The Decade That Art Forgot The most famous painter in Northern Europe in the 1870s was an Austrian named Hans Makart. Collectors from around the world flocked to his studio, hundreds of acolytes hung on his every word, acknowledgment of his genius appeared so obvious that the lionizing press he received seemed, above all, redundant. No Gustave Klimt, Egon Schiele or Edvard Munch, Makart held court in a huge studio bedecked with hunting tchotchkes and his immense paintings of battle scenes and bare-naked ladies. A sort of prototype for the overinflated, wholly undeserved fame and power of 80s art star Julian Schnabel, Makart is nearly all but forgotten today.
Saddled with a B-movie actor as president whose best-known film role was opposite a chimp, with Americans as television-addled as laboratory mice (in 1989 the average American spent nearly half of his or her waking life watching tv) and supply-side economics triumphant as the nation's financial paradigm, the country was primed for a loud, extra-brash group of artists with dollar signs and XL, celebrity-driven ambition virtually printed on their foreheads.
The rise of the Boesky-like, corporate-raider art of Jeff Koons, David Salle and Schnabel fit the cruel, power-hungry decade to a T. Vaingloriously trumpeting their work as "important," these three artists fostered a set of art world confusions that particularly favored work like theirs. Is there any real relation between size and scale? May an artist be truly original and appropriationist at the same time? Is there a way to embrace artistic relativism, on the one hand, and the desire to become the world's biggest artist zillionaire on the basis of slim genius, on the other?
P.S.1, INSTALLATION VIEW, 2000 In the 80s Madonna Ciccone sculpted her chubby thighs and vacuous person into a facsimile of Greta Garbo, producing the frigid, tinny mirage we now know to be the Material Girl. Messrs. Koons, Salle and Schnabel, emboldened by their musical gal-pal, took their severely limited talents and savvy, duplicitous monster mouths all the way to the bank during an era in which (to paraphrase a Sprite ad) art was nothing, but the myriad appearances conjured up by expensive art objects were everything.
Stepping into the wide breach left by these vanguard-mimicking artists, a second group of 80s art stars arrived, dog-eared volumes by French Mandarin intellectuals under their arms, ready to do symbolic battle with every "power structure" available, except the one that propped up the perennially corruptible art world. Junior associates to the big-money phenomenon surrounding Koons, Salle, Schnabel and other artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Francesco Clemente, theory-spouting artists like Sherrie Levine, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger grafted a particularly strident brand of identity politics onto the arts scene. With all the speculative cash trading hands, the 80s art world could hardly have asked for better window dressing.
So what have we learned from the 1980s in this, our last year before the long-decried fin de siecle? Not a damn thing, it would seem from the nightmarish attack of bad 80s art littering New York this summer. From Jeff Koons' 43-foot-high, 44-ton Chia Pet at Rockefeller Center to Barbara Kruger's terrible one-note retrospective at the Whitney Museum to the weakly revisionist P.S. 1 exhibition "Around 1984: A Look at Art in the Eighties," the once-moribund decade is back, peeking out cautiously from well-deserved oblivion in the cash-rich but critically insecure 90s.
Take Barbara Kruger: her work today could not look more dated if it were carved into rocks in gothic script. Featuring a seemingly never-ending collection of rooms silk-screened from floor to ceiling?a few blasting audio read woodenly by hammy actors?Kruger's so-called retrospective at the Whitney is a Philip Glass record played with a busted needle. An artist who has varied her work only in size in a 20-year career, Kruger's "challenging" billboards have come to embody the definition of the tired, out-of-time cliche. A pioneer of banal political correctness (a dubious achievement, if there ever was one), her work blatantly illustrates the narrow cultural self-righteousness that once passed for politics in an art world that, in the 80s, faked left while booking right with all the decorous reserve of a steam locomotive.
"Around 1984," the first in a series of "decade" shows at P.S. 1, is a surprisingly timid attempt to revise the history of the largely cash-and-carry 80s arts scene. Presenting the 80s as a decade-long seminar on "deconstructive strategies, and the renewal of?critical consciousness" and "the exhaustion of the West," curator Carolyn Christov- Bakargiev promotes a cheery, politicized "point of view" of the era's market-driven, Spenglerian rise and fall. Preferring postmodern theory over historical fact, Christov-Bakargiev pushes the "narratives" of appropriation and media artists like Dennis Adams, Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine to the near exclusion of the decade's big money guys. Schnabel, Salle, Peter Halley, Basquiat and Clemente are in, but vastly underrepresented; Eric Fischl, Robert Longo, Nan Goldin, Sandro Chia, Philip Taaffe, Georg Baselitz, Ross Bleckner and Robert Mapplethorpe are, inexplicably, out. Informed largely by schoolmarmy textbook postmodernism, "Around 1984" does with its watered-down version of still-contentious 80s art what few thought possible: make it academic and boring.
"At the end of the 1980s there may have been five hundred people in the world that could pay more than $25 million for a work of art, and tens of thousands who could pay a million: a situation with no historical precedents at all," Robert Hughes wrote in his anti-80s screed "The Decline of the City of Mahogany." It isn't that there was really no good art at all made in the 1980s. There was. But the grossly speculative and conservative political climate that produced it mangled its intentions, desiccated its formal daring and, finally, suborned its spirit.
Making art in the 80s without thinking of celebrity and the big payoff became unthinkable, a legacy that is still with us today. Witness the nauseating promotion of young artists as beautiful people, the rise, yet again, of Bride-of-Frankenstein dealer Mary Boone, the fawning drivel that passes for art criticism in otherwise respectable publications. Jeff Koons' midtown installation of Puppy, smarmily flower-encrusted and stupid as the day is long, may or may not signal the return of 80s-style razzmatazz to a rich but uncertain art world. But of one thing you may be sure: for 80s artists like Koons & Co., in the longer, historical run, it will be here today, gone tomorrow.
"Barbara Kruger," through Oct. 22 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. (75th St.), 570-3676. "Around 1984: A Look at Art in the Eighties," through September 3 at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, 22-25 Jackson Ave. (46th Ave.), LIC, 718-784-2084. "Puppy," through Sept. 5 in Rockefeller Center, near the skating rink, 980-4575.