The 1980s Arts and Entertainment: Headline Makers

Keith Haring (1958–1990) Artist Keith Haring loved the raw energy and sense of life in subway graffiti. Drawing inspiration from it for his own work, he created images that often resembled thickly outlined hieroglyphics or cave drawings. His work became perhaps the most universal, influential, and popular art of the 1980s. In addition to creating paintings that were displayed in museums, Haring also created murals for school-yards and on the sides of inner-city buildings. In 1986, three Haring works were placed in the sculpture garden at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

Whitney Houston (1963–) Singer Whitney Houston released her self-titled debut album in early 1985 to critical and commercial acclaim. Filled with conventional pop ballads and dance numbers, the album stayed at the top of the music charts for forty-six weeks and sold over thirteen million copies. Houston's powerful vocal talent was further featured on her next album, Whitney, released in 1987. It was the first album by a female singer to debut on the top of the Billboard charts. Between 1985 and 1988, Houston had seven consecutive number-one hit songs.

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Stephen King (1947–) Stephen King was possibly the most prolific and most famous novelist of the 1980s. A one-man best-seller factory, he turned out as many as four novels in a single fifteen-month period. By 1985, there were fifty million copies of King's horror books in print, earning him more than twenty million dollars. He earned three million dollars alone as an advance for It (1986), which was ranked number one on the New York Times best-seller list before it was officially published. Many of his bestsellers were quickly adapted into money-making movies during the decade.

Barbara Kruger (1945–) In the late 1970s, Barbara Kruger began using an artistic form that would mark her work throughout the next decade: putting typed messages directly on top of photographs she took from magazines. The combined pictures and words made her work confrontational and political, such as "You are an experiment in terror" placed over a picture of a hand holding an exploding firecracker. Much of her best work had feminist messages. Kruger's art proved popular and easy to sell in the 1980s, and it was quickly adapted to postcards, T-shirts, and posters.

Wynton Marsalis (1961–) Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis caught the jazz world by surprise in the early 1980s with his technical mastery. Skilled in both jazz and classical, a rare musical talent, Marsalis received a recording contract from Columbia Records in 1981 to record music in both styles. He was just twenty years old. Three years later, in 1984, Marsalis became the first musician ever to win Grammy Awards in jazz and classical in the same year. Remarkably, he repeated the following year, becoming the only person in history to have won back-to-back classical and jazz Grammys.

Steven Spielberg (1947–) Steven Spielberg was the most important moviemaker in Hollywood in the 1980s. He not only directed some of the decade's biggest movies—Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)—but served as producer on others—Poltergeist (1982) and Back to the Future (1985). In 1985, Spielberg surprised everyone by directing The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker's acclaimed novel about the struggles of an African American woman in the rural South. Although some felt the movie was oversimplified, Spielberg won the Director's Guild prize for his effort.

Bruce Springsteen (1949–) In 1984, Bruce Springsteen released Born in the USA. The immediate success of the album caught everyone by surprise. Always popular with critics, Springsteen previously had a small fan base. But the album spawned seven top-ten hits and sold fifteen million copies (it became the seventh best-selling album in U.S. history). The accompanying tour took Springsteen around the world to play in stadium-sized venues. Shows typically sold out in minutes. Springsteen, who had made the covers of both Time and Newsweek in 1975, was featured again on the cover of Newsweek.

August Wilson (1945–) August Wilson emerged as the most highly acclaimed new playwright of the 1980s. Audiences and critics were charmed by his keen instinct for character, dialogue, and blues music. They also responded to his subtle handling of racial and political issues. His first three Broadway productions—Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1987), and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1987)—won New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for best drama. Fences, which also won a Pulitzer Prize for best drama and a Tony Award, set a new box-office record for nonmusicals.