Word: publicity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Twenty years ago, you might not have got $1,000 for the Pre-Raphaelite painting that now fetches $100,000. The $30,000 Tiffany lamp was not worth $3,000, and so on. One is left with the impression-indeed it is cultivated assiduously by the largest gaggle of public relations people ever to batten on the flank of culture-that art prices can only go up; the market has transcended its old uncertainty, whether the objects are million-dollar Titians or ten-buck trash "collectibles...
...this drift away from serious, intelligent exhibition toward spectacle will increase. There will be much more wrapping for mass appeal, in the form of Tut-style blockbusters and Pompeian frolics. Meanwhile, the proper functions of the museum will receive proportionately less support, because they are not "sexy." As corporate public relations firms insert their flackery into the curatorial arena, diminishing the museum's own control of what it shows while encouraging clients to favor exhibitions with guaranteed pull, the situation will not improve. Eventually, we may be reduced to the Ultimate Art Show, a display of all the gold...
...Britain's wartime Prime Minister. Since young Winston at the time was the Conservative Party's junior shadow defense minister, the disclosure raised questions. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher squelched them by informing the Commons: "I am satisfied there has been no breach of security in the public service." Was Churchill's political career imperiled? Said another M.P.: "If the criterion for this place is that you haven't committed any infidelity, then there would be a hell of a lot of by-elections...
...would never have admitted to such sentiments. But today, peering calmly into his own heart, Smiley knew that he was unled, and perhaps unleadable; that the only restraints upon him were those of his own reason, and his own humanity. As with his marriage, so with his sense of public service. I invested my life in institutions-he thought without rancour-and all I am left with is myself...
...life crises threaten to become as much a cliché in literature as they are in life. Yet Piers Paul Read, 38, puts a lot of his native English on this familiar pitch. He knows, as most chroniclers of Me Decade shenanigans do not, that private acts have public consequences; in the great tradition of British novelists, he draws society as a delicate, vast spider web, tuned to vibrate at the lightest footfall or breath of scandal. In addition, Read is a self-described "serious Catholic" and scales this novel to dimensions familiar to readers of Graham Greene: his hero...