Welcome to the last installment of our admittedly Eurocentric, somewhat Anglophiliac, U.S.-heavy and Chicago-focused chronicle of the most important cutural events of the last 1,000 years.
(Movie) 1968. “2001: A Space Odyssey” and its dazzling effects open new worlds in space.
(Music) 1968. James Brown sings “Say It Loud-I’m Black and I’m Proud,” the anthem for a new era of black empowerment.
(Theater) 1968. Gerald Arpino unveils “The Clowns,” a visually striking ballet with an anti-nuclear theme.
(Visual art) 1969. Polish weaver Magdalena Abakanowicz creates “Abakan Rouge,” a shaped, monumental, free-hanging tapestry that changes the face of fiber art.
1969. The Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network is created as a system for exchanging messages among military bases, defense contractors and academics. This complex of telephone lines, switchboards and other equipment along with the software developed to run it became the original backbone of today’s Internet.
(Music) 1969. Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors and Joseph Jarman form the Art Ensemble of Chicago, conquering Paris and rising as one of the most influential acoustic avant-garde units of the past 30 years.
(Movie) 1969. Hollywood’s moral landscape is changed by the X-rated Oscar-winner “Midnight Cowboy,” the low-budget biker smash “Easy Rider” and Sam Peckinpah’s ultra-violent “The Wild Bunch.”
(Music) 1969. The Woodstock rock festival draws hundreds of thousands of young people to upstate New York for three days of peace and love, drugs and music in the mud.
(Music) 1969. The Altamont rock festival draws hundreds of thousands of young people to Northern California for a free Rolling Stones concert, and a young man is killed in front of the stage by Hell’s Angels security guards.
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(Music) 1969. Opera meets rock in The Who’s “Tommy.”
(Theater) 1969. Arthur Mitchell, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, forms the Dance Theater of Harlem with Karel Shook.
(Music) 1970. German groups such as Tangerine Dream, Can and Kraftwerk usher in the age of electronic pop music.
(Visual art) 1970. California artist Robert Irwin abandons his studio and begins working purely with light and space; a world of artistic possibility opens.
(Music) 1970. The Beatles break up.
(Movie) 1970. IMAX, the huge-screen film process, is first exhibited at Japan’s Expo 70.
(Architecture) 1970. Completion of Chicago’s 100-story John Hancock Center, a high-water mark of postwar modernism.
(Television) 1970. Professional women get their own TV hero as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” debuts.
(Television) 1971. TV comedy loses its polite veneer as “All in the Family” finds humor in working-class bigot Archie Bunker.
(Music) 1971. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” brings a new political dimension to black pop.
(Movie) 1971. “Grease,” a raunchy musical about Chicago high school greasers, opens its international career in Kingston Mines Theatre, a ex-trolley barn on Lincoln Avenue.
(Visual art) 1972. The term “Imagism” is misapplied to a group of young Chicago fantasy artists and it sticks; in the next decade it will become synonymous with the “Chicago School” of painting including artists as different as Roger Brown, Jim Nutt and Ed Paschke.
(Architecture) 1972. The destruction of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler’s Chicago Stock Exchange Building spurs the organization of a historic preservation movement in Chicago.
(Television) 1972. HBO, the nation’s first pay-TV network, is launched.
(Visual art) 1973. Twyla Tharp’s breakthrough work, “Deuce Coupe,” premieres in Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre.
(Architecture) 1974. Rising 1,450-feet, Sears Tower snatches the world’s tallest building title away from New York City’s World Trade Center.
(Theater) 1974. Mikhail Baryshnikov, the greatest male ballet dancer of the 20th Century and perhaps the greatest ever, defects to the West.
(Theater) 1974. “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” the first full-length drama of 27-year-old David Mamet, is presented by the Organic Theatre of Chicago.
(Theater) 1975. Wooster Group forms in New York. Its blend of theater, visual art, technology and text influences everybody from Peter Sellars to Marilyn Manson.
(Movie) 1975. New all-time box-office champ “Jaws” introduces the world to its most popular moviemaker, Steven Spielberg.
(Theater) 1975. “A Chorus Line,” a monumental American musical, conceived, directed and co-choroeographed by Michael Bennett, opens at the Public Theatre in New York.
(Television) 1975. Sony pioneers the VCR in 1975 with its revolutionary Betamax machine.
(Theater) 1976. Director-designer Robert Wilson’s collaboration with composer Philip Glass, “Einstein on the Beach,” a five-hour opera, premieres at the Festival d’Avignon and the Venice Biennale. With “Einstein on the Beach,” performance art becomes high art.
(Theater) 1976. A group of young actors, fresh out of Illinois State University, opens a series of four one-acts in a Highland Park church school basement. They call themselves Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble.
(Architecture) 1976. Architect Harry Weese’s Metro rapid transit system opens in Washington, D.C. and becomes one of the century’s greatest public spaces.
(Movie) 1977. “Saturday Night Fever” is released and becomes the soundtrack for the disco age .
(Movie) 1977. “Star Wars” opens and a new blockbuster mentality takes hold in Hollywood.
(Theater) 1977. Choreographer Lou Conte and a group that will eventually become Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, the city’s leading contemporary dance company and one of the best in the nation, give their first public performances.
(Television) 1977. The miniseries “Roots” is broadcast on ABC and mass culture finally addresses slavery.
(Visual art) 1977. The Georges Pompidou Center opens in Paris; it will become one of the world’s busiest arts complexes.
(Music) 1977. Ruben Blades, with Willie Colon, releases his first record, “Metiendo Mano,” and changes the face of salsa.
(Architecture) 1978. Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s design for the AT&T Building in New York City is unveiled, its top resembling a Chippendale dresser. Subsequently, postmodern office towers with decorated facades rise throughout American cities.
(Music) 1978. The Sex Pistols complete their first, brief and chaotic tour of America, and then break up.
(Visual art) 1979. Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” premieres in Los Angeles to tremendous controversy but becomes an icon of feminist art.
(Music) 1979. The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” takes rap out of the streets and onto record for the first time.
(Visual art) 1980. James N. Wood becomes director of the Art Institute of Chicago; his tenure will include a new wing, renovation of galleries in every department and the mounting of several attendance-breaking exhibitions including the 1997 “Renoir Portraits.”
(Visual art) 1980. Sony Walkman hits the market and music hits the sidewalks.
(Music) 1980. A deranged fan assassinates John Lennon.
(Television) 1981. MTV goes on the air, and how music is made, marketed and perceived is forever changed.
(Theater) 1981. The musical “Cats” opens in London; it will become the longest-running London and Broadway musical in history.
(Visual art) 1981. An unknown Yale University undergraduate Maya Lin wins the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
(Music) 1982. Introduction of the compact disc recording, which will eventually supplant the Long Playing disc.
(Music) 1982. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is released and goes on to sell more than 30 million copies worldwide-the biggest-selling album in history.
(Music) 1982. Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” signals the political coming-of-age of hip-hop.
(Television) 1984. “The Cosby Show,” about a middle-class African-American family, begins an dominant eight-year run.
(Music) 1985. Live Aid, the most ambitious rock concert to date, devoted to charity and dubbed a new Woodstock by many, captures the world’s attention for an entire July day and demonstrates the art form’s widespread popularity in this peak period.
(Architecture) 1985. Architect Helmut Jahn’s postmodern State of Illinois Center (later renamed the James R. Thompson Center) opens in Chicago to enormous controversy.
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(Visual art) 1986. The new Musee d’Orsay in Paris sets the most radical example of showing art in the world, presenting the entire panoply of 19th Century styles as they unfolded rather than giving prominence only to recognized masterpieces.
(Theater) 1986. Twyla Tharp premieres her masterpiece, “In the Upper Room,” untitled at the time, at the Ravinia Festival .
(Theater) 1986. 20th-Century Fox launches the Fox Network, the first real challenge to the Big Three.
(Theater) 1987. August Wilson’s arrival as a major American dramatist is confirmed by the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for “Fences.”
(Visual art) 1987. The death of Andy Warhol fixes his position as the American artist who redefined the image late 20th Century artists had of themselves, bringing them more in line with movie and rock stars.
(Theater) 1987. Chicago City Ballet, the city’s major resident classical troupe for 13 years, disbands.
(Music) 1988. Mano Negra releases “Patchanka,” a wild mix of styles in French, English and Spanish, giving birth to Latin rock.
(Theater) 1988. Ballet Chicago is created by former New York City Ballet dancer Daniel Duell on the ashes of Chicago City Ballet.
(Music) 1989. 2 Live Crew releases “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” the first recording ever declared obscene by an American court of law. It ushers in an era of explicitness in pop music.
(Movie) 1989. U.S. black cinema produces its first masterpiece: Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.”
(Music) 1989. Trumpeter-bandleader Wynton Marsalis releases “The Majesty of the Blues,” a stunning suite that marks his arrival as a major composer of epic works.
(Visual art) 1989. Photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano are denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate, beginning an attack on government arts funding that has recurred with varying intensity to this day.
(Music) 1989. Art meets politics: Leonard Bernstein conducts a special performance of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony (with the word “freedom” substituted for “joy” in the “Ode to Joy” finale) in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.
(Television) 1989. “The Simpsons” becomes a hit in its first year, a rare animated series in network prime time and a withering, satirical look at family life in America.
(Music) 1991. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” becomes a major hit, and, coinciding with the commercially successful debut of the Lollapalooza festival, headlined by Jane’s Addiction, signals the emergence of “alternative rock” as a major commercial force in pop music.
(Music) 1991. The artist then known as Prince attends an L.A. performance of the Joffrey Ballet, leading to “Billboards,” popular program of works set to his music and a key to the debt-ridden company’s survival.
(Theater) 1991. The Dance Center of Columbia College hosts the first Chicago version of DanceAfrica at the Medinah Temple.
(Television) 1992. Johnny Carson ends his extraordinary 30-year run as host of NBC’s latenight champion, “The Tonight Show,” triggering a major shift in late night TV.
(Literature) 1993. Novelist Toni Morrison wins the Nobel Prize for literature.
(Music) 1994. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain kills himself, the tragic hero of rock’s angst-ridden Generation X.
(Television) 1995-The boom year for mini-satellite dishes, which breaks the cable tyranny and, with their multiple channels of pay per view movies, suggest the future where TV will be available at the viewer’s demand and not according to some arbirtrary network schedule.
(Music) 1995. Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” is released; it sells more than 28 million copies and culminates a decade in which female rock performers from Liz Phair to PJ Harvey emerged with unprecedented strength.
(Theater) 1995. The Joffrey Ballet announces it will relocate to Chicago.
(Architecture) 1996. Sears Tower loses its world’s tallest title to the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia.
(Music) 1997. Sarah McLachlan’s “Lilith Fair” for women rock and pop performers becomes one of the top-earning pop music festivals.
(Architecture) 1997. Architect Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain opens to wide acclaim, and opens the way to an architecture of the 21st Century with its fragmented, computer-generated forms.
(Architecture) 1997. The $1 billion Getty Center, designed by Richard Meier, opens in L.A.
(Movie) 1997. “Titanic,” the most expensive movie ever made, becomes the first movie to earn more than $1 billion worldwide.
(Television) 1997. The digital video disc (DVD) enters the home video field in earnest.
(Theater) 1998. Western opera reaches mainland China with a lavish staging, involving Western and Chinese artists and a Chinese production team, of Puccini’s “Turandot” in the Forbidden City of Beijing.
(Visual art) 1998. Computer animation and digital effects soar to new levels in live-action films (“What Dreams May Come”) and in animated features (“Antz,” “A Bug’s Life”).
(Music) 1998. A merger between Polygram and Universal creates the world’s largest record company; as a result, thousands of employees will lose their jobs and dozens of bands will be dropped. The deal shrinks the number of multinational conglomerates that control the record business from six to five.
(Music) 1998. A new file format, MP3, emerges, making it easier than ever to download music from the Internet. It promises to revolutionize how music is distributed to consumers in the 21st Century, and threatens the existence of retail stores and the music-industry itself.
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Sources: American Architecture and Urbanism; Frank Lloyd Wright; I.M. Pei: A Profile in American Architecture; AIA Guide to Chicago; The Landmarks of New York; For the Glory of Washington; Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture; Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks; Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States; The Master Builders: Le Corbusier/Mies van der Rohe/Frank Lloyd Wright; The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows; The Encyclopedia of Literature; Masterpieces of World Literature”; African America: Portrait of a People; Africans In America: America’s Journey Through Slavery; Black Genius and the American Experience; Timelines of the Arts and Literature; The Timelines of History; Calendar of Creative Man; The Oxford Companion to Art.