Word: 80s
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...people who run the Brooklyn Museum have a new retrospective of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and they are doing their best right now to summon the spirit of the '80s. Basquiat, who died in 1988 at age 27, is the graffiti artist who personified certain dimensions of that decade as completely as his onetime girlfriend Madonna. So on a recent Saturday afternoon, a large area on the museum's fifth floor was given over to break dancers busting out moves. In a corner, a DJ fiddled with his turntable while a crowd of kids watched. A couple of guys...
...produced some irresistible work. After it wraps up in Brooklyn on June 5, the exhibition moves on to Los Angeles and Houston, bringing cross-country the Basquiat debate--Was he the last inheritor of the Modernist tradition? A puerile nobody? Something in between?--and its attendant recollections of the '80s. Meanwhile, a sizable show called "East Village USA" has just completed a three-month run at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan. That one surveyed the moment two decades ago when that New York City neighborhood became the anti-SoHo, full of storefront galleries and artists who were...
What all this means is that Billy Idol isn't the only bit of '80s cultural flotsam that has floated back lately. The art of that moment is of the moment again. How does it look to us now that the hype has dimmed? Just as it is in music and fashion, in the realm of art, it's a decade that remains a sore spot. It introduced artists whose work has enduring fascination. Cindy Sherman's photographs of herself in the guise of indistinct movie heroines, Jenny Holzer's dream jottings on electronic ticker-tape signs, Elizabeth Murray...
...that? As a rule, art grabs the popular imagination in either of two ways. One is to offer crescendos of feeling, real or simulated. That explains the long lines for any show billed "Van Gogh" or "Pollock." And in the '80s that partly explained the otherwise inexplicable fame of Schnabel, whose big, slapdash canvases seemed contrived for no greater purpose than to proclaim his muscular intention to proclaim muscular intentions. The other route an artist can pursue is to borrow from readily understood sources in pop culture. That would describe Basquiat's graffiti-derived gestures and Koons' life-size renditions...
...world of the '80s expanded exponentially because it produced a more aggressively commercial breed of artist and dealer. How different that was from the decade before, with its monastic retreat from the marketplace. Steeped in the directives of '60s radicalism, many artists of the '70s wanted nothing to do with making deluxe commodities to be traded around in the capitalist gallery system. They deliberately moved into practices--performance art, installations, earthworks--that left behind very little that could be hung on some rich guy's walls. It was an approach that a lot of artists returned...