Word: 80s
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After World War II, nothing of such magnitude would be tried in America; the triumph of the glass-box International Style meant the death of ornament and a recoil from "fine" material. Nor, in the '70s and '80s, was the cheap pasteboard revivalism of Postmodernist historical quotation going to revive a sense of grandeur. Moreover, with the exception of various memorials, and of such projects as Richard Meier's six-building Getty Center in Los Angeles (to be completed later this year), the level of grand commissions for public benefit flattened...
...create public art because of the erosion of shared public values; perhaps the privacy and obscurity of so much of the art itself; perhaps the shift of social discourse toward the moving image and away from the static one. More likely a mixture of all three. In the '80s and '90s, things would get big and expensive, but no longer grand...
...hard to get used to. As an undergraduate in the late 1970s, it was easy to cultivate foreboding: democracy seemed washed up; both inflation and unemployment were out of control; warheads were pointed our way; the '60s had left a residue of chaos without idealism (you know--Altamont). The '80s brought fresh stuff to find deeply troubling: recession, Star Wars weapons, Reaganomics, leveraged-buyout layoffs, greed, soaring deficits, Michael Dukakis as a potential President. Now? Well, let's see: there's the failure of the budget deal to adequately address middle-class entitlements. A nontrivial problem, but not a crisis...
They're buying better cuts of meat, says the butcher, but driving an extra 100 miles to get a better car deal; saving money on toilet paper at Wal-Mart--"I never did that in the '80s," says a local businessman--so they have extra to spend on a better breed of golf club. The deli owner was confident enough to start her own business, but is worried enough that she doesn't yet dare raise the price of a liverwurst above $3.50. The local bankers see people with as much as $70,000 in charge-card debt, which could...
...usually mirrored the country's fortunes. Right now that reflection is beguiling: new construction in Ross County has quadrupled in the past seven years; the average home, which sold for $49,700 in 1989, now sells for $84,200. The pretty downtown brick buildings, hollowed and haunted in the '80s, are being turned into stores with condo apartments on top. "In 1990 I don't remember one ribbon cutting for a new business," says David Milliken, president of the Chillicothe-Ross Chamber of Commerce. "Lately we've had about one every month...