The 1980s Arts and Entertainment: Chronology

1980:      President Jimmy Carter cancels a Washington exhibit of works from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad to protest the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.

1980:     April 13 Grease, the longest-running show on Broadway to date, closes after 3,388 performances.

1981:      The portable Sony Walkman becomes a huge seller, popularizing "mobile" music.

1981:      The University of Pennsylvania Press publishes the complete, unedited version of Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie, first published in 1900, including thirty-six thousand words that the original publisher, Frank Doubleday, considered too sexually explicit.

1981:     August 1 MTV (Music Television) begins broadcasting. Its first video is the Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star.

1982:      Michael Jackson releases Thriller, which becomes the top-selling album in history.

1982:      Compact discs (CDs) are introduced by the Sony Corporation of Japan and Philips of the Netherlands.

1982:      Steven Spielberg's movie E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial earns a record $235 million at the box office in only three months.

1983:     May 25 The movie Return of the Jedi sets an opening-day box-office record of $6.2 million.

1983:     September 29 After 3,389 performances, A Chorus Line becomes the longest-running show in the history of Broadway.

1984:      Run-D.M.C.'s self-titled debut album becomes the first rap album to be certified gold.

1984:     February 25 Michael Jackson wins eight Grammy Awards for his album Thriller, which tops thirty-seven million copies in sales and also earns him seven American Music Awards.

1984:     June 19 The Motion Picture Association of America institutes the PG-13 rating.

1985:      Madonna's Like a Virgin becomes the first album by a female artist to sell more than five million copies.

1985:      The all-star recording "We Are the World," released under the name USA for Africa, becomes the hottestselling single of the decade and raises more than $50 million for African famine relief.

1985:     July 13 The Live Aid concert held in London and Philadelphia is broadcast to more than 1.6 billion people around the world and raises $70 million for African famine relief.

1985:     September 22 Farm Aid, a concert organized by Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John (Cougar) Mellencamp to raise funds for American farmers, is held in Champaign, Illinois.

1986:     February 26 Robert Penn Warren is named the first poet laureate of the United States.

1986:     May 5 Cleveland, Ohio, is chosen as the site for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

1987:      George Michael's song "I Want Your Sex" is banned from many radio-station playlists because its lyrics are considered too suggestive to be heard by young listeners.

1987:     October 5 Thirteen New York dance companies perform a Dancing for Life benefit for AIDS research.

1988:      Whitney Houston becomes the first recording artist in Billboard history to have four number-one songs from a single album; only one month later, Michael Jackson breaks this record with five number-one singles from his Bad album.

1988:      Total spending for cultural events, $3.4 billion, exceeds spending on spectator sports for the first time in American history.

1988:     September 2 Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Tracy Chapman launch a benefit concert tour for Amnesty International, a worldwide organization dedicated to freeing political prisoners.

1989:      A self-portrait by painter Pablo Picasso sells for $47.85 million, a record sum for a twentieth-century work; later in the year, that record is broken by the sale of Picasso's Pierrette's Wedding for $51.3 million.

1989:      Willem de Kooning's Interchange sells for $20.7 million, a record for a living artist.

1989:      Motion pictures gross a record $5 billion.