sound, video, and live performers played on tradi-
tional stages. Symptomatically, at the beginning of
the decade, Laurie Anderson was signed to a record-
ing contract with Warner Bros., and her perfor-
mance song “O Superman” rose to number two on
the British pop charts. The Blue Man Group, which
in the 1980’s began as three street performers, de-
veloped into a worldwide enterprise with a long-
term contract to appear at the Venetian Hotel and
Casino in Las Vegas.
Impact Performance art both expressed and re-
jected the culture of the 1980’s. It addressed topical
social and political issues, exploited new electronic
technologies, and participated in the exuberant art
market of the decade. It also blurred the distinctions
between high art and popular culture, at a time
when the broader movement of postmodernism was
beginning to reject those very distinctions.
Further Reading
Goldberg, RoseLee.Performance Art: From Futurism to
the Present. Rev. ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams,
- First attempt to place the contemporary
practice of performance art in historical context;
significant bias toward New York-based perfor-
mances.
___.Performance: Live Art Since 1960. New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Goldberg concentrates
on modern developments. Unlike in her earlier
work, she is comfortable here with theorizing and
analyzing recent developments. Useful appen-
dixes include a chronology of performance
events and artists’ biographies.
Roth, Moira. “A History of Performance.”Art Journal
56 (Winter, 1997): 73-83. Included in a special is-
sue on performance art, this is not actually an arti-
cle but a syllabus for Roth’s exhaustive course on
modern and contemporary performance art.
Valuable for its many sources for additional ex-
ploration.
Jean Owens Schaefer
See also ACT UP; Art movements; Camcorders;
Feminism; Glass, Philip; Homelessness; Homosexu-
ality and gay rights; Music; Theater.
PG-13 rating
Definition Film rating
Date Introduced on July 1, 1984
The first adjustment since 1972 to the MPAA film rating
system, the PG-13 rating filled the void that had developed
between the ratings PG and R. This gap reflected shifting
public standards regarding acceptable levels of violence
and adult language in movies aimed at children in their
mid-teens.
In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA) adopted a rating system for commercially
released films. The purpose of the system was to
stave off government censorship by instead adopt-
ing a means for the film industry to regulate itself. By
1984, there were four possible ratings: G (general
audiences), PG (parental guidance suggested), R
(restricted), and X (persons under seventeen not
admitted). Films receiving an R rating under this sys-
tem could not expect to generate significant reve-
nue from the teen market, because children under
seventeen years of age were allowed to see such films
only in the presence of a parent or adult guardian.
Thus, directors of films that were geared toward
teens were often contractually obligated to ensure
that those films received PG ratings, reediting R-
rated films as necessary to gain the lower rating.
Several incidents revealed that the PG rating cov-
ered too wide an age range of viewers and was being
inconsistently applied. In 1975, the MPAA ratings
board wanted to giveJaws(1975) an R rating for
strong violence, but Universal Pictures, fearing the
consequent loss of revenue from teenage viewers,
slightly edited the film then successfully lobbied to
receive a PG rating with the warning “May be too in-
tense for younger viewers.” Such movies asPoltergeist
(1982) and Disney’sDragonslayer(1981) received PG
ratings, despite containing what many considered to
be R levels of violence.
The same ambiguities existed concerning adult
language. The Academy Award winner for Best Pic-
ture,Ordinar y People(1980), received an R rating
solely because a character uttered a strong expletive
once during the film. Some critics protested that it
should have been rated PG. Another Best Picture
winner,Terms of Endearment(1983), received a PG de-
spite its characters’ use of adult language in several
scenes. In each case, the MPAA received angry let-
ters from parents protesting the assigned ratings.The Eighties in America PG-13 rating 755