Robert Wilson and Philip Glass create "Einstein on the Beach," inventing a new kind of American opera that is not bound to conventional text or singing, let alone to traditional plot or psychology, but rather extends performance art into an opera of images. Its huge success has the effect of mainstreaming Minimalist music and setting both Glass and Wilson off into major international opera careers.
*
1980
Movies
John Sayles directs "Return of the Secaucus Seven." If the modern American independent movement, which spawned everything from Sundance to Miramax, had a first step, this $40,000 gem was it.
*
1980
Television
Cable technology had years of relatively obscure life as a means of improving reception in isolated areas when the first cable network, HBO, was created in 1972. It was the forerunner of an explosion that, along with the birth of Fox, the WB and UPN, would deliver to viewers an ever-expanding Rolodex of program options. The most important of these surfaced 19 years ago when that exotic visionary Ted Turner launched CNN, a 24-hour news network that became a precursor of the 24-hour news cycle that presently drives much U.S. media.
*
1980s and 90s
Mass Media
The boardrooms, they are changing. As mergers and buyouts proliferate in the great biosphere of communications, the milieu's elite are shrinking in number as their empires become vaster and ever more incestuously interwoven. Recent cross-pollinating--from the Walt Disney Co. acquiring Capital Cities/ABC to Time Warner Inc. absorbing Turner Broadcasting--has centered communications power in fewer hands. And now comes the proposed monster of all mergers, Viacom Inc.'s recently announced planned takeover of CBS Corp. This big-bloc fervor in communications signals expanded homogeneity instead of diversity for the new century. Not a healthy prospect.
*
1984
Opera
Next-generation Minimalist opera composer John Adams writes "Nixon in China" in collaboration with director Peter Sellars and librettist Alice Goodman. Unlike the less narrative work of Glass and Wilson, Adams and Sellars demonstrate how American opera can also mythologize the moment, creating "CNN opera," which will help revitalize the form and connect it with the popular imagination.
*
1980s
Art
Internationalism. The return to prominence of European art, led by German artists, and the consolidation of Los Angeles as a second production center for American art, signal the beginning of the end of a monolithic art scene dominated first by Paris, then by New York.
*
1987
Jazz
Wynton Marsalis co-founds the Lincoln Center Jazz Program. His insistence upon reexamining the history of jazz triggers a neoclassical period through most of the '90s, in which a generation of young lions--Terence Blanchard, Roy Hargrove, Marcus Roberts among many others--emerges. In addition, his pioneering work in positioning jazz within the cultural stream influences the creation of similar programs in Washington, Los Angeles and elsewhere.
*
1989
Pop Music
N.W.A ups the stakes in rap. Though Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC and Public Enemy played invaluable roles in establishing rap, N.W.A shaped the music's future with its raw, explosive commentary, which was sometimes illuminating and sometimes ugly. The group--which included one of the genre's most effective rappers (Ice Cube) and one of its most accomplished producers (Dr. Dre)--laid a foundation for rap to become the first sound in 40 years to replace rock as the music of choice of young America.
*
1993
Movies
"Jurassic Park" proves computer-generated imagery is here to stay. While James Cameron was a pioneer in the use of CGI effects in films like "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2," those films were not as dependent on effects as this Steven Spielberg dinosaur epic. Those visuals were the sole reason the film grossed hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide, making CGI irresistible to filmmakers, from Cameron in "Titanic" to Atom Egoyan, who used them to sink a school bus in "The Sweet Hereafter."
*
1997
Art & Architecture
Frank O. Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is one of the great buildings of the century and, perhaps more important, a work that has renewed the public's faith in architecture's potential to transform a city's culture. The building's euphoric, sensual forms are the culmination of Gehry's search for a truly populist architecture, while the structure's deep connection to its tough, industrial site reaffirms the architect's desire to root his work in the postindustrial landscape. The building sums up architecture's ultimate liberation from Modernist dogma as the century comes to a close.
*
1998-99
Opera
Peter Sellars creates an updated "Peony Pavilion," while Lincoln Center stages the whole Chinese enchilada in a manner resembling but not dutiful toward the original. Together these versions of the 400-year-old classic kunju opera demonstrate new possibilities for a new century that surely will be multicultural in ways we can't even imagine.
*
1999
Movies
After struggling for decades to achieve financial parity with directors and actors, Hollywood's underappreciated screenwriters make a historic agreement with Sony Pictures. The pact grants gross points (a percentage of a film's pre-expense revenues--which no more than 10 screenwriters had gotten in all of Hollywood history) to three broad classes of writers in exchange for script commitments from a group of 30. Though it's too early to say how this agreement will play out, it has all the earmarks of a breakthrough.
