How Does ’80s Art Look Now?

The 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 in suits stood off to one side. Although they were probably just visitors, it was easy to imagine them as those other essential players in any ’80s tableau: investment bankers.

“Basquiat” is one of the major museum shows of the year, a reminder that for all the mediocrity and repetition of his last years, when his heroin addiction overcame his gifts and took his life, Basquiat was someone who 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 thumbing their noses at the fancier dealerships around West Broadway. (At least they were doing that until they could get picked up by those dealers themselves.) And although the art world is a place of very diverse practices these days, two legacies of the ’80s turn up everywhere in the work of younger artists: an adolescent obsession with pop culture–comic books, video games, Japanese anime, Goth music–and a very grownup dedication to career management.

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’s shaped canvases–all that arrived in the ’80s. So did inflated reputations and a superheated art market that eventually crashed, taking some of the biggest names down with it. All the same, despite its frequent lapses into coarseness, triviality and crass merchandising–hey, because of those things!–it was the last time that stars of the gallery circuit were also famous in the wider world. The decade included not only the wild-style markings of Basquiat but also the slatherings on broken plates of Julian Schnabel, the lovable doodles of Keith Haring, the metallic metal bunny balloon of Jeff Koons–even your mother had heard about that stuff.

Why was 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 of Michael Jackson and the Pink Panther. Even if you don’t know about Basquiat’s debt to the scribble paintings of Cy Twombly or Koons’ connection to Marcel Duchamp, you know what graffiti and the Pink Panther are. You have a way in.

But the art 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 to in the ’90s.

To put it 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 out to be one of the most successful artists to emerge from the ’80s. His 1992 Puppy, a 43-ft.-high dog made of flowering plants, is probably one of the most widely seen outdoor works of our time. He’s at work on a project called Train for a site in Paris where a crane will suspend a locomotive steam engine 80 ft. above the ground, with its nose pointed straight down. At least once a day, while hanging in midair, it will chug into action for about five minutes. You might think of that as a good metaphor for cultural exhaustion. He says no. “The moment we live in is a great time to make art,” he says. “We have different technologies to play with, and we’re left with the opportunity to focus on our work.”

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. The boy is then built up out of a host of ragged gestures. Basquiat may not have been trained in academic drawing, but at least in his first years, he could mark a canvas in interesting ways. And in a typical Basquiat, nothing was minimal. Everything was cluttered, unbuckled and dripping. Although he came from a middle-class background–his father was an accountant–collectors tended to see him as the authentic representative of the urban underworld, the new wild child. They came running with their wallets open. They have kept them open too. Last June an untitled Basquiat from 1982, a head with fangs, sold at auction in London for $4.5 million. His record is $5.5 million, for a painting sold in 2002 by Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich. The title? Profit 1.

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 it now, she did not so much create the new realities of the ’80s market as respond to them. “Because of the Wall Street boom, the collector base quadrupled overnight,” she says. “The art world didn’t know how to deal with it.”

Actually, it did, although the innovations it came up with were not always the kind that protected and developed an artist’s talent. All that new money fostered a 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 buffeted by their times. Midway through the decade, taste changed, and a cooler brand of conceptual art came into favor. His star plummeted. “A lot of us grew up in public,” he says. “In a weird way that often means you have to fail in public too. I became a poster child for the ’80s.” In the past few years, Longo has begun showing work again in New York Citydrawings of Sigmund Freud’s apartment, waves and atom-bomb blasts. “An artist should know art history,” he now concludes. “Shock value only lasts so long.”

In the ’90s, Schnabel began to pour more of his energies into filmmaking, which turned out to be a better place for them than painting. In 1996 he directed Basquiat, about you-know-who, with its peerlessly funny impersonation of Andy Warhol by David Bowie. Before Night Falls,made four years later, brought an Oscar nomination for Best Actor to Javier Bardem, who played Reinaldo Arenas, an AIDS-stricken Cuban writer who committed suicide in New York City in 1990. Even before Schnabel began directing, Longo directed a film, Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves in a futuristic film noir. So did David Salle, the painter whose voyeuristic conjunctions and overlays of imagery from all over had made him another brand name in Boone’s stable. But only Schnabel has actually launched a plausible career for himself as a director. Although he still exhibits art and had a large retrospective in Frankfurt last year, his next movie project is likely to overshadow anything he has done lately for a gallery. His adaptation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the memoir of a French magazine editor left paralyzed by a stroke, is scheduled to star Johnny Depp.

Later in the decade, taste shifted away from hot-blooded Expressionism to something much more cerebral, bringing to the fore conceptual artists like Richard Prince, who rephotographed portions of existing magazine ads to expose their underlying messages of desire, domination and anxiety. As always, the newer phalanx of artists tended to look back at whoever had come just before and wince. “There was a traditional view that I grew up with,” says Peter Halley, who emerged as a theoretician of what got called Neo-Geo. “Artists had a high calling. They should not let things out of their studio that were bad.”

Halley’s paintings were and are brightly colored geometric abstractions. “What I’m doing by today’s standards is pretty tame,” says Halley, who is head of the graduate program in painting at Yale’s school of art. “On the other 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.'”

Even among artists who had come to light in the early, now degraded part of the decade, there are some who quietly pursued serious careers that have brought them into the present with their reputations intact. Eric Fischl first drew attention in the early ’80s with weirdly charged scenes of suburban life that parted the curtain on things, generally meaning sex, that three centuries of genre painting had kept tucked away. He continues to do work you want to see. But he fears that another bubble is rising in the art market, in which prices are climbing fast again and auctions are setting new records all the time. Says Fischl: “What’s going on now in the art world makes the ’80s seem positively spiritual.”

In certain quarters, two events in 1987 brought the decade to a symbolic close. Warhol’s death in February deprived the scene of its presiding elder, the white-wigged spirit of affectless salesmanship. The collapse of the stock market eight months later gradually squeezed off buyers. By the following August, Basquiat was dead as well. How will the future regard him and his brethren? “Dying young is the easy way out,” says Longo. “It’s much harder to keep your edge and keep it going.” It pays to keep in mind something Zhou Enlai once said. On the bicentennial of the French Revolution, someone asked the erstwhile Chinese Communist Party leader what he thought its legacy would be. His answer: “It’s too soon to tell.” He should have been an art critic. –With reporting by Amy Lennard Goehner