The New York Times Style magazine indulged in 1980s nostalgia Sunday, with a special issue that obsessively examined 1981-1983, claimed as the most brilliant creative era in the city's history.
Focusing on those two years distorts history by taking too narrow a view. The 1980s' cultural developments began much earlier, and continued long past 1983. Shadowing the issue's claims of the era's enduring importance are later events such as gentrification and Sept. 11, largely unexamined.
Perhaps the Times Style magazine is going through the same stirrings of historical regret that led the newspaper recently to produce retrospective obituaries on leading women the newspaper had ignored when they died.
The Times has long been faulted for its superficial coverage of its own city, and I doubt the newspaper gave the 1980s the same in-depth coverage when the era was unfolding day by day as the Style magazine gives the period looking back more than 30 years later.
Maybe the Times can be inspired by the Style magazine to give today's city the same level of imaginative coverage in its news pages. All too often, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and New York magazine produce more insightful stories about New York than the Times.
The Style magazine's brilliant ideas promote a dubious premise.
Editor Hanya Yanagihara makes the breathless claim for the early 1980s that "this was perhaps the most culturally fecund time in the city's history." She also says that the artists, actors and writers who emerged in that period, "are truly New York's greatest generation."
While I was enthralled by the articles in the special section, my overall impression is of wasted talent and a cultural dead end. A major theme is the onset of AIDS, which devastated an entire generation. Many of the artists mentioned died young, although their works continue to bring high prices. Writer Edmund White in a funereal essay mourns what might have been.
The special section takes note of Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City" as the central novel of the time. I like McInerney, especially his later work, but I don't see him in the same league as Edith Wharton, Herman Melville or even New Yorker writers like E.B. White.
Aritsts like Jeff Koons receive attention. Are he, and other artists mentioned, of the same stature of artists like William De Kooning and Jackson Pollock?
The actors profiled continue to have a presence in theater, TV and movies. But none is a major star.
In the 1920s, editors like the New Yorker's Harold Ross and Time/Life's Harry Luce created a new national industry. The Times' own Adoph Ochs invented the model for the modern American newspaper. CBS and NBS were created in New York. During the first half of the 20th century, New York dominated the nation's music, theater and entertainment, to a greater scale than during the 1980s.
The New York theater before the 1980s produced playwrights like Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neil, Tennessee Williams and Clifford Odets. Rodgers and Hart. Rodgers and Hammerstein.
While exciting, the early '80s in New York were a time of devastation, epidemic disease, urban squalor, soaring crime, and wasted talent.
Phrases like "greatest generation" are dubious. The artists, writers, musicians and actors of the 1990s produced iconoclastic work, but better artists came before and after.
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