economic policies swelled the ranks of the (largely white) rich and the (largely black) poor. The rap group Public Enemy vented their anger with the album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The movie Colors (1988) dealt with interracial violence among warring street gangs. Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities portrayed the uproar over a rich white New Yorker's hit-and-run killing of a poor black youth, while Spike Lee's movie Do the Right Thing (1989) depicted the mutual hostilities of a mixed-race ghetto. August Wilson's play Fences confronted the effect of racism on an aging ballplayer, while Alice Walker's postfeminist novel The Color Purple raised storms of protest over its scathing portrayal of African American men. Many Americans also sensed an antifeminist backlash during the decade, largely the result of Reagan-era conservatism that seemed to prefer women in their traditional cultural roles. This trend was most strongly reflected in Hollywood movies such as Fatal Attraction (1987), Baby Boom, and The Good Mother (1988), which "punished" career women and "rewarded" stay-at-home mothers. Jack Nicholson's crowd-pleasing lament over women in The Witches of Eastwick (1987)—"Do they exist just to torture us?"—was a typical sentiment in movies of the late 1980s. The decade-long wave of slasher and stalker movies also elicited protests that they victimized women, as did music videos (especially heavy metal), which frequently depicted women as passive sex toys. Works by feminist artists such as Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger protested society's continued sexism. Meanwhile, homosexuals found themselves targets of a conservative backlash during the decade, first as a result of AIDS hysteria and Rambo-era machismo and later as a result of a controversy over government funding of the arts.

The Culture War

The insurrectionary works of some minority artists shocked and angered conservative segments of the public in the 1980s, fueling a debate about the place of art in society and the relationship of art, law, and government. While on the whole, consumer spending on art increased during the decade (encouraged by the tax-cutting policies of Ronald Reagan), the president's agenda led to cuts in government funding for the arts. During the 1980s the Christian right spent much of its energy on fighting to censor "subversive" books, movies, recordings, and showings of fine art. In 1989 Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) spearheaded an attempt to make drastic cuts in government funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) after he became outraged over an NEA-funded exhibit that included "obscene" photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. A compromise was reached—funding was curtailed, not eliminated—but Helms's battle was typical of the increasing politicization of the arts during the 1980s. Washington wife Tipper Gore and the Parents' Music Resource Center (PMRC) fought for warning labels on album covers to protect children from raunchy rock lyrics and cover art. Their efforts led to a series of highly publicized congressional hearings on "porn rock." Punk rocker Jello Biafra was acquitted of obscenity charges after a long trial in Los Angeles. Across the United States school boards made headlines by attempting to remove controversial books from school libraries, many of them classic novels by respected authors such as John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and J. D. Salinger. Some of these cases escalated into court battles over students' First Amendment rights; one case reached the Supreme Court. Other popular targets of the Christian Right included "biased" history texts, rap music, "blasphemous" movies and videos, and the "desecration" by artists of the American flag.

Patriotism

If any single impression was left by the Reagan presidency, it was an almost fevered Cold War patriotism that echoed the strong anticommunist rhetoric of the 1950s. Reagan embraced entertainment legends such as liberal Democrat-turned-Republican Frank Sinatra, especially when they fit an image of national pride and religious faith. In 1982 he presented singer Kate Smith with the Medal of Freedom for "inspiring the nation" with her renditions of "God Bless America." He used country singer Lee Greenwood's song "God Bless the U.S.A." as his campaign theme in 1984; Greenwood sang it at the Republican National Convention. When Bruce Springsteen reached new heights of popularity with the release "Born in the U.S.A." (1984), Reagan praised the musician's "patriotic" message in his campaign speeches. He, and many of Springsteen's fans, cheerfully ignored the antigovernment rage of the song, and Springsteen rejected Reagan's attempt to appropriate him and his song for the conservative cause. In Hollywood a host of mid-1980s movies—from Rambo: First Bloody Part 2 (1985) to Missing in Action (1984) to Rocky IV (1985) to Red Dawn (1984)—fought the Cold War on-screen, while flag-wavers such as Top Gun (1986) boosted Reagan's efforts to build a strong national defense. The overall result was a sometimes mindless patriotism not seen in Hollywood since World War II. This movie propaganda was hardly surprising, given Reagan's history as a film actor. In fact, he cultivated an image akin to that of a Western hero riding into town to restore peace, order, and prosperity. At the end of his second term he appeared, waving goodbye, on the cover of Vanity Fair over a title that read "Happy Trails." The Reagan persona was well suited to a decade in which many Americans valued style and image over substance and worshiped wealth and success.

Copyright 2001, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.