The+80s+Art+Scene

=Artist As Cultural Commentator=

"What matters about the most important art of this era is not physical media or technique, but an astute consciousness of art's role as a interpreter, reflector, and transformer of cultural information and the artists' rueful awareness of their own role as fodder for the mass culture mill." [|Collections of the Castellini Art Museum]

=Artist as Bobo=

"Many firsthand observers of the 80s art scene cite first and foremost the sheer numbers of young artists attempting to break into the gallery scene during the decade. The postwar baby boom, which peaked in 1959, led to an outpouring of art-school grads in the early 80s. Artist/curator Peter Nagy, who, with Alan Belcher, opened the East Village gallery Nature Morte in 1982, comments: "Sometimes it seems as though a majority of my generation, having grown up in the fertile 60s, pursued careers in the creative arts, and the New York art world simply couldn't accommodate this glut of brash, snot-nosed artists eager to exhibit their goods, and consequently burst at the seams. Second, the boom market enabled a generation of artist-entrepreneurs not only to start their own galleries but to keep their doors open and flourish." (Artforum, 10/99)

=Artist as Capitalist=

"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**

=Primary Sources **[|New Art, New Money], New York Times By CATHLEEN McGUIGAN, 1985 [|Major Events Timeline]**=