Introduction

About the 80s

Critical Perspectives

The 80s Scene

"Was contemporary art in the eighties really any good? Did all this high-profile, extremely lucrative activity have anything to do with aesthetic quality, or did it reflect mainly the native American penchant for hype, faddism, and general-purpose humbug? The question was rarely asked out loud. It tended to emerge though, in the argument that dominated critical discourse in the eighties—the argument over postmodernism....some of the more recent developments in art here strike me as frivolous indeed, and almost certain to vanish in the cloud of their own pretentiousness...A vast amount of inventive energy still enlivens the current art scene, however, and one development in particular, the new art of public spaces, suggests to me that there could be, after all, a postmodern aesthetic that is not just a downhill slide."
-Calvin Tomkins, from Post-To-Neo-; The Art World of the 1980s, Penguin, 1988

"It was a decade of irony and extremes in the art world. Egos and dollar signs crowded out art's more enduring values, while painting returned with a passion lost since the 1950s."
-Leah Ollman, Los Angeles Times, 12/25/89

To me 'Expressionism' means expressing a personal viewpoint about reality, but the word also means 'juicy.'...I guess I'm a semi-Expressionist in terms of the visuals and surfaces of my paintings. That I've been placed in the new wave of Neo-Expressionism I find more confusing than for the new painting itself. There is some awfully good painting going on, and it's a good time for painting—"
-Susan Rothenberg, from Carter Radcliffe, "Expressionism Today: An Artist's Symposium," Art in America, 12/82.

"The work on view confirms that today's avant-garde is less concerned with formal absolutes and more concerned with the unique contemporary experience. Some of the most engaging pieces invite us to consider the relative and context-bound nature of art, perception, and reality in today's radically diverse and shrinking world. Powerful works by Cindy Sherman and John Baldessari look at the nearly vertiginous and open-ended information we use to construct the illusion of ''fact.''
-Marlena Donohue, The Christian Science Monitor, 6/15/87 (from a review of Avant Garde in the 80s at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

"Whether they be painters, architects, or philosophers, the heroes of postmodernism have in common the belief that the present-day crisis of all artistic and social practice will never lead to anything other than a complete refusal of all collective effort to elaborate a project of any importance. So let's just cultivate our garden, and preferably in the same way, with the same methods used by our contemporaries. No waves, just new waves, harmonizing with the art market and public opinion through advertising campaigns and opinion polls. ...
-Félix Guattari, "The Postmodern Dead End," from Flash Art, May-June, 1986

"There is no doubt that video technology has enlarged both the performative and spectatorial aspects of our lives and transformed us all into actors or viewers simultaneously. It permeates the social fabric, changes the feel of our human contacts, and rearranges the choreography of family affairs, sexual forays, and gatherings of all kinds. The video camera has indeed replaced the mirror as the reflection of choice, putting us in a constant state of either watching or being watched, and transforming the emancipatory notion of 'play' into the relentless realm of 'instant replay.'
-Barbara Kruger, from Remote Control, MIT Press, 1993

Artists somehow develop this moral crisis where we are fearful of being effective in the world. We set up these inside games; we develop all these esthetics and all this formalism. It's a totally ineffective structure which participates not at all in the outside world. We were the great seducers—we were the great manipulators; and we have given up these intrinsic powers of art...A photographer just working for an advertising company has a platform to be much more politically effective in the world than an artist...What you have to do is exploit yourself and take the responsibility to victimize others. It's time we regain everything that we had—all our powers—and exploit that.
-Jeff Koons, "From Full fathom Five," Parkett 19, 1989.