Word: 80s
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...mildly, the biggest names of the '80s had no such compunctions about money. Koons, a former commodities trader, publicized his 1988 "Banality" show with color-photo magazine ads that showed him on a pony being fed cake by a model in a bikini--the artist as king of the world. In another he was cavorting with pigs. Thinking back on that ad now, Koons has a simple explanation. "I thought I would call myself a pig before the viewer could, so they could only think more of me," he says. And anyway, he has had the last laugh. He turned...
Many artists and collectors in the '80s were also bored with the astringent minimalism of the prior decade. All those no-nonsense Donald Judd boxes--it was only a matter of time before a new generation came along to scribble on blank slates. That was how it felt when Basquiat's bright, hectic canvases started appearing. In Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, an '82 picture in the Brooklyn show, he applied broad washes of pigment in a way that suggests a cross between Willem de Kooning's surfs of color and any kid's finger paintings...
Mary Boone was one of the art dealers who epitomized the overheated art market of the '80s. The spike-heeled opening night, the waiting list for collectors hoping to buy from the hottest artists--it was all part of a culture of desire that she helped bring to a high pitch. Her stable of artists was diverse, but in the public's mind Boone was the woman behind big, thumping Neo-Expressionists like Schnabel. For a time she also represented Basquiat. Today she still has a thriving business at two locations in Manhattan. And as she sees...
...resale market, in which dealers helped collectors unload pictures they often had not held long in the first place. Paintings were "flipped" like Miami condos and traded like pork bellies--not a market designed to cultivate an artist's career over the long haul. "I try to forget the '80s as much as possible," says Robert Longo. "I was a total egomaniac, a lunatic child at that point." Early in the decade, Longo became famous for large-scale realistic drawings of business-suited men and women in lurching, heaving postures--a not-bad portrait of the young middle classes being...
...hand, I'm also associated with ideas about changes in technology, the digitalization of culture, that I find young artists are very interested in." And for all his reservations about the decade's club-crawling, fashion-flaunting, big-paint-splattering beginnings, he has good things to say about the '80s as an arena of ideas. "In the '80s, you had a bunch of very distinctive notions about what a work should be about. I can't locate a group of artists now about whom I would say, 'This is really interesting. This is a new direction...