Word: 80s
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...what is done is done. The hard lesson of the past decade is that liquidity, to many people, may be all that art means. The art market has become the faithful cultural reflection of the wider economy in the '80s, inflated by leveraged buyouts, massive junk-bond issues and vast infusions of credit. What is a picture worth? One bid below what someone will pay for it. And what will that person pay for it? Basically, what he or she can borrow. And how much art can dance for how long on this particular pinhead? Nobody has the slightest idea...
...insurance? When the Metropolitan Museum of Art's show "Van Gogh at Arles" was being planned in the early '80s, it was assigned a global value for insurance of about $1 billion. Today it would be $5 billion, and the show could never be done. In the wake of Irises, every Van Gogh owner wants to believe his painting is worth $50 million and will not let it off the wall if insured for less. Even there, the problem is compounded by the auction houses: when consulted on insurance values or by the IRS, they tend to stick the maximum...
...harping on the investment value of art, by hiring personable young sales cadres to explain the significance of the Meissen jug or the not-quite-Rubens, by creating user-friendly expertise, the auctioneers defused this wariness. By the early '80s dealers were getting cut out of the game by collectors buying directly at auction. And by 1988, when the auction room had been promoted into a Reagan-decade cathouse of febrile extravagance, where people in black tie and jewels applauded winning bids as though they were arias sung by heroic tenors, private dealers (at least those dealing in the work...
Disney and Don Bluth can lead the way. Walt Disney, after all, created the genre, turning barnyard animals into superstars and a Sunday-supplement curiosity into the movie's most enduring subspecies. Bluth, a Disney renegade, showed his old masters that the cartoon possessed a social vitality for the '80s. Bluth's The Secret of NIMH was a parable on animal experimentation; An American Tail found much to say, endearingly, about melting-pot prejudice; The Land Before Time found love and death among the dinosaurs. Now Disney and Bluth have launched a welcome new Thanksgiving tradition, each producing a feature...
...Government may have been right to take this terrible RICO blunderbuss and use it to scare the living daylights out of Wall Street, because Wall Street's level of greed and immorality in the '80s had reached a cyclical peak...